Street & Smith's New York Weekly

This penny weekly serialized melodrama for working-class readers hungry for sensation and scandal. The cover illustration shows a domestic confrontation—a woman in elaborate dress faces two men in a Victorian parlor, the composition hinting at betrayal, accusation, or revelation. Such scenes of moral transgression were the genre's stock-in-trade. Penny dreadfuls and their American equivalents flooded the market with weekly installments of crime, seduction, and supernatural horror, priced for factory workers and servants. They represented commercial fiction's first mass medium, preceding cinema and comic books as the primary vehicle for melodramatic storytelling among the poor. Moralists condemned them as corrupting; readers devoured them.