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updated 29th October, 2008.
Justin's
'Collectors Miscellany' Extracts offsite
The term Penny
Dreadful has become part of our
everyday lives. I suppose that in the minds of
most people it’s a term of abuse for cheap
literature mainly read by juveniles. At least
that’s what it originally was when it was
first coined in the mid-19th century,
but it soon became a label which society slapped
on almost every form of literature for the young.
I was amazed last week to see a bookseller on the
Internet who had a sign on his home page which
said "NO PENNY
DREADFULS" underneath which
was a cover from a Spiderman comic! The label has
certainly traveled a long way.
To clarify the term, and its predecessor the Penny Blood,
we have to go back to the first quarter of the 19th
century. The popular form of literature in
England then was the Gothic novel. The setting
and plot to this type of fiction generally
included castles, dungeons, hideous hags, plus a
hero, heroine and villain. The problem here was
that these books cost much more than any average
worker could afford and, apart from this, only a
small percentage of the working classes could
read. A combination of events changed this
situation and put popular literature into the
hands of the common man.
Reforms in the government’s education
policy led to most children being taught to read.
The introduction of a new type of steam-powered
printing press meant publications could be turned
out at an unprecedented rate. The stamp tax on
newspapers was abolished and a new type of paper
made from esparto grass cost only a fraction of
the existing price.
These factors led to
cheaper literature being made available
to a growing market of poor and working
class people. For these first time
readers caught in a squalid and deprived
existence it was an escape into the
exciting world of literature. The first
periodicals to gain popular appeal (apart
from newspapers and journals) were serial
publications such as The Newgate Calendar
and The Terrific
Register (1825). The former
chronicled the lives of famous criminals
both present day and historical while the
latter offered sensational reports of
murders, tortures, ghostly sightings,
bizarre customs etc. Charles
Dickens ‘took in’ The
Terrific Register every week and recalls
being delightfully "...frightened
out of my wits by it!"
The first publisher to successfully gauge
the public’s growing fascination
with sensational reading material was Edward
Lloyd. His first serial
publication (apparently) was ‘Lives of the Most
Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads etc"
(1836) in 60 numbers. |
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Its success was instant and he
quickly put out "History
of the Pirates of all Nations" (1836)
in 71 numbers. Lloyd was an unscrupulous
businessman and had no qualms about cashing in on
the dramatic success that Charles Dickens was
enjoying at the time. He set his writers to
produce plagiarisms of Dickens’s works,
issuing them with slightly altered titles e.g.
Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nicklebery, The Penny
Pickwick etc. Lloyd is credited with coining the
term penny blood
as his sensational publications invariably
contained gory scenes.
In all Lloyd put out over 200 serials from the
mid-1830s to the mid-1850s . The money they
earned him helped establish a newspaper empire,
which continued well into this century. In his later years Lloyd was
ashamed of his early publications and employed
agents to go around old bookshops buying up this
material and destroying it. Luckily one
agent stored up a large amount and later sold
them for a handsome profit.
The launch of the storypaper The Boys of England in
1866 by Edwin J. Brett was the
beginning of the end for the penny blood. Brett
saw that adult readers had moved on to more
‘refined’ fiction in journals and
newspapers. He aimed his new paper specifically
at the juvenile market and used schoolboys as
heroes in his stories. The result was a runaway
success with sales starting at 150,000 per week,
soaring to 250,000 in 1871 due to the
introduction of the legendary character, Jack
Harkaway. Strangely enough, Brett, had been a
publisher of penny bloods prior to this. In 1860
he founded the infamous Newsagents’
Publishing Company. This firm put out some of the
most daring bloods in its day such as 'The Wild Boys of London’
or, The Children of the Night (1866) in 105
numbers. The tale featured a gang of
sewer-dwelling boys who salvaged corpses and done
battle with the police! Its reprinting (c.1876)
was suppressed by the police at number 79!
The success of Brett’s Boys of England
led the way for a host of imitators all very
similar in format. A critic at the time is
credited with coining the term ‘penny dreadful’,
which was used to describe this new breed of
children’s literature. The label is unfair.
The fiction in these publications was, by and
large, of a high standard with exciting,
well-written adventure stories. Far from
glamorising villains and criminal behaviour these
new storypapers condemned vice and promoted
virtue. H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill and
Noel Coward were amongst their boyhood
audience and in later years praised them highly.
Even the more edifying Boys
Own Paper (1879 -1967) published by The
Religious Tract Society was branded a penny
dreadful! Victorian society used escapist fiction
as a scapegoat to blame for juvenile crime while
ignoring the deeper ills like poverty and
prostitution. In fact records show that at the
height of the storypaper boom juvenile crime
fell.
I’m a keen collector of the old penny bloods
and penny dreadfuls.
Over the years I’ve managed to build up a
pretty good representative collection. If anybody
out there collects or has material in my line, I
would love to hear from you. Even if you have
only a passing interest in this murky backwater
of fiction you can get in touch with me as
follows:
Contact: Michael
Holmes mickeyholmes@gmail.com
, Carrickcoola,
Riverstown, Co. Sligo, Ireland,
telephone + 353 71 91 65036.
A friend and collector in the States has set
up a listserve ( a kind of forum where people can
leave messages, queries, articles, ads etc ) on
the internet to try and promote more interest in
penny dreadfuls, bloods dime novels and
storypapers.
The address for Justin's listserve (online
newsletter, as per CB&M List) is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BloodsandDimeNovels/
HELP REQUIRED
As you may or may not know I am trying to
finish a bibliography of the Penny Bloods of
Edward Lloyd and have kept running up against
this old story about the mischievious doings of
an Australian bookdealer back in the 1930s. It is
recounted in a book called Penny Dreadfuls,
written by an english author Mick Anglo, although
I have come across it in several different
places. The gist of it from his account is:
The following account of the matter appears in
Mick Anglo’s book Penny Dreadfuls and other
Victorian Horrors :
Montague Summers.....was certainly fooled by
[John. P. Quaine,] an extremely knowledgeable
Melbourne bookseller with a sense of humour, who
issued an important catalogue for collectors in
the 1930s. Stanley Larnach, a writer and
collector of ‘dreadfuls’ who lived in
Sydney, New South Wales, and was a leading member
of the Book Collector’s Society of
Australia, said that Quayne’s catalogue
included two beautiful ‘dreadful’
titles: ‘The Skeleton Clutch; or, The Goblet
of Gore’, a romance by T. Prest issued in
penny parts (E.Lloyd 1841); and ‘Sawney
Beane, the Man-Eater of Midlothian’ by T.
Prest issued in penny parts (E.Lloyd 1851).
Montague listed both of these splendid titles,
which were Quayne inventions, in his Gothic
Bibliography.
Apparently this was an intentional list of
spurious titles which may have been intended as a
sales ploy or literary joke. Problem is I want to
establish if in fact they were inventions, or was
Quaine drawing on another source.
Is there any way you could post my letter on
your site - perhaps some old collector out there
could help. If you can think of any other source
for an answer, or better still where I could
locate a copy of this dubious catalogue of
Quaine's I would be tremendously grateful.
ARTICLES
of interest
Spine-Chillers
were Big Time, by Ray Heath: MAN, June, 1949 pps 18-19 (Australia)
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