Meaning
A cheap, sensational serial story or magazine of Victorian Britain, sold at a penny an instalment and packed with crime, horror and adventure; the label is pejorative and was never adopted by the publishers themselves. It is now used loosely, and often jokingly, for any lurid or badly written fiction, and as the standard historical term for the genre. Historical or deliberately retro register; almost always dismissive of literary quality. Regional use: British English.
Origin
The publications themselves began as 'penny bloods': the first penny serials appeared in 1836, including Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., cheap weeklies of 8 to 16 pages made possible by steam printing, rising literacy and railway distribution, and rooted in 18th-century execution broadsides. The name 'penny dreadful' arose later as a contemptuous coupling of price with a verdict on quality: the OED's earliest evidence is from 1861, in the North American Review, and the label spread in the 1860s and 1870s as the stories grew gorier and aimed at younger readers. Contemporaries played on the formula with 'penny horrible', 'penny awful' and even George Newnes's counter-programmed 'penny delightfuls' of 1896, and the genre collapsed in the 1890s under halfpenny rivals such as Harmsworth's Half-penny Marvel, prompting A. A. Milne's quip that Harmsworth had killed the penny dreadful by producing the 'ha'penny dreadfuller'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- penny awful
- penny blood
- penny dreadfuls
- penny horrible
Usage Examples
- His prose was so purple and his plots so shameless that reviewers called the series the last penny dreadful of the internet age.
- The exhibition displayed penny dreadfuls alongside the execution broadsides that inspired them, complete with bloodthirsty woodcuts.
- Reading that tabloid serial feels like handling a penny dreadful: cheap ink, desperate villains, and a cliffhanger every week.