penny dreadful
1
9.5
- noun
- /ˈpɛni ˈdrɛdfəl/
- Archaic
:
novela barata
- She is currently at work on a new book, The Freedom Maze, but she took time out from it to concoct this pastiche, a Victorian penny dreadful in such a manner as Anthony Trollope might have produced, had he set his pen to it.
- Victorian penny dreadful
Examples
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With her father gone, the house used to jangle with noisy discord—her older brothers shouting at each other in their rough way, reading penny dreadfuls and snickering with each other over jokes they would not tell their sister.
Fiction book (2000) -
Should that particular 'fable' be equated to the Victorian equivalent of a penny dreadful?
Blog text (13) -
And before radio, there were penny-dreadfuls and the explosion of novels in the late Victorian period.
Blog text (28) -
"One of those children you read about in penny dreadfuls left on the doorstep in a basket, except that I was in an old fruit box." "I'm sorry."
Fiction book (2001) -
When they write about you in the penny dreadfuls, they're gonna call Val Verde your end of the line.
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If there's one thing we've learned from penny dreadfuls, it's that, when you find yourself in a place like this, you must never be a candy-ass.
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Picture books rode the eighteenth-century wave of popular enthusiasm for literature, a category that included political pamphlets, sermons, penny dreadfuls, and ballads.
Academic text (2001) -
ZS: The great thing about Woolf is that she reviewed books that most of you would consider very bad, like, you know, Victorian penny dreadfuls—awful books by completely obscure women.
Blog text (25) -
In the 19th century, many readers enjoyed thrilling tales in penny dreadful booklets that featured exaggerated plots and sensational characters.
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The popularity of penny dreadfuls among the masses reflects society's appetite for scandalous stories and melodrama.
Synonyms
1
8.5
A cheap exciting paperback story of adventure popular in late 1800s America
A small cheap booklet from past centuries with folk stories or songs
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components give useful cues: 'penny' signals very low cost and 'dreadful' signals something sensational or terrible, so a learner could plausibly infer a cheaply produced sensational item. However, the full historical sense — a specific type of 19th‑century cheap storybook — is lexicalized and culturally specific, so the exact referent is not fully predictable from the parts.
Etymology
Penny dreadful comes from Britain in the 1800s, when cheap storybooks cost a penny and often told very scary, over-the-top tales, so people called them dreadful. That's why today penny dreadful means a 'cheap' and 'sensational' story.