The Flag of Our Union

This Boston penny paper exemplifies the serialized sensation fiction that gripped Victorian working-class readers. The ornate masthead frames an urban skyline while the featured story, "Wandering Guerrilla: Infamy Bride of Unarillo," promises melodrama and moral transgression. Priced at two cents per issue, *The Flag* offered weekly installments of crime, romance, and dark adventure—narratives that thrilled ordinary laborers and servants. These cheap serials, dismissed by middle-class critics as corrupting trash, established the template modern comics would inherit: episodic storytelling, visual sensationalism, and plots centered on social outcasts and moral extremes. The penny dreadful's direct descendant, the dime novel, would dominate American popular reading through the century's end.