Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic

Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror

Edited by Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine

Distributed for University of Wales Press

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic

Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror

Edited by Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine

Uncovers neglected Gothic texts of the nineteenth century crucial to understanding working-class popular culture.

This collection of essays recovers a plethora of penny dreadful titles which have, until now, been largely neglected by literary studies and reveals the cultural, social, and literary significance of these working-class texts. It demonstrates the penny dreadful’s importance to our understanding of both working-class Victorian literature and the Gothic mode, providing new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture, and Gothic fiction more broadly. Through its analysis of penny dreadfuls, the collection offers an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

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Gothic Literary Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

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Reviews

"This is an important new volume of literary criticism that pays attention to the class dimension of the history of the Gothic. Dittmer and Raine have assembled and curated vital work on an under-researched aspect of Gothic literature that addresses misconceptions, stereotypes and literary snobbery, and provides fresh insights into the ways gothic tropes, narratives and techniques were developed through mass market periodicals and penny papers. The editors provide a deftly-written and rigorous introduction to this research, and the chapters taken together offer a lively conversation opening new avenues of enquiry for gothic scholars. This is a must-read for those interested in the history of the Gothic, especially in relation to social class, as well as anyone keen to learn about the publication contexts of nineteenth-century literature more broadly."

Chloé Germaine, Senior Lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University

Table of Contents

Part One: The Progression of Pennys, or Adaptations and Legacies of the Dreadful
1.Penny Pinching: Reassessing the Gothic Canon through Penny Blood Reprints Hannah-Freya Blake and Marie Leger-St-Jean
2.“As long as you are industrious, you will get on very well”: adapting The String of Pearls economies of horror
Brontë Schiltz
3.“Your lot is wretched, old man”: Anxieties of Industry, Empire and England in George
Reynolds’ Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
Dr Hannah Priest.

Part Two: Victorian Medicine and Sciences, or Dreadful Discourses of the Gothic
4.“Embalmed pestilence”, “a contagious disease”: Discourse of contamination, contagion, and the Gothic marginalisation of penny dreadfuls by their contemporary critics
Manon Burz-Labrande
5.“A Tale of the Plague”: public health and epidemic disease in British popular fiction, 1832-48
Joseph Crawford
6.“Mistress of the broomstick”: Biology, Ecosemiotics, and Monstrous Women in Wizard’s The Wild Witch of the Heath; or the Demon of the Glen
Nicole C Dittmer

Part Three: Mode, Genre and Style, or Gothic Storytelling and Ideologies
7.A Ventriloquist and a Highwayman Walk into an Inn...Early Penny Bloods and the Politics of Humour in Valentine Vaux and Sixteen-String Jack
Celine Frohn
8.Dreadful Anticlericalism: James Malcolm Rymer’s Gothic Ideology
Rebecca Nesvet
9.Unearthing Newgate’s Haunted Legacy: The Gothic tourist in Thomas Peckett Prest’s Newgate: A Romance
Sophie Raine
Conclusion
Notes on Contributors
Index

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