Franklin's Boyhood

This penny leaflet reproduces Benjamin Franklin's own account of his family's religious persecution and emigration to New England. The engraved church tower frames a respectable historical narrative—yet it appeared among serialized fiction that fed Victorian working-class readers' hunger for sensation. Cheap weekly publications like this occupied the market between serious literature and street ballads, mixing biography, melodrama, crime, and horror in installments affordable to laborers and servants. The format would evolve into comic serials and story papers, establishing the visual-narrative structures that eventually shaped modern comic books. These publications scandalized middle-class critics even as they democratized reading itself.