A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860

About POP

History - Future - Acknowledgments - Contributors
How to Cite - Funding - Technical Notes

History

Launched in November 2010, Price One Penny (POP) was created and is maintained by Marie Léger-St-Jean, doctoral candidate of English at the University of Cambridge, to provide bibliographical and eventually biographical data about the countless publishers and authors involved in the production of penny bloods, weekly serials sold for a penny to a varied audience from the late 1830s through to the 1850s. It was peer-reviewed and aggregated into NINES in August 2011.

It is modelled on Troy J. Bassett's At the Circulating Library. Its content draws from pioneering research by Louis James, Fiction For The Working Man (1973), and current work by Helen R. Smith, as well as from the wealth of information gathered by collectors, the true repositories of penny-publishing knowledge.

Since June 2012, Elizabeth Stearns, doctoral candidate at Syracuse University, is assisting with library copy research and data entry as well as bringing in fresh new enthusiasm. Sarah Lill, doctoral candidate at Northumbria University, offers punctual help with primary research since October 2012.

Future

POP has not yet taken advantage of all previously published bibliographies. Here are the three bibliographies left of which I would like to add the contents (limited to 1835-1860 penny serial fiction):

King, Andrew. Index of Serials in The London Journal: First series, 1845-1883, volumes I-LXXVIII. 2008.
Wiener, Joel H. A Descriptive Finding List of Unstamped British Periodicals, 1830-1836. London: Bibliographical Society, 1970.
Summers, Montague. A Gothic bibliography. London: Fortune Press, 1941.

POP will not extend beyond 1860, when penny dreadfuls replaced penny bloods.

Acknowledgments

A special thank you to Jennifer Pollard, Rob Macfarlane, and Helen Cooper who generously accepted to temporarily host POP on the Faculty of English website at the University of Cambridge. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their help and support: the two NINES anonymous reviewers, Justin Gilbert, Elizabeth James, Helen R. Smith, John Adcock, Peter Ross, James Doig, Troy J. Bassett, Chris Martin, Eric Peters, Benoit Leseul, and Patrick Leary.

John Adcock regularly updates his Penny Bibliography on his blog Yesterday's Papers.

Contributors

If you would like to contribute corrections, data entry, publisher biographies, author biographies, title summaries, or serialization information, please contact Marie Léger-St-Jean.

Thank you to James Doig and Robin Hamilton for their contributions as well as Elizabeth Stearns and Sarah Lill for their collaboration.

How to Cite

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

Funding

Marie Léger-St-Jean's doctoral studies are funded by:

Technical Notes

This website was written on a Macintosh using a MySQL database and PHP. It complies with XHTML and CSS specifications.