Pulp fiction, Victorian style

Pulp fiction, strictly speaking, was an American phenomenon in the early years of the twentieth century - but we Brits got there first with "penny dreadfuls", popular for much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and featuring lurid tales of crime and horror. So far so trashy - but, as this article (illustrated with a number of amazing penny dreadful covers) suggests, they were more than that, in both encouraging literacy and paving the way for more edifying serial publications on political and educational themes.