The Flag of Our Union

This penny weekly's cover features a frontiersman—rifle in hand, posed against a wilderness landscape—advertising a serialized story, "Scout of the Susquehanna," by Dr. J. H. Robinson. Such publications flooded Victorian newsagents, offering working-class readers weekly installments of melodrama, frontier adventure, and sensation at affordable prices. The Flag of Our Union exemplified the format: serialized fiction, woodcut illustrations, and sensational narratives designed for rapid consumption. These cheap weeklies, dismissed by middle-class critics, created an enormous popular market and established narrative conventions—episodic structure, cliffhangers, stock characters—that would directly influence the comic books of the twentieth century.