Street & Smith's New York Weekly

This penny weekly serialized Copper and Gold, a melodramatic tale of crime and moral peril. The woodcut shows five figures in Victorian dress—a woman in distress at center, flanked by men in dark coats and a woman in striped fabric—arranged in theatrical tableau. Such publications flooded working-class newsstands weekly, offering serialized sensation fiction at affordable prices. Street & Smith's built their empire on these cheap weeklies, which featured crime, seduction, murder, and supernatural horror alongside adventure tales. The lurid illustrations and cliffhanger narratives created devoted readerships among working people largely excluded from respectable literature. These publications established the commercial formula—serialization, visual drama, and accessible melodrama—that would evolve directly into early comic books.