Penny dreadfuls were never intended to have much of a shelf life and with few exceptions (The String of Pearls, which introduced the character of Sweeney Todd, is one), they have faded away like graffiti on a bathroom wall. But those same boys also helped others dodge child-stealers and rescued drowning women – they were not without a moral code, it just wasn’t the same as Victorian society’s. And yes, its boy heroes were petty criminals. How else to explain the campaign against The Wild Boys? Yes, it contained violence, a smattering of nudity and some flagellation. Penny dreadfuls may not have explicitly promoted bloodthirsty deeds but their tattered pages did showcase a certain giddy disregard for authority. Perhaps it wasn’t what was being read so much as who was reading it that lay at the root of society’s unease. Commentator Francis Hitchman wasn’t alone when he declared that penny dreadfuls were “the literature of rascaldom”, responsible for peopling Britain’s prisons and penal colonies. This made commercial sense – already in the 1820s nearly half of the UK’s population was under 20 – but it also fanned the flames of moral panic. While initially read by men and women of all ages, penny dreadfuls later began to be aimed specifically at children. The most popular works could shift 30,000 copies a week, but they weren’t popular in all quarters, especially when they started to target younger readers. They may have been in black and white but blood was blood. And lest titles such as The Calendar of Horrors and The Maniac Father or, the Victim of Seduction weren’t already salacious enough, these illustrations provided vivid images of vampires, ghouls and the aftermath of violent goings-on. Penny dreadfuls did, however, adhere to pretty strict technical specifications, each instalment totalling eight, sometimes 16, pages of cheap paper, with a lurid illustration filling half of the front page. In Gentleman Jack, a footpad caper by the prolific James Malcolm Rymer, which ran for four years and described itself as “a romance of interest, abounding in hair-breadth escapes of the most exciting character”, one character was actually killed twice. Unsurprisingly, the genre played fast and loose with conventions of plausibility, character development and even continuity. (Turpin wasn’t executed until page 2,207.) No wonder highwaymen proved such popular characters, especially Dick Turpin, whose exploits ran to 254 episodes in Black Bess or, The Knight of the Road. These stories were essentially escapist in nature – narratives of rebellious wrongdoing for the powerless masses. Some, such as the long-running series The Mysteries of London by GWM Reynolds, which wound its way to its finale in almost 4.5 million words, drew on the lives of their readers, juxtaposing the dangers and privations of the slums with the dissolute shenanigans of the rich. Authors also turned to the news for material and pillaged popular works of existing fiction (does Oliver Twiss sound familiar?). Some writers juggled multiple works simultaneously, each one unfolding over the course of months or years and packing in a telenovela’s worth of kidnappings, poisonings, larceny, bigamy, revolution and all manner of gruesome revelations.Ĭreatively, the roots of the penny dreadful reached back to the gothic novel and beyond, to Jacobean tragedies, macabre folklore and ballads. At a penny apiece, they cost as little as a twelfth of the price of an instalment of a Charles Dickens novel, and historians estimate that there were as many as 100 publishers in the business, paying authors by the line to crank out tales with titles such as Varney the Vampire or, The Feast of Blood and The Black Band or, The Mysteries of Midnight. Its heyday came in the 1860s and 1870s, when these booklets papered the nation’s newsstands. The penny dreadful emerged in the 1830s, catering to an increasingly literate working class population and made possible by technological advances in printing and distribution.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |