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A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860

By Marie Léger-St-Jean
University of Cambridge

"unlock the material for other research purposes"
— William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

Welcome to Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 (POP). This project aims to catalogue early Victorian penny fiction and thereby enable easy access to surviving copies and accurate bibliographic information. It is peer-reviewed and aggregated into NINES.

Victorianist scholars and collectors alike should find it very helpful. It will also prove of use to those researching transmission of French and American popular culture. You may search by title or browse by work, author, publisher, periodical, or library.

What are penny bloods?

Penny bloods are novels published either in penny periodicals of varying sizes or in weekly autonomous penny numbers, usually comprising eight pages with a woodcut on the first. Serials from periodicals could also be reprinted on their own. Read more...

Links

POP's records are linked to many other resources, online or in print:

• copies in libraries throughout the world;
• periodicals' entries in the Waterloo Directory;
• authors' and publishers' biographies in ODNB;
• entries on authors, periodicals, and publishers in the online version of the DNCJ in the Nineteenth Century Index;
• authors' entries in the online version of the Wellesley Index in the Nineteenth Century Index;
• publishers' entries in the BBTI;
• authors' case files in the archive of the RLF;
• authors' biographies in the Literary Encyclopedia;
• plays (both source texts and dramatizations) in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays, ELTA, and the Victorian Plays Project;
• digitized copies in Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive;
• digitized periodicals in 19th Century British Library Newspapers, 19th Century UK Periodicals, and British Periodicals;
• title entries in existing bibliographies by Montague Summers, John Medcraft, Andrew Block, Michael Sadleir, Louis James, Joel H. Wiener, Everett Franklin Bleiler, Elizabeth James and Helen R. Smith, and Andrew King.

Coverage

Currently, the database contains 418 editions by 41 publishers of 366 different works written by 36 identified penny authors. It also contains 59 serials from 16 periodicals. (More statistics.)

POP contains all penny books published until 1860 indexed in:

• James, Elizabeth and Helen R. Smith. Penny dreadfuls and boys' adventures : the Barry Ono Collection of Victorian popular literature in the British Library. London: British Library, 1998.
• Medcraft, John. Bibliography of the penny bloods of Edward Lloyd. Dundee: privately printed (by J.A. Birkbeck.), 1945.

It is missing 36 of Reynolds's serials, 106 works listed in Louis James's check-list, and 31 indexed serials from the London Journal. Work on the database is ongoing: read more about planned developments...

How to Cite

Léger-St-Jean, Marie. Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860. [18 April 2012]. Faculty of English, Cambridge [21 May 2012] (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/pop).