And don’t imagine that they worked part-time hours. During the nineteenth century, most working class children, by the time they were ten years old, went to work - running errands for shopkeepers, as assistant chimney sweeps, crossing sweepers, page boys, working in textile mills and in coal mines. It’s worth noting that most working class children had very little time for recreational activities. By the late 1790s, Churches and religious organizations had begun to publish children’s periodicals and Sunday School magazines, but again they were rather stuffy and conservative, not really the kind of thing that children were excited to read. The first children’s periodical, The Lilliputian Magazine, published by John Newbery, didn’t appear until 1751. In fact, children’s literature as a genre was a pretty late starter, only getting off the ground in the eighteenth century, and even then it was usually didactic, pious, and moralizing - not particularly fun. The first children’s periodical, The Lilliputian Magazine, 1751 British Libraryīefore the nineteenth century, there wasn’t much in the way of fun and entertaining reading material for children. It’s in this environment that the penny dreadful made its debut. In England, between 18 the population doubled it then doubled again between 18! That growth was accompanied by a marked demographic shift: already by the 1820s almost half of the UK’s population was under 20! Not only did the period mark an almost exponential increase in mass-produced and cheap print, on scales inconceivable prior to the Industrial Revolution, but it found a global mass market of readers - an increasingly large number of whom were young and literate. What’s more, in the nineteenth century there was sustained and unprecedented population growth. By 1900 the literacy rate had risen to 97%. By the 1830s, literacy rates were about 66% and 50% for men and women, respectively. In England, when printing was introduced in the 1470s, literacy was likely under 10%. Nationwide educational reforms launched in the 1830s aimed to eventually provide universal, free, and compulsory state-funded education. The emergence of the penny dreadful in England coincided with improved literacy. It wasn’t Charles Dickens or Mary Shelley but it was cheap - only a penny - easy to read, entertaining, and extraordinarily popular. You might or might not know that the show takes its name from a new kind of serialized fiction which first appeared in London in the 1830s. ![]() ![]() The three-season gothic thriller, starring Eva Green no less, is set in late Victorian England. Google ‘penny dreadful’ and you’ll see pages of results for the TV show of that name.
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