Penny Dreadfuls Research Paper

When studying Victorian England, it becomes fairly obvious rather quickly that the vast majority of the population loved violence. Therefore, it is no surprise that the same population enjoyed reading stories that told of horrors and overzealously used an excessive amount of gore in their telling. These stories had many different names over the years, such as penny awfuls or penny horribles, but they are most often referred to today as penny dreadfuls. The history of penny dreadfuls is an interesting account, and it leaves nothing to be desired when it comes to insight of the Victorian era people and their country. Darryl Jones explains in Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film that the gothic genre started in the 1700s, as a way

One such story was the seventy-part serial titled “The Boy Detective, or, The Crimes of London,” which began in 1865 and was about a boy who ran away from his home and began working for a police detective (Flanders). This is why later on, penny dreadfuls started to become more associated stories of adventure, rather than their native beginnings of gore and violence (“Penny

Because of the frenzy that happened with the working class people over the penny bloods and penny dreadfuls, the upper class found it easy to use them as a scapegoat for the troubles of the working class. The penny bloods were the scapegoat for the generalized poor, and then later the penny bloods were the scapegoat for any juvenile crime. There are many reports of police officers and courts blaming the “dreadfuls” for the actions of young boys. The penny stories were a convenient way for the upper classes to ignore the real problems of their society and allow themselves to not worry about, as there was nothing they could do since the lower classes brought their problems on themselves by reading such garbage (Springhall 326-330). However, the gothic genre did have a few upperclass defenders, one being the highbrow literature English writer G. K. Chesterton. He is quoted in his essay “Fiction as Food” as saying “Sensational novels are the most moral part of modern fiction. Literature that represents our life as dangerous and startling is truer than any literature that represents is as dubious and languid. For life is a fight and is not a conversation” (qtd. In “Penny