Penny dreadful
First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Spring-heeled Jack.
[4][5] The Guardian described penny dreadfuls as "Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young", and "the Victorian equivalent of video games".
[4] While the term "penny dreadful" was originally used in reference to a specific type of literature circulating in mid-Victorian Britain, it came to encompass a variety of publications that featured cheap sensational fiction, such as story papers and booklet "libraries".
Improvements in printing resulted in newspapers such as Joseph Addison's The Spectator and Richard Steele's Tatler, and England's more fully recognizing the singular concept of reading as a form of leisure; it was, of itself, a new industry.
[5] The serials were priced to be affordable to working-class readers and were considerably cheaper than the serialised novels of authors such as Charles Dickens, which cost a shilling [twelve pennies] per part.
The first ever penny blood, published in 1836, was called Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c. The story continued over 60 issues, each eight pages of tightly-packed text with one half-page illustration.
[14] Highwaymen were popular heroes; Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real-life English highwayman Dick Turpin, continued for 254 episodes and was well over 2,000 pages long.
The first 'sighting' of him was in 1837, and he was described as having a terrifying and frightful appearance, with diabolical physiognomy, clawed hands and eyes that "resembled red balls of fire".
At the height of Spring-Heeled Jack hysteria, several women reported being attacked by a clawed monster of a man breathing blue flames.
The penny dreadfuls were influential since they were, in the words of one commentator, "the most alluring and low-priced form of escapist reading available to ordinary youth, until the advent in the early 1890s of future newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth's price-cutting 'halfpenny dreadfuller'".
At first the stories were high-minded moral tales, reportedly based on true experiences, but it was not long before these papers started using the same kind of material as the publications they competed against.
From 1896, the cover of Illustrated Chips featured the long-running comic strip of the tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim, with a young Charlie Chaplin among its readers.
[25] Two popular characters to come out of the penny dreadfuls were Jack Harkaway, introduced in the Boys of England in 1871, and Sexton Blake, who began in the Half-penny Marvel in 1893.
The fictional Sweeney Todd, the subject of both a successful musical by Stephen Sondheim and a feature film by Tim Burton, first appeared in an 1846/1847 penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls: A Romance by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.
[28] Describing penny dreadfuls as "a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon", the BBC adds, their "very disposability (the booklets' bargain cover price meant they were printed on exceptionally flimsy paper) has made surviving examples a rarity, despite their immense popularity at the time.
