Calendar of Horrors. Criminal history could not provide enough material for Lloyd’s
profitable presses, and so a new industry was launched, fiction-hacking at a halfpenny a
line.
Lloyd’s leading hack, who also acted as editor on many of the weekly parts, was
Thomas Peckett Prest, a relation of the Archdeacon of Durham. Although Prest relished
blood and thunder (he wrote some 200 series with titles like Mary Bateman the Yorkshire
Witch (1840), The Maniac Father or the Victim of Seduction (1842), and the classic Varney
the Vampire or the Feast of Blood (1847)), he was also sufficiently well educated to
successfully write pirate versions of current bestsellers by Charles Dickens, as well as
the now ‘standard’ version of the Sweeney Todd story, The String of Pearls (1840).
The villain as hero was popular in both ‘proper’ fiction and penny parts. Dick Turpin,
who died on the gallows in 1739, was raised to high stardom by W. Harrison Ainsworth
in his 1834 novel, Rookwood. The ride to York on Bonnie Black Bess is said to have been
an author’s invention, and it seems to have been the key to the story’s popularity. It
featured ever after in the many rewrites of Turpin’s career, and was the centrepiece of
action in a number of stage and circus dramatisations as well as early films. Turpin
weeklies and libraries were being published into the 1930s, and the hero and his horse
were illustrated in Thriller Picture Library (a pocket comic) as late as 1957.
Several of the hack writers found a fair living churning out Dreadfuls before ascending
to better things. One such was George William MacArthur Reynolds whose partworks
included the plagiarised imitation, Pickwick Abroad (1838). Son of a sea captain,
Reynolds spent some time in Paris where he read Eugene Sue’s popular partwork The
Mysteries of Paris. Inspired, he returned to England and commenced his own Mysteries
of London (1845), a long-runner which wove into its fictional narrative factual reports on
the evils of the nation’s capital. Five years later Reynolds founded his own Sunday
journal, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, a title which would run, latterly supported by
the Co-operative movement, until it turned into the tabloid Sunday Citizen in the 1960s.
The change from penny parts to penny magazines came about in 1866 when Edwin J.
Brett, operating as the Newsagents Publishing Co., and publisher of some of the ‘fiercest’
(to use a contemporary term) Dreadfuls of the day, including The Wild Boys of London
(which was eventually suppressed by the police), issued number one of Boys of England.
There were already plenty of religious-based weeklies and monthlies for boys and girls,
especially ‘Mr’ Samuel Orchard Beeton’s Boy’s Own Magazine which began in 1855. But
these were either too ‘goody-goody’ for a young taste corrupted by Dreadfuls, or were too
expensive: Beeton’s magazine cost sixpence a month, and was therefore thoroughly
middle-to-upper class.
Boys of England, sixteen pages of stories, serials, illustrations and competitions
(prizes ranged from fifty pairs of ducks to a hundred concertinas!), was at the beginning
not far removed from a Dreadful; the lead story was ‘The Skeleton Crew’. But in time, as
the Victorian era progressed, Brett boasted on his front page that the weekly was
‘subscribed to by HRH Prince Arthur, the Prince Imperial of France and Count William
Bernstorff’. It was the start of a publishing gold rush as publisher after publisher put out
penny weeklies for boys. Brett’s main rival, William Laurence Emmett, also of Penny
Dreadful fame, issued his Young Gentleman’s Journal (1867). Brett answered with Young
Men of Great Britain (1868), and Emmett counterpunched with Young Gentlemen of
260 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS