Vanity Fair, Vol. 6, No. 135

This Victorian satirical weekly features a caricatured figure operating a miniature locomotive, captioned "The G.F. Train: Going it like Tivnor, with Bell on Track."

Such penny publications—affordable weekly serials selling for a shilling or less—fed working-class appetite for melodrama, satire, and sensation. These precursors to modern comics combined illustrations with serialized stories of crime, social scandal, and absurdist humor. Accessible to literate laborers, they shaped mass entertainment and visual narrative traditions that would evolve into twentieth-century comic strips and books.