Penny Dreadfuls, 1867 · page 109 of 300
Roving Jack, The Pirate Hunter — page 109: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Victorian Penny Dreadful Page Analysis This page contains an illustration accompanied by prose narrative from "Roving Jack, the Pirate Hunter." The engraving shows three figures on what appears to be a ship's rigging, labeled "Simon Smut at the Mast-Head," depicting what seems to be a dramatic scene aboard vessel. The accompanying text is descriptive prose rather than dialogue, depicting a moonlit landscape with forests, streams, and night sounds, followed by a character named Tom King observing stars overhead. The passage emphasizes natural beauty and solitude, contrasting peaceful countryside with crowded cities. This represents typical penny dreadful formatting: sensational illustration paired with serialized narrative prose.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
ROVING JACK, THE PIRATE HUNTER. F ith «fe 4% se ' p] 4 I Z oy \, RSS , - ‘/ 4 , NW » \\ \N \ SIMON SMUT AT THEMAST-HEAD. The landscape swam around him, in all its moon- lit beauty of hill and vale. Dark woods slumbered on the hills’ sides ; clear, bubbling streams leapt along in the moonshine ; the golden corn waved in the fresh night breeze; the interlacing branches of trees whispered over his ead, The sylvan scene was calm and restful, The road was lonely ; but the solitude was peace, it was the loneliness of the ‘‘ pathless woods,” where man communes humbly with his Maker, and drinks in deeply the strong life of nature and repose—the peace so cruelly contrasted by the deadly apathy of sleeping, fever-dreamed cities, where crowded men pass away a trance-like interval between successive days of toil and sorrow. There were the stithy, ear-piercing sounds of night, the boom of the flying beetle, the chirrup of the grasshopper revelling in the wet sward, the hoot of the owl in the woods, Tom King looked upwards. Over his head the glorious host of stars spangled forth in unclouded splendour. The moon sailed along through the deep blue ocean of space, silvering the fleecy clouds and bathing the still landscape with her bright, cold beams, om King, delighted by the quiet beauty of the