Cheap Popular Fiction (Penny Dreadfuls & Dime Novels)

The late 19th century gave us something close to the platonic ideal of a media moral panic. The technology in question was cheap print. A "penny dreadful" was a flimsy serialised story paper that cost exactly what the name suggests (a penny, in Britain) and was printed on pulp paper in eight or sixteen pages at a time, full of criminals, highwaymen, detectives and the occasional vampire. Its American cousin, the "dime novel", was a slightly sturdier pamphlet aimed at roughly the same audience: working-class boys with a little pocket money and an appetite for adventure. The format was, in short, trashy, thrilling, and cheap enough that ordinary kids could buy it themselves — which was precisely the problem, as far as their elders were concerned.

Victorian moral crusaders blamed such reading for corrupting young minds and inciting real-life crime. In The Wilds of London (1874), the journalist James Greenwood warned that a pernicious story paper might "be lurking at this very moment in that young gentleman's private chamber…polluting his mind and smoothing the way that leads to swift destruction." In the United States, the anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock (who had made a career of policing what other people read) devoted a chapter of his 1883 book Traps for the Young to "Half-Dime Novels and Story Papers," calling them "literary poison" and "sure-ruin traps" — "eggs from which all kinds of villainy are hatched." Reformers pushed for censorship, promoted improving "healthy fiction" as an alternative, and librarians and teachers actively steered boys away from the dreadfuls. Historians John Springhall and Michael Denning have since shown the panic tracked class anxiety as much as any genuine rise in juvenile crime: the problem, fundamentally, was that the wrong sort of children were reading the wrong sort of stories without anyone's permission.

The panic eventually faded as the format itself faded. The dreadfuls left behind the seedbed of modern genre fiction — mystery, adventure, science fiction, the detective story — that mass culture would later happily feed on. Their real legacy, though, was less about what children read than about who got to decide.