Franklin's Miscellany: "The Last Hours of a Queen"

A deathbed scene illustrates the serialized melodrama that defined Victorian penny publications. This weekly miscellany, priced for working-class readers, mixed scientific curiosities with sensational fiction—stories of queens, crime, and supernatural horror rendered in woodcut engravings. Such serials were the direct ancestors of comic books: episodic narrative, visual drama, affordable mass production, and the promise of sensation for a penny. These publications scandalized middle-class moralists but fed an enormous appetite among laborers and servants for stories that mingled pathos, intrigue, and the macabre.