Exhibit: Bloody Books - Popular Fiction in Victorian England

This exhibit presents the panoply of cheaply printed serial fiction that flooded the literary markets in early Victorian England. The British working class, increasingly literate and increasingly urban, represented a new market for reading material that catered to their interests and was affordable.

In response, savvy publishers began to print cheap magazines, long serials, and novels in parts during the 1830s and 1840s that were aimed initially at working-class men and then later at a juvenile audience. These texts were almost unwaveringly sensationalist and derivative in terms of content, often plagiarizing popular Gothic romance novels or summarizing lurid tales of true crime, ripped straight from contemporary newspaper accounts. These provocative and violent stories often sold for a mere penny an issue, and British society initially used a blanket term to describe the exceedingly popular but highly ephemeral genre: "penny dreadful".

The exhibit was curated by Morgan Swan and the poster was designed by Sam Miles. It will be on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries in Rauner Special Collections Library from September 16 through December 13th, 2024.