Franklin's Miscellany: 'The Sleeping Prince'

This wood-engraved tale from a Victorian penny serial depicts a fairy-tale encounter in an enchanted forest—two women in classical dress confront a male figure. Franklin's Miscellany, a sixpenny weekly, exemplified the cheap serialized fiction that sustained working-class appetite for melodrama, fantasy, and sensation. Published in installments and profusely illustrated, such serials were the direct ancestors of the modern comic book, establishing narrative conventions of visual storytelling, cliffhanger serialization, and fantastical subject matter that would evolve into twentieth-century graphic narrative.