The Flag of Our Union

This penny serial, priced for working-class readers, exemplifies the sensational fiction that dominated Victorian popular culture. Crowded columns of text packed each issue with melodramatic tales of crime, romance, and moral transgression. Such serials—distributed weekly through news vendors and read aloud in public houses—shaped the narrative conventions that would later define comic books: episodic storytelling, vivid illustration, and plots calibrated to keep readers returning for the next installment. The *Flag of Our Union* reached thousands of readers hungry for entertainment beyond their station, establishing the template for cheap mass-market narrative that persists today.