Penny Dreadfuls: Serialized Sensation for the Working Classes

This is not a Victorian penny dreadful. The OCR text documents a scholarly 1928 edition of Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, with preface by E. Denison Ross. The volume comprises verse translations of ghazals (Persian odes) by the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz of Shiraz, accompanied by a substantial historical and critical apparatus. The preface details Bell's linguistic training in Persian and Arabic, her research methods, and contextualizes the translation within existing English renderings by Wilberforce-Clarke, Walter Leaf, and Herman Bicknell. Bell's historical introduction reconstructs the Minor Dynasties of Persia during Hafiz's era, a contribution praised by Edward G. Browne. The work includes explanatory notes and addresses translation methodologies for rendering Persian poetry into English verse.