Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

This edited collection is suitable for upper-level graduate students; postgraduate students; independent scholars and researchers; and academics and have widespread appeal to a general readership.

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures and Illustrations
1. Introduction:
Dreadful Beginnings
Dr Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine
Section One: The Progression of Pennys; or, Adaptations and Legacies of the Dreadful
2. Penny Pinching:
Reassessing the Gothic canon through nineteenth-century reprinting
Hannah-Freya Blake and Marie Léger-St-Jean
3. "As long as you are industrious, you will get on very well":
adapting The String of Pearls' economies of horror
Brontë Schiltz
4. "Your lot is wretched, old man":
Anxieties of Industry, Empire and England in
George Reynolds's Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
Dr Hannah Priest
Section Two: Victorian Medical Sciences and Penny fiction; or, Dreadful Discourses of the Gothic
5. 'Embalmed pestilence', 'intoxicating poisons':
Rhetoric of contamination, contagion, and the Gothic
marginalisation of penny dreadfuls by their contemporary critics
Manon Burz-Labrande
6. "A Tale of the Plague":
anti-medical sentiment and epidemic disease
in early Victorian popular Gothic fiction
Joseph Crawford
7. "Mistress of the broomstick":
Biology, Ecosemiotics, and Monstrous Women
in Wizard's The Wild Witch of the Heath; or the Demon of the Glen
Dr Nicole C. Dittmer
Section Three: Mode, Genre, and Style; or, Gothic Storytelling and Ideologies
8. A Ventriloquist and a Highwayman Walk into an Inn...
Early Penny Bloods and the Politics of Humour
in Jack Rann and Valentine Vaux
Celine Frohn
9. Gothic Ideology and Religious Politics
in James Malcolm Rymer's Penny Fiction
Dr Rebecca Nesvet
10. "Muddling about among the dead":
found manuscripts and metafictional storytelling
in James Malcolm Rymer's Newgate: A Romance
Sophie Raine
List of Referenced Penny Titles
Bibliography
Index