Stories in Motion: How the Victorian Penny Dreadful Circulated Across Genres, Classes and Centuries

This is an author interview with Manon Burz-Labrande, author of Penny Dreadfuls: The Circulation Patterns of a Victorian Popular Genre

• Can you explain what penny dreadfuls are, for readers who might not be familiar with them?

Penny dreadfuls were cheap, weekly story papers that were hugely popular in Britain during the nineteenth century, especially from the 1830s to the 1880s. Sold for just a penny and printed on low-quality paper, they offered short, gripping stories full of crime, horror, adventure and suspense. They were mainly aimed at working-class and young readers at a time when literacy was rising but books were still too expensive or demanding for many people. Early versions, often called ‘penny bloods’, were especially violent, while later forms evolved into boys’ adventure papers before being replaced in the 1890s by even cheaper and more varied publications.

These stories reflected the fast-changing world of industrial cities and mass readership. Because they were produced quickly and depended on sales, penny dreadfuls often sacrificed polish for speed, resulting in messy plots and frequent errors – but they were exciting, accessible and responsive to what readers wanted. Although they were looked down upon by the cultural elite, penny dreadfuls helped reshape the literary marketplace by creating new genres, characters and storytelling habits for a mass audience, challenging older ideas about what counted as ‘real’ literature.

• Why did penny dreadfuls provoke so much criticism in Victorian times?

‘Penny dreadfuls’ was originally a derogatory term coined by middle-class critics in the late Victorian period as part of a wider campaign against cheap, popular fiction that was widely read by the working classes. At a time when more people were learning to read and political power was slowly expanding beyond the elite, critics worried that inexpensive stories full of crime, violence and adventure would corrupt readers and threaten social order. Penny dreadfuls became the focus of repeated moral panics, blamed for everything from poor morals to criminal behaviour, often serving as an easy scapegoat for deeper social and economic problems.

Critics dismissed penny dreadfuls as badly written, harmful and morally dangerous, especially when compared to the novels of respected contemporary authors such as Charles Dickens. At the same time, their popularity and communal reading practices made them seem politically threatening, particularly because some publishers openly engaged with radical ideas. In reality, these attacks reveal how unsettling it was for the cultural elite to lose control over what people read. Penny dreadfuls were not just cheap entertainment: they helped create a new, shared popular culture; challenged traditional ideas about literature; and reflected a society in the middle of rapid social and cultural change.

• What are the key ideas of this book? What is the penny dreadfuls’ legacy and why is their study relevant today?

This book argues that penny dreadfuls were a dynamic and innovative form of popular fiction that emerged in response to nineteenth-century mass culture and left a lasting imprint on literature and entertainment. It shows how these serial publications drew on oral storytelling traditions, experimented with sensationalism and serial form, and reworked established genres such as the Gothic to reflect the realities of urban life. Far from being marginal or disposable, penny dreadfuls are presented as culturally central texts that shaped reading practices, narrative techniques and popular tastes. By tracing their influence from early Victorian print culture to neo-Victorian fiction and contemporary media, the book demonstrates the genre’s remarkable flexibility and enduring significance within literary and popular culture.

Approaching penny dreadfuls through the concept of circulation helps reassess their significance within nineteenth-century print culture and traces their influence into contemporary popular culture. It demonstrates that examining these publications is essential to understanding how popular culture functions more broadly, particularly in challenging rigid distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and in highlighting the close relationship between literary form and material conditions of production and consumption. Focusing on circulation makes it possible to connect texts, publishing practices, reception and long-term legacy, revealing the penny dreadfuls as culturally active and enduring rather than marginal or disposable. Their continued reappearance and adaptation across genres and periods, including in neo-Victorian fiction, underscores their lasting impact and expanding cultural relevance.

• • Who is this book for and who can benefit from reading it?

Penny Dreadfuls: The Circulation Patterns of a Victorian Popular Genre is written for a wide and diverse audience. By offering a clear overview of penny dreadfuls and cheap fiction and situating them within the cultural and literary landscape of the nineteenth century, the book both advances current scholarship and serves as a practical teaching resource. It supports ongoing efforts to expand the Victorian canon and will be useful across courses and fields such as literary studies, cultural studies, social history, periodical studies and popular culture studies. In the end, this study will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in Victorian popular fiction, periodicals, working-class culture and neo-Victorian studies, while reaching readers beyond academia who are interested in nineteenth-century popular literature.

• What inspired you to research and write about penny dreadfuls in the first place?

I started working on penny dreadfuls rather early in my academic career, but I actually first came into contact with them through my love for musical theatre, not through my own literature studies. It was Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) that prompted my interest: the gripping story intrigued me, and wanting to know where it had come from soon led me down a rabbit-hole of fascinating popular fiction, to which I decided to dedicate my professional life and my research. Writing this book about the penny dreadfuls’ circulation therefore made complete sense, considering that it is their successful circulation across media and across epochs that led me to them. I believe that encountering penny dreadfuls through modern popular culture also allowed me to instantaneously be interested in their circulation patterns and to grasp their dynamicity beyond paper, and their significance in the landscape of entertainment on a broader scale.

• Why did you decide to publish with Anthem Press?

When evaluating potential publishers for my book, I first looked through my own bookshelves, where a number of Anthem Press publications happen to sit – this is what first made me consider the press. Later on, I came across one of their newest book series and immediately knew that this could be an excellent fit: the Anthem Impact in Victorian Popular Fiction series, under the editorial direction of Kevin Morrison, is a much-needed, innovative addition to the landscape of academic publications with a focus on the nineteenth century, thanks to its focus on the mass-publishing market and on the popular. In addition, I was looking for a top-tier publisher with not only a global reach but also accessible prices for their readers, and Anthem Press met these requirements and more, providing precious support along the way. I am delighted to see this book become one of the first volumes of the Anthem Impact in Victorian Popular Fiction series.