Penny dreadful

• 1. Introduction

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  Penny dreadfuls made even the hanging of the highwayman Dick Turpin wait until page 2,207. That was the length of Black Bess, or the Knight of the Road, a serial that ran for 254 weekly episodes. Penny dreadfuls were cheap, sensational story papers sold across 19th-century Britain. They usually came in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, and each part cost a single penny. Their pages were crowded with detectives, criminals, and supernatural creatures. Disapproving critics gave them nicknames such as penny horrible and penny awful. Who bought these booklets, and where did their plots come from? Why did a ghoulish illustration matter as much as the story beneath it? And what could push such a runaway success off the market?

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• 2. Roots and Rails

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  At public executions in the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries, printers sold crime broadsides to the watching crowd. Each sheet carried a crude picture. It might show the crime, a portrait of the criminal, or a stock woodcut of a hanging. Below the picture came a written account of the crime and the trial, often ending with the criminal's confession. A rhyming verse of doggerel warned readers not to follow the dead person's example.

  The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first public railway, opened in 1825. Tracks and engines gave publishers a way to distribute printed pages widely and quickly. Victorian Britain was also changing in other ways. Literacy was rising, and industrialisation and capitalism were putting spare money into people's hands for entertainment. Reading for pleasure had become an industry of its own, with printing improvements behind papers such as Joseph Addison's The Spectator and Richard Steele's Tatler.

  The first penny serials appeared in 1836. They were priced for working-class readers, and they cost far less than the serialised novels of Charles Dickens, which sold at a shilling, or twelve pennies, per part. Up to a hundred publishers were soon competing for these readers, each hunting for the next shocking story.

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• 3. Highwaymen and Vampires

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  Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c, published in 1836, is counted as the first penny blood. It continued across 60 issues. Each issue held eight tightly packed pages and a single half-page illustration. Other early serials reprinted or rewrote the first Gothic thrillers, including The Castle of Otranto and The Monk. Publishers also wrote fresh tales about famous criminals.

  The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance gave readers Sweeney Todd, known as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The Mysteries of London took its inspiration from a French serial, The Mysteries of Paris.

  Varney the Vampire, published from 1845 to 1847, told the story of the vampire Sir Francis Varney. It introduced many tropes that modern audiences recognise from vampire fiction. It was also the first story to mention a vampire's sharpened teeth.

  Highwaymen were popular heroes with this audience. In 1838, a series titled Robin Hood and Little John: or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest started the mass circulation of Robin Hood stories. Some of the most lurid tales, however, claimed to be built on fact.

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• 4. Spring-Heeled Jack

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  The first reported sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack came in 1837. Accounts gave him a terrifying face with a diabolical look, clawed hands, and eyes that "resembled red balls of fire". Today he would be called an urban myth.

  London was the place where he was seen most often, but he also turned up elsewhere. For several decades he remained a source of frightened fascination. At the height of the hysteria, several women reported attacks by a clawed monster of a man who breathed blue flames.

  The last reported sighting happened in Liverpool in 1904. Writers would keep reviving him long after that, well into the 21st century.

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• 5. Borrowed Plots

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  The publisher Edward Lloyd sold numerous hugely successful penny serials derived from the works of Charles Dickens. Two of them were Oliver Twiss and Nickelas Nicklebery. Their titles were thin disguises, and the stories were lightly altered copies of popular contemporary literature.

  Across the Atlantic in the 1840s, a similar class of cheap reading had developed under the name city mysteries. In the 1860s, American dime novels began to flow the other way. They were edited and rewritten for a British audience and issued in booklet form, for example as the Boy's First Rate Pocket Library. Frank Reade, Buffalo Bill, and Deadwood Dick became favourites of penny dreadful readers.

  Many of those readers, though, could not spare even one penny every week.

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• 6. Blood on the Page

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  Each issue opened with an engraving, and readers treated it as a teaser for the installments to come. One reader described the pull this way: "You see's an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire, and some would go mad if they couldn't learn... all about him." One publisher urged his illustrators on with the cry "more blood - much more blood!"

  Working-class boys who could not afford a penny each week formed clubs to share the cost. They passed the flimsy booklets from reader to reader. Other enterprising youngsters collected several consecutive parts and rented the volume out to friends. The paper itself was cheap wood pulp, and the target audience was young working-class men.

  In 1866, Boys of England arrived as a new kind of publication. It was an eight-page magazine that mixed serial stories with articles and short pieces. Competitors followed quickly, including Boys' Leisure Hour, Boys' Standard, and Young Men of Great Britain, a short-lived companion to Boys of England. Their price and quality matched other penny fiction, so they also counted as penny dreadfuls. By then the term covered story papers and booklet libraries as well as the original serials.

  In the 1860s and 1870s, more than a million boys' periodicals were sold per week. The Guardian later called penny dreadfuls "Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young" and "the Victorian equivalent of video games". A market that large was bound to attract a rival with a lower price.

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• 7. The Halfpenny Rival

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  In 1893, the first number of The Half-penny Marvel carried an editorial attacking its own competition. Its publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, priced the paper at one half-penny. The editorial claimed that magistrates often saw boys who had read "dreadfuls", robbed their employers, bought revolvers, and run off to play highwaymen. It concluded: "It makes thieves of the coming generation, and so helps fill our gaols."

  The source takes a milder view. The serials were overdramatic and sensational but generally harmless, and they may even have produced more literate young people during the Industrial period. Even so, their wide circulation fed a growing fear of crime in mid-Victorian Britain.

  The Half-penny Marvel was soon followed by other Harmsworth half-penny periodicals, such as The Union Jack. At first the stories were high-minded moral tales, reportedly based on true experiences. It was not long before the papers turned to the same kind of material as their rivals. From 1896, the cover of Illustrated Chips featured the comic strip of the tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim, and a young Charlie Chaplin was among its readers.

  A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, once said: "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the 'ha'penny dreadfuller." Book series also took aim in 1896. George Newnes launched The Penny Library of Famous Books and called its volumes "penny delightfuls". That same year, W. T. Stead launched the Penny Popular Novels.

  The Harmsworth papers improved in quality through the early 20th century. By the time of the First World War, papers such as Union Jack dominated the market in the UK. One of those papers would soon belong to a single detective.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Sexton Blake began in the Half-penny Marvel in 1893. In 1904, the Union Jack became "Sexton Blake's own paper", and he appeared in every issue until the paper ended in 1933. In total he starred in roughly 4,000 adventures, which carried on into the 1970s.

  Jack Harkaway, introduced in Boys of England in 1871, was the other great character to come out of the penny dreadfuls. He was also popular in America and had many imitators.

  Sweeney Todd first appeared in an 1846/1847 penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. The barber later became the subject of a successful musical by Stephen Sondheim and a feature film by Tim Burton. The penny dreadfuls also inspired the British comics that began to emerge in the 1870s.

  Spring-Heeled Jack has returned in modern fiction too. Mark Hodder's 2010 alternate history novel, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, portrays him as a time traveller. The Springheel Saga, a three-series audio drama from the Wireless Theatre Company, followed in 2011.

  The BBC called the penny dreadful "a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon". The bargain price meant the booklets were printed on exceptionally flimsy paper, and that disposability has made surviving examples rare, despite their immense popularity at the time.

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