Page 27 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 27/206
Various publishers: Penny Dreadfuls from c1830.
The Penny Dreadfuls - serialised novels costing 1d (one old penny = half a new penny) - from about 1830. Gradually increasing literacy, urbanisation, gaslight, the railways, increased leisure time - these factors and more contributed to an increasing demand for popular entertainment publishing through the century. This demand was met in a publishing revolution that saw the burgeoning popularity of the novel, the magazine, and for the less literate classes, the penny dreadful. These were so-called in a demeaning, disparaging put-down of the kind of content, the lurid covers, the illustrated nature of the dreadfuls - some were prototypical graphic novels or simple comics. Serialised novels, as Dickens and other respected authors had discovered, were the means to reach a new, less affluent market, as most could afford a penny - in 1860 one penny would buy you a loaf of bread, or a visit to coin-operated public toilet. Serials were great for publishers too - Charles Dickens had proved with his Pickwick Papers how successful serials were - making on average £2000 per month over the 19 months between April 1836 and November 1837. Black Bess which featured the adventures of the highwayman Dick Turpin ran for 254 episodes at 1d a time, and sold tens of thousands of copies - even the very poor could group together to share the cost of a penny dreadful. In the 20th century serials were co-opted into the commercial world with radio and later television Soap Operas (from about 1930) - serials sponsored by advertisers...
Publishing changed through the 19th century - from serious high-brow works (Darwin, Audubon, Gibbons, Stendhal, Poe, Carlisle, etc) and novels as literary art intended for the middle and upper- middle classes (Austin, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Walter Scott etc) - to a vast new publishing industry catering for the newly literate - largely the working classes and lower-middle classes in Britain's still strictly segmented but rapidly growing population. The reasons for this are increasing literacy (national education acts, education for younger children, increased leisure time, railway and tram-car commuting times, the steam-powered letterpresses, cheap woodpulp paper (giving rise to pulp fiction around the turn of the century, the yellow press, etc. The content of these 'dreadfuls' were sensationalist, serialised versions of classics, re-written versions of Gothic horror stories, detective and crime fiction, popularised versions of adventure classics like The Three Musketeers, and a range of freshly written stories originated just for this new marketplace: tales of highwaymen, pirates, smugglers, cowboys, Explorers, deep-sea divers, frontiersmen, gold-prospectors, cat- burglars, and vampires, zombies and other fantasia. Popular culture was being invented as early as the 1830s ...