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. Its heyday came in the 1860s and 1870s, when these booklets papered the nation’s newsstands. 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. 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.

Grim tales

Creatively, the roots of the penny dreadful reached back to the gothic novel and beyond, to Jacobean tragedies, macabre folklore and ballads. Authors also turned to the news for material and pillaged popular works of existing fiction (does Oliver Twiss sound familiar?). 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. These stories were essentially escapist in nature – narratives of rebellious wrongdoing for the powerless masses. 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. (Turpin wasn’t executed until page 2,207.)