Penny Blood or Penny Dreadful?

Which are you? Today, we use the terms interchangeably, but that was not always the case. These weren't just some cheap thrills, well, they were, but they were used to quicken the blood and as a bit of scary entertainment for those looking for a bit of a scare.

Penny Bloods hit first. Around the 1830s & 40s, Penny Bloods were created to give a bit of entertainment to adults coming home from 14 hour shifts at the factories that were just popping up. The rise of industrial factories created a large underclass of people and those urban people needed some form of entertainment that was affordable. Well, the printers came up with the perfect thing. A bit of an escape from the daily drudge in the factory. Penny Bloods were Gothic in tone, usually taking place in castles and having some form of superstition or ghosts or...Vampyres.

By the 1860s, the Penny Dreadful was taking over. After the educational reforms, the testing requirements for public funding, increased the number of literate youths. With a more educated adolescent class, and young boys who were selling newspapers and working as runners, they had a penny in their pocket. What better way to liberate that penny than by coming up with scandalous stories that young boys wanted to read? And so, the Penny Dreadful came about. Urban adventures and true crime gave the thrills that the Gothic tales used to. Keeping things local, it made it seem that anything could happen at anytime. These stories were fast-paced and unabashedly crude and gory.

We are still consuming the same stories, only this time we have horror films, novels by well-known authors, tv series and now web-series that carries the stories forward. True-Crime podcasts are huge hits and people cannot get enough of them. It is the same cycle that happened over a century ago in the early 1800s. It started on paper, changed to screens, then to earbuds. We are all still looking for thrills, now it's in headlines. So, which are you? Do you identify more with the Penny Bloods or the Penny Dreadfuls? Let us know below!

-tjs