<i>Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror</i> edited by Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine

The past few decades have seen a growing wave of academic interest in what a recent guest-edited issue of Victorian Popular Fictions has termed “Reappraising Penny Fiction” (Fall 2022). The huge, and hugely understudied, body of popular literature that comprises penny fiction has been taken up by collections focused on the two most famous producers of penny fictions, G. W. M. Reynolds and Edward Lloyd (Anne Humpherys and Louis James’s G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press [2008]; Sarah Lill and Rohan McWilliam’s Edward Lloyd and His World [2021]; Jennifer Conary and Mary Shannon’s G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined [2023]), and also by monographs that examine how studying penny fiction can enlarge our understanding of Victorian culture (Anna Gasperini’s Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act [2019]; Rob Breton’s The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction [2021]). Nicole Dittmer and Sophie Raine’s new collection, Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic, which centers on penny fiction’s responses to and reshapings of the literary Gothic, offers a significant new contribution to this project of reappraising the penny fiction archive.Dittmer and Raine make a cogent case in their introduction for how little the vast arena of Gothic penny fiction has been studied. As they note, current scholarship on sensational penny fiction tends to focus on just a few well-known titles, especially G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–48), James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre (1845–47), and Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846–47) (3). Indeed, over half of the essays in this collection continue to focus on Reynolds and Rymer, although many enter more widely into each author’s substantial oeuvres. This enlarging of scholarship on Reynolds and Rymer, along with other essays in the collection that illuminate lesser-known texts, help Dittmer and Raine substantially embark upon their project of providing a “much needed compendium of scholarship that revivifies” lost and ignored “working-class Gothic texts which have . . . cultural, literary and socio-political significance” (14, 3).The wide variety of approaches and arguments in Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic speaks to the richness of the field, and also to how much more work there is to be done. The collection is divided into three sections, each containing three essays. The first section is devoted to “Adaptations and Legacies of the Dreadful” and considers the transmedial popularity of staples of Gothic penny fiction, including Rymer’s The String of Pearls and Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1846–47). The collection’s second section engages “Victorian Medicine and the Sciences” as filtered through Gothic penny fiction. Some of the collection’s strongest essays are to be found in the third and final section, “Mode, Genre, and Style; or, Gothic Storytelling and Ideologies,” which offers detailed close-readings of a host of lesser-known fictions, including Thomas Peckett Prest’s Valentine Vaux (1839–40), James Lindridge’s Jack Rann, Alias Sixteen-String Jack (1840), and Rymer’s The Ordeal by Touch, a Romance (1846), Newgate, a Romance (1846–47), and The Sepoys, or, Highland Jessie: A Tale of the Present Indian Revolt (1858). Whereas penny fiction is often examined as data rather than as literature, these final essays in the collection especially focus on tracing the intricate, sophisticated ways in which penny fiction engages and transforms Gothic conventions and tropes, and thus they make clear how such texts can substantially enlarge our understanding of the genre.In the first section, Hannah-Freya Blake and Marie Léger-St-Jean’s essay, “Penny Pinching: Reassessing the Gothic Canon through Nineteenth-Century Reprinting,” examines how attending to surprising and “unexpected reprinting patterns of publishers” who reprinted Gothic novels in penny weeklies can expand our view of the Gothic genre past “the canonical few Gothic novels that dominate scholarship” (29). The second essay in this section, Brontë Schultz’s “‘As long as you are industrious, you will get on very well’: Adapting The String of Pearls’s Economies of Horror” considers the ways in which the “tale of Marxist horror” encapsulated by The String of Pearls and its many successors—from the nineteenth century to today—offers a sustained cultural excavation of the terrors of internalized capitalism. The section’s third essay, Hannah Priest’s “‘Your lot is wretched, old man’: Anxieties of Industry, Empire, and England in George Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf,” begins by scrutinizing the tendency of scholarship on Reynolds to elide the nearly contemporaneous publication of The Mysteries of London series and the Gothic horror novel Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf. Priest argues that reading Wagner in the context of The Mysteries sheds new light on the novel’s politics—for instance, when read against the critiques of the English penal system in The Mysteries, Wagner’s anti-Catholic moments seem more overtly directed at England and its institutions than at the Catholic Church (69). All three essays intervene in thought-provoking ways with the idea of the literary test of time.The collection’s second section, which focuses on how penny fiction responded to scientific and medical zeitgeist, begins with Manon Burz-Labrande’s “‘Embalmed Pestilence,’ ‘Intoxicating Poisons’: Rhetoric of Contamination, Contagion, and the Gothic Marginalisation of Penny Dreadfuls by Their Contemporary Critics.” Burz-Labrande considers how “many Victorian critics constructed the penny dreadful as a metaphorical monster thanks to a Gothicised discourse of circulation as a threat,” and argues that “casting the penny dreadfuls as a literary monster actually reveals their innovative potential as a formative experiment in the growing literary marketplace” (92, 94). The second essay in this section, Joseph Crawford’s “‘A Tale of the Plague’: Anti-medical Sentiment and Epidemic Disease in Early Victorian Popular Gothic Fiction,” reads a variety of penny fiction titles—including Reynold’s Mysteries and Rymer’s Varney, but also the anonymous (attributed to Richard Thompson) Mysteries of Old St. Paul’s (1841)—to examine how the diabolical doctors of midcentury laboring-class Gothic literature shows its readership’s deep distrust of the medical profession in the 1830s and 1840s. The third essay in this section, Nicole Dittmer’s “‘Mistress of the Broomstick’: Biology, Ecosemiotics and Monstrous Women in Wizard’s The Wild Witch of the Heath; or The Demon of the Glen,” elucidates depictions of monstrous femininity in this little-known 1841 penny fiction.The third section continues and deepens the collection’s attention to penny fiction’s textual nuances. Celine Frohn’s “A Highwayman and a Ventriloquist Walk into an Inn . . . Early Penny Romances and the Politics of Humour in Jack Rann and Valentine Vaux” attends to penny fiction’s usually episodic and often humorous plots, and notes particularly the ways in which penny fiction can create humor by subverting Gothic expectations. Rebecca Nesvet’s “Gothic Ideology and Religious Politics in James Malcolm Rymer’s Penny Fiction” explores how Rymer’s fiction significantly “repurposes the anti-Catholic tropes that had become firmly established as the paraphernalia of British Gothic storytelling” (181). Nesvet’s longitudinal reading of Rymer’s work amply demonstrates how penny fiction is not, as she notes, “homogeneous or monolithic in its treatment of religion” (197). Finally, Sophie Raine’s “‘Muddling about among the dead’: Found Manuscripts and Metafictional Storytelling in James Malcolm Rymer’s Newgate: A Romance” reads the complex metafiction in Rymer’s novel and how its collected internal documents combine to effect “the quest at the heart of the narrative, both Rymer and the narrator’s mission: to revive the romance of Newgate” (204). This last essay examines how Rymer also shows how penny fiction revives the Gothic in intricate and self-reflexive ways: as Raine notes, Rymer’s novel shows “how working-class texts were actively encouraging their readers to scrutinise the accuracy of non-fictional sources whilst unapologetically celebrating reading imaginative, sensational literature for entertainment purposes” (217).The collection’s celebration of the penny Gothic concludes with a useful resource of a chronological list of the referenced penny titles. The whole compendium, while overtly aiming to create and maintain “a permanent place for penny dreadfuls in Gothic studies” (8), will prove valuable not just to scholars of the literary Gothic but also to those interested in penny fiction more widely, Victorian popular and laboring-class culture, Victorian science, and publishing and book history.