Vanity Fair, Vol. 6, No. 153

This penny dreadful cover features a caricature of a figure labeled 'Old Peter Cooper,' positioned beside a barrel marked 'Specie'—a visual attack on the American industrialist and philanthropist.

Penny dreadfuls and their cousins, penny bloods, were serialized stories hawked on London streets, offering sensational melodrama, crime, and horror to working-class readers hungry for entertainment beyond their means. These cheap broadsheets and pamphlets—ancestors of the modern comic book—prioritized lurid imagery and inflammatory content over artistic subtlety. They shaped popular taste, reflected class anxieties, and established narrative conventions that would evolve into twentieth-century sequential art.