What is the significance of the title Penny Dreadful?

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According to Wiki:

Penny dreadful is a pejorative term used to refer to cheap popular serial literature produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The stories themselves were reprints, or sometimes rewrites, of Gothic thrillers such as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, as well as new stories about famous criminals. Some of the most famous of these penny part-stories were The String of Pearls: A Romance (introducing Sweeney Todd),[5] The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial The Mysteries of Paris), and Varney the Vampire. Highwaymen were popular heroes; Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real-life English highwayman Dick Turpin, continued for 254 episodes. Other serials were thinly-disguised plagiarisms of popular contemporary literature. The publisher Edward Lloyd, for instance, published a number of penny serials derived from the works of Dickens entitled Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nicklebery, and Martin Guzzlewit.

But what is the significance of the title related to the series? Is the script the reprint of different scripts or is it having some other significances and why Penny Dreadful only?



Best Answer

So as you say (and BCdotWEB mentions in the comments) the Penny Dreadful was a name for old lurid serialsed stories (which sold for a penny).

The series is attempting to re-imagine these type of stories so is thus called Penny Dreadful. In the exact same way Quentin Tarantino re-imagined old lurid, hard-boiled American crime stories into a film named "Pulp Fiction".




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Why is Penny Dreadful called Penny Dreadful?

Penny Dreadful was actually a derogatory name used by those who felt this type of literature was low and beneath the more worthy fictional writings of the time. Despite this, they were very popular and could be purchased on the streets for one penny, hence the name.

What was Penny Dreadful name?

Quick Answer: First, let's dispel a common myth; there is no character on this show named \u201cPenny Dreadful.\u201d The show is not named after a woman named Penny, but after a sensational form of literature\u2014known pejoratively as Penny Dreadfuls\u2014that was popular during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom.

What is the history of Penny Dreadful?

The penny dreadful emerged in the 1830s, catering to an increasingly literate working class population and made possible by technological advances in printing and distribution. Its heyday came in the 1860s and 1870s, when these booklets papered the nation's newsstands.

What stories is Penny Dreadful based on?

5 Books You Must Read to Truly Get This Season of Penny Dreadful
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. ...
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker. ...
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. ...
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. ...
  • Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.




Penny Dreadful: The Literary Origins




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