Acrash of thunder jolts a beautiful girl awake. She sits bolt upright in bed, her eyes transfixed on a storm outside. Lightning, and for an instant, a tall, gaunt figure is illuminated outside. “What—what was it? Real, or a delusion?” she gasps, melodramatically.
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The figure scrapes its long nails across the window—definitely not a delusion. “Help!” she cries, but there is no one to come to the rescue. In a sudden rush the figure is in the room and has dragged the girl by her hair to the edge of the bed, where it plunges its teeth into her neck: “a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!” Not exactly children’s literature, is it?
So begins the gruesome tale of Varney, the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. First published in 1845, it was one of the most popular stories of its time. Readers could buy serialized installments of stories like these, in pamphlets of a dozen pages or so for just a penny. It’s how they got the name we still know them by today: penny dreadfuls.
Characters from these stories, such as Varney, Sweeney Todd, and Spring-Heeled Jack terrorized the Victorian, English-speaking public from England to the United States to Australia. Author, journalist, and sometimes apprentice of Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala wrote in 1861 that penny dreadfuls are “a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to the study of toxicology, of gipsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roués, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, gravediggers, resurrection-men, lunatics and ghosts.” They contained grisly tales of murder, crime, and the supernatural, with the occasional romance thrown in for good measure. Between their first emergence in the 1830s to their decline in the 1890s, penny dreadfuls fascinated, horrified, and titillated millions.
As one might expect, no audience was drawn into the world of penny dreadfuls more than children and teenagers. In fact, they specifically targeted young readers. Many of the stories feature young characters, such as the schoolboy Jack Harkaway, who would become as beloved to Victorian readers as Harry Potter is today, according to the British Library. Boys of England, a periodical marketed to young boys, first introduced the character in the 1871 penny dreadful “Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays,” which details the protagonist running away from school, boarding a ship, and embarking on a life of adventure and travel. Jack even had to battle a 15-foot python when one of his many pranks went awry.