Free A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley

the so-called ‘Penny Blood’, a downmarket version of the Gothic novel.
    Brought out in instalments, these trashy ‘Bloods’ became an important feature of publishing after 1828. Each week you could buy the next eight pages of the story, illustrated by a woodcut, for a single penny. (Meanwhile, a lofty, three-volume, middle-class novel would cost you over a pound.) From the 1830s, the first generation of working-class people who’d learned to read at school became avid consumers of literature.
    Real, hard-core ‘Penny Bloods’ were often set in the past, and bore some sort of relationship to supposedly real events. They included the
Calendar of Horrors
, published between 1835 and 1836, and a long-running publication called
The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., &c
. Both purported to be a history of true crimes and mysterious happenings, but were in fact largely fictional. In the latter, various genuine highwaymen are introduced, and then go on to share adventures together, despite having lived at different times in the eighteenth century.
    ‘Penny Blood’ writers often wrote extremely quickly, infrequently revised their work for publication and bulked it out with all kinds of plagiarized and extraneous material. Their plots were implausible, their characterizations crude and their locations usually included prison cells, haunted castles, sinking ships and desolate heaths. ‘More blood, much more blood’ was the instruction issued to his writers by one ‘Penny Blood’ editor.
    It may not sound particularly edifying, yet, a generation earlier, devotees of ‘Penny Bloods’ would not have had any access to literature at all. And the genre quenched a great new thirst. It’s been estimated that in the year 1845 the publishing house of Lloyd’s, based in Fleet Street, sold half a million copies each week of thevarious magazines and ‘Penny Bloods’ it produced – and each one of these would have been read by several people, bringing the total number of readers into the millions. Henry Mayhew, recorder of the lives of the London poor, found an interviewee who described how the reading of ‘Penny Bloods’ was a shared and sociable experience: ‘on a fine summer’s evening a costermonger, or any neighbour who has the advantage of being a “schollard”, reads aloud to them in the courts they inhabit’.
    Costermongers were people who sold fruit, vegetables or other perishable goods on the London streets. (A ‘monger’ is a ‘seller’, and ‘costards’ were a type of apple.) And Edward Lloyd, the publisher, stated himself that these people constituted his audience. He wished to lay ‘before a large and intelligent class of readers, at a charge comparatively insignificant, the same pleasures of imagination which have, hitherto, to a great extent, only graced the polished leisure of the wealthy’.
    Successful ‘Penny Blood’ writers needed dedication, a good nose for the kinds of story that ordinary, unpretentious people liked to read and a wealth of invention. They did not need a fancy education, or artistic aspirations – quite the opposite, in fact. Many of them were driven to their work by financial desperation, and some of them had lives no less sensational than their fiction.
    George Augustus Sala, a favourite young writer of Charles Dickens’s, was typical. Originally a hard-working ‘Blood’ writer, he cut his teeth on these products before going on to become a celebrated journalist and leader writer for the
Daily Telegraph
. Described as ‘a red, bloated, bottle-nosed creature’, he also had a seamier side to him: when times were hard, he produced both‘Bloods’ and pornography. Towards the end of his life he wrote
The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala
, an autobiography fittingly described by the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
as ‘notoriously unreliable’. The adventures he writes about include going to Russia, being imprisoned for debt and