A penny dreadful gave literature its first vampire with sharpened teeth
Varney the Vampire, a cheap weekly serial that ran from 1845 to 1847, set down many of the habits fictional vampires still have, and it was the first story to give one sharpened teeth. It was a penny dreadful, the lurid one-penny fiction that thrilled young working-class Victorians.
The format was simple: a story sold in weekly instalments of 8 to 16 pages at a penny each, printed on cheap wood-pulp paper. The first, in 1836, was Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., which ran for 60 issues of dense text with one half-page picture apiece. Serialised Dickens cost a shilling a part, twelve times as much.
Several changes made the boom possible. Literacy was rising, industrial wages left more to spend on entertainment, and railways, starting with the Stockton and Darlington line in 1825, could carry print across the country. Between 1830 and 1850 up to 100 publishers produced penny fiction, and in the 1860s and 1870s over a million boys' periodicals sold every week.
Criminals, detectives and monsters filled the pages. The String of Pearls introduced Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street. Black Bess, spinning mostly invented adventures for the highwayman Dick Turpin, ran for 254 episodes, and Turpin was not hanged until page 2,207. Spring-Heeled Jack, a clawed figure with fiery eyes first reported in 1837, fed decades of scares until a last sighting in Liverpool in 1904. A 1838 series launched mass-market Robin Hood stories, while Edward Lloyd sold barely disguised Dickens knock-offs such as Oliver Twiss.
Each issue opened with a gory engraving as a teaser, and one publisher urged his illustrators to add far more blood. The Guardian has likened the genre to the video games of its day. Its hold loosened in the 1890s, when Alfred Harmsworth's halfpenny papers undercut it.
Source: Penny dreadful
