Edward Lloyd's Penny Bloods

It's sometimes said that the popularity of cheap penny literature in Victorian England was very much a London phenomenon, however is clear that Penny Bloods were popular much further afield.  For example, Edward Lloyd's Penny Bloods were advertised in the Hull Packet and East Riding Times in the 1840s.

This advertisement appeared in January 1847 and mentions James Malcolm Rymer's Ada the Betrayed and Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Blood ("By the author of Ada the Betrayed"):

The following advertisement appared in the 21 April, 1848 issue.  It is interesting for showing the close connection at this time between Edward Loyd and George Purkess.  Although titled "Lloyd's Works" (with Lloyd's London address at the end), according to Marie Leger-St-Clair's excellent Penny Bloods database many of the titles listed in the advertsement were actually published by Purkess or by Purkess & Strange.  The Ringdove, The Pledge, Ethelinde, The Miser's Fate and The Doom of the Drinker were published by George Purkess; The Rosebud, The Corsair, A Lady in Search of a Husband, The Double Courtship, The Unhappy Bride, and The Golden Marriage were published by Purkess and Strange.  The Mysteries of the Quaker City and The Virgin Bride were published by Lloyd & Purkess, while ten of the titles were published by Edward Lloyd.  The publisher of Lucille; or The Young Indian appears to be unknown.

Penny Pickwick

A recent bargain book purchase was a copy of The Post-Humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, an early Dickens plagiarism by Thomas Peckett Prest and published by Edward Lloyd. Two volumes bound in one in the complete 112 parts that were published in weekly penny issues in 1837-39, for a mere 12 pounds from an online seller. Presumably they thought it was an early edition of the Pickwick Papers and not worth much. Here is part of an early article on penny part fiction that mentions the Penny Pickwick and some of Lloyd's other publications. NOVELS IN PENNY NUMBERS (The Saturday Review, 13 September 1862) Jacob Tonson is said to have had the attics of a house in Little Britain in habited by a colony of authors whose services he could call into requisition when he chose. Three of these “famous pens” slept under one rug, while one suit served their purposes when stirring abroad; and from these attics, as from an arsenal, Tonson drew forth the arms which disturbed the Ministry, or set the hearts of the nation a flutter. Since those days, the position of the recognised author has amazingly improved, but we doubt whether the race of hack authors is not greatly degenerated. Originally recruited almost solely from the ranks of wandering scholars who had spent some years at one of the Universities, who had been ushers or classical masters at schools, and who possessed, therefore, a very considerable amount of learning, our cheap authors have by degrees dwindled down to those who never saw the inside of an Eton grammar, and whose ignorance of foreign literature is only equalled by their ignorance of their own. Hence perpetual carelessness and blundering in the most ordinary sentences – hence bombast and obscurities, and a general want of style and poverty of English, pitiable enough to contemplate. Doctor Johnson, indeed, said that “every newspaper was now written in a good style,” but it was after a long training in the school of Addison, Swift, Dryden, Pope, and of the Doctor himself. All these masters are now felt to be out of place, and the spasmodic, the turgid, the quaint, or the silly style, each taken from its most popular exponent, serves the purpose. But, although the scholarship survives, the race survives. “Time was that when the brains were out the men would die,” but that time has long passed away, and a man without brains is as lively as ever. Bad, too, as Jacob Tonson undoubtedly was, we have in these days fallen upon a worse set of publishers. There was an assumption of learning at least in the books that came from “Curll’s lewd press or Tonson’s rubric post,” but are clean abandoned now by the “classic muse” in the presses from which we are about to quote. Certainly we do not desire that quotations should lie all about an article like the top dressing on a field, or, to quote Mr Sneer in the Critic, “like lumps of marl in a barren ground, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize;” but we do wish to feel the presence of scholarship, and to meet, at least occasionally, with a thought. Fifty or even seventy years ago, the issue of works of fiction, as well as of religion and history, in periodical parts, was very well known. The sale was no doubt circumscribed because of the weight of material; but the country bookseller, by the aid of the slow wagon, helped the London publisher to dispose of his wares, just as now, when both are aided by the railways. But these effusions, to which a temporary vitality had been given by the success of the novels of Mrs. Radcliff and the Minerva Press school, soon died out. Of what kind they were, it is hardly worth while to inquire. Mrs Aphra Behn had set her mark upon their predecessors, the crop of which was rank, filthy and lascivious. Mrs Behn’s plays were not of the cleanest. The stage, how loosely does Astoa tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed – Says Pope, and their titles may sometimes tell us what we may expect from their contents. But, as Lady Wortley Montagu, Sir Walter Scott’s grandmother, and other ladies will witness, bad as they were, they used to be read aloud in a circle of young ladies, and apparently relished and remembered. Hence, no doubt, the lingering prejudice and hatred against works of fiction – feelings which are slowly dying out, but are yet in some families in full force. Their badness and ingrained viciousness soon called for their banishment, and in a short time young people were ashamed to be seen reading them. “Here, my dear Lucy,” cries Lydia Languish, “hide these books. Quick, quick; fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet, throw Roderick Random into the closet, put the Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man, thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa, and there, put The Man of Feeling into your pocket.” Containing such fruit, it was no wonder that a circulating library was stigmatized as an “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,” or that novels and their authors were both hated and despised. The blood and thunder romances, and the haunted castle school which Horace Walpole introduced, drove away these; and the advent of Sir Walter Scott brought the historical novel into fashion, and redeemed the whole series of fiction, but also seems entirely to have stamped out the novels in numbers, which the followers of the Della Cruscan school still indulged in. Consequently, when Mr Dickens first began to publish the Pickwick Papers in monthly parts, it was regarded as a novelty – an experiment, indeed; and the fact that novels had been issued in that form years ago, seemed to have been quite forgotten. If the upper classes of society had become tired of the Minerva Press school, it is evident that there were lower strata into which ghosts, murders, and vampires could yet penetrate. About twenty years ago, Mr Edward Lloyd, of Salisbury Square, the proprietor of a paper afterwards edited by Douglas Jerrold, marking the success of Dickens’ shilling numbers, flooded the town with a succession of penny-number novels, especially adapted for the working classes. There was Ela, the Outcast; Ada the Betrayed, or the Murder at the Old Smithy; Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood; The Old Ferry House; and The String of Pearls, a blood-thirsty novel, the principal character of which, a barber of Fleet Street, contrives to cut the throats of his customers and turn them down a trap-door, whence they issue in the shape of mutton pies of great savouriness and celebrity. Of course, with these horrors – some of them described with a rough power by a more celebrated author, who tried his ‘prentice hand on them – there was a regular flood of Jack Shephards, Blueskins, Jonathon Wilds, Claude Duvals, and pirates and robbers without number. The game, indeed, seems begun with a Penny Pickwick, of course a rank copy of Boz’s celebrated work, and issued at the same time. This, the publishers of Mr. Dickens, we believe, tried to stop by an injunction; but as the grossness of the copy was perfectly apparent, as no one could doubt that the issue was at least colourably different, since one came out monthly, price one shilling, and the other weekly at one penny, the sages of the law held that the piracy did not interfere with the original work, and it was not suppressed. At any rate, it ran on till its attractions ceased, or its readers got tired of the issue, when the tale was wound up in a moderately thick volume.

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber

There have been a couple of excellent scholarly editions of Sweeney Todd in recent years. Wordsworth Editions recently published its 3rd edition of the text with a new introduction by Penny Bloods expert, Dick Collins, and Robert L. Mack edited the Oxford University Press edition in 2007.

Sweeney first appeared in The String of Pearls: A Romance, which was serialised in Edward Lloyd's The People's Periodical and Family Library in 18 weekly parts in 1846-7. A much expanded version was published in book form in 1850 by Lloyd and subtitled 'The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance'. Charles Fox published a celebrated version as Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street in about 1880, which was much reprinted. Above is an ad for it in Fox's Boy's Leisure Hour from 1888.

Melbourne book dealer John P. Quaine, who I've mentioned several times before, was a Sweeney expert, and, according to his obituary, owned several copies of the Fox version. He also wrote a radio play version in 1935 which was published in The Collector's Miscellany between May and December 1935.

The following article appeared in the Melbourne Argus on Saturday 8 July 1950, and was clearly influenced by Quaine, incorporating a couple of his inventions such as Sawney Bean, The Man-eater of Midlothian. Recent research has shown that James Malcolm Rymer, not Thomas Peckett Prest, was responsible for The String of Pearls.

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!
By John Drake

Devaluation of the pound and demands from American book collectors, have turned the shilling shockers of the 19th century into prized possessions of 20th century bibliophiles.

In the last year British book dealers have watched with delight while the price of a bound Sweeney Todd, in good condition, has risen from about £25 to over £35.

Destruction of many 19th century blood and thunder magazines by people ignorant of their rarity, and the activities of collectors with a nostalgic yearning for the full-blooded fiction of the Victorian era, have all combined to force up the prices.

Sweeney Todd, Springheel Jack, The Blue Dwarf, and a hundred other characters, first appeared in weekly and bi-weekly instalments known as "penny parts" or "penny bloods." Periodically they were issued in collected form as "shilling shockers."

The 19th century shockers were created to satisfy the desires of the huge new reading public which sprang to life with the spread of literacy through England at the beginning of the century.
First story form to appear was the Gothic shocker.

Based on the framework constructed in such pure Gothic shockers as Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and Ann Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," all Gothic shockers were set in huge castles and monasteries of the architectural style whose name they took.

These huge buildings almost invariably possessed a wing which, although closed down and never used by the owners, teemed with strange and dreadful life after dark. In the cobwebbed, dusty halls, the great organs played wild and terrible music on stormy nights, and behind the tattered curtains burnt flickering red lights.

And just as invariably the hero of the Gothic shocker entered the closed down wing to chase a pet dog, or track down the sounds of a child's weeping, and spent the rest of the novel heartily regretting his curiosity.

Typical of Gothic shockers were "Geralda the Nun," "The Black Monk," "Varney the Vampire," or "The Feast of Blood," "The Ranger of the Tomb," and "The Secret of the Grey Turrets."
One of the earliest breakaways from the rigid style of the Gothic shocker was "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

Sweeney's line of business, of course, was supplying human flesh for the manufacture of veal pies, and he was the most successful of all the characters ever created in popular thriller literature.

From his first appearance in a novel with so mild a title as "A String of Pearls" in 1840, until the shocker's popularity began to wane around 1900, Sweeney appeared again and again in stories based on cannibalism.

For half a century theatrical companies played Sweeney Todd to packed houses, and for half a century no stage carpenter thought himself a master of his craft unless he could make a barber's chair fitted to drop through the floor of the stage.

It is possible that Sweeney Todd was modelled on Sawney Bean, who was tried and executed for cannibalism in Scotland in the 13th century. Sawney Bean's exploits were retailed at one time in a shocker titled "Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian."

More probably he was based on a French barber in whose cellars 300 skulls were found shortly after the French Revolution. After the discovery of the skulls neighbours realised that, although the barber's next door neighbour made the finest veal pies in Paris, nobody had ever seen meat delivered to his door.

Sweeney was the creation, on his first appearance, of one Thomas Peckett Prest, who had already won fame among penny blood readers for his stories "The Maniac Father," "The Victims of Seduction," "Vice and its Victims," and "Phoebe the Peasant's Daughter."

Sweeney was "a long, low-jointed, ill-put-together sort of fellow, with an immense mouth, and such huge hands and feet that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and what was more wonderful, considering his trade, there never was such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd's. We know not what to compare it to; probably it came close to what one may suppose to be the appearance of a thick-set hedge in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled."

Sweeney also had a laugh which was so horrible that "people had been known to look up to the ceiling, then on the floor and all around them, to know from whence it had come, scarcely supposing it possible that it proceeded from mortal lips."

Sweeney's shop was in Fleet Street, by St. Dunstan's Church. On the other side of the church "was Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, which could be reached from Sweeney's cellars by means of underground passages.

Mr. Lovett's pies were famed for miles around, and were particularly esteemed by members of the legal profession.

"There was about them a flavour never surpassed and rarely equalled; the paste was of the most delicate construction and impregnated with the aroma of a delicious gravy that defied description. Then the small portions of meat which they contained were so tender, and the fat and lean so artistically mixed up, that to eat one of Lovett's pies was such a provocative to eat another that many persons who came to lunch stayed to dine, wasting more than an hour perhaps of precious time, and endangering (who knows to the contrary?) the success of some law suit thereby."

But while Mrs. Lovett's customers slavered over her supreme pies, industrial unrest was brewing below stairs.

The pieman who worked in her underground bakehouse was becoming dissatisfied with his working conditions. He was allowed to eat as many pies as he wanted, and he was housed and clothed, but he was never permitted to leave his dungeon. Nor did he ever see the supplies for his piemaking arrive. While he slept fresh supplies of meat mysteriously appeared in the room.
One morning he found a sheet of paper on the floor. On it was written: "You are getting dissatisfied, and therefore it becomes necessary to explain to you your real position, which is simply this: you arc a prisoner, and were such from the first moment that you set foot where you now are ... it is sufficient to inform you that so long as you continue to make pies you will be safe, but if you refuse, then the first time you arc caught sleeping your throat will be cut."
As he finished reading the threatening note a trapdoor above his head opened and Sweeney Todd's face appeared.

"Make pies,"advised Sweeney Todd. "Eat them and be happy. How many a man would envy your position - withdrawn from the struggles of existence, amply provided with board and lodging, and engaged in a pleasant and delightful occupation; it is astonishing how you can be dissatisfied."

But, not the slightest bit cowed by Sweeney's menaces, the pieman broke through a barred door at the back of the bakehouse, and in an instant discovered the source of the piemeat in an adjoining cellar.

The climax of the story finds Mrs. Lovett laboriously winding a fresh batch of pies up on a service lift from her underground kitchen, spurning offers of assistance, but tiring rapidly with the labour of hauling up an unusually heavy batch of pies.

"How the waggish young lawyers' clerks laughed as they smacked their lips and sucked in all the golopshious gravy of the pies, which; by the way, appeared to be all delicious: veal that time, and Mrs. Lovett worked the handle of the machine all the more vigorously that she was a little angered with the officious stranger. What an unusual trouble it seemed to be to wind up those forthcoming hundred pies! How she toiled and how the people waited, but at length there came up the savoury steam, and then the tops of the pie's were visible."

On top of the pics, of course, was sitting the young cook from the cellar.

In the midst of dead silence from the astounded crowd he announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but truth is beautiful ¡it all times, and I have to state that Mrs. Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!"

"How the throng of persons recoiled! What a roar of agony and dismay there was! How frightfully sick about 40 lawyers' clerks became all at once . . .!"

Mrs. Lovett collapsed and died of shock, and of the effects of poison which Sweeney, who had made his pile and wanted to get out of the business, had put in her brandy.

Sweeney himself was arrested and later hanged.

Edward Lloyd in Harper's Magazine

Here is an extract from an early article on ‘King of Bloods’ Edward Lloyd from Harper’s Magazine, vol. 64, 1882. The writer observes “Mr. Lloyd's story has never been quite exactly told,” and that still holds true. No mention is made of Lloyd’s early publishing ventures into Penny Bloods - not a respectable past for a successful newspaper tycoon. The approximately 200 Bloods that he published between 1836 and 1856 include such celebrated titles as James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and The String of Pearls and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Dickens’ imitations.

"After inquiring for Mr. Lloyd at the palatial offices of The Daily Chronicle, I was directed to 12 Salisbury Court, and there in an unpretentious little room I found Mr. Edward Lloyd, a hale, hearty, middle-aged, florid-complexioned, white-haired gentleman. He introduced me to his son, a stalwart young fellow, who was amused at the surprise I expressed at not finding the head of the firm a tottering old gentleman of the aspect usually thought characteristic of Father Time and the venerable Parr. Mr. Lloyd is old enough to have originated the cheap press, and young enough to be vigorously occupied in establishing the newest daily paper. Responding to a remark about the literary interest of the locality in which I found him, he said, "This house use was Richardson's printing-office; in this room he wrote Pamela, and here Oliver Goldsmith acted as his reader.” The old familiar story: you are treading on historic ground every foot you move in London, historic not in a mere antiquarian sense, nor in the narrow meaning of age being historic, but in the breadth of human interest and universal fame. There is not a court hereabouts but it is linked with the history of all that is great and glorious in English letters, from Shakspeare to Hood, from Fielding to Thackeray, from Caxton, the first printer, to his great successors, and from The English Mercurie to The Daily News. ''I can show you Richardson's lease of these very premises," said Mr. Lloyd presently, and turning over the deeds which convey to him a large extent of the local freeholds (now strangely connected by passages and subways from Salisbury Court to Whitefriars), he handed me the parchment. It was a lease dated 30th May, 1770, from Mrs. Jennings to Mr. Richardson, the printer-novelist's signature a bolder one than would seem characteristic of the gentle tediousness of Pamela. Mr. Lloyd's freeholds and leaseholds are a curious mixture of properties, extending into Whitefriars, under streets and over streets, and they are all devoted to the mechanical requirements of Lloyd's Newspaper and The Daily Chronicle. The very latest inventions in the generation and use of steam, the newest ideas of Hoe in the way of printing, are pressed into the service of these two papers. Colonel Hoe is Mr. Lloyd's ideal machinist; Mr. Lloyd is Colonel Hoe's ideal newspaper proprietor.

"Have you ever been to America?” I asked

"No; I had once made up my mind to go, and had fixed upon the ship," Mr. Lloyd answered ‑ "the Arctic, I think she was called. Douglas Jerrold was against my going, and persuaded me all he could not to venture upon it. 'But,' said he, 'if you must go, give this play into Jim Wallack's own hands.' He gave me the manuscript of The Rent Day, which had been produced at Drury Lane. The object of my going was to see Hoe, and arrange for two machines on certain revised terms, so that if one broke clown, I should have another to fall back upon. Just before the time for sailing I received a letter from Hoe telling me that I could have just all I wanted. In consequence of that letter, I did not go. The ship I was booked for went to the bottom."
Mr. Lloyd's story has never been quite exactly told. Briefly it is this. As early as 1829, when he was only fourteen, he was strongly imbued with Liberal opinions, and with the idea of starting a "free and independent newspaper" for their advocacy. There was a fourpenny stamp duty on each paper, and in due time Edward Lloyd labored hard with others in the direction of its reduction. He started a newspaper, and issued it without a government stamp; so likewise did other London printers; but after a short struggle they succumbed to legal proceedings for their suppression. In order to keep the question of unstamped papers before the public, Mr. Lloyd started a monthly unstamped journal, believing he could legally issue such a publication; but the Stamp‑office authorities stifled it with crushing promptitude, though it turned out afterward that he was within the law, Mr. Charles Dickens having, at a later date, issued a monthly paper on similar lines. In September, 1842, Mr. Lloyd published Lloyd's Penny Illustrated Newspaper, consisting chiefly of reviews of books, notices of theatres, and literary selections, thus keeping, as he thought, just outside the pale of what the law designated a newspaper. Within three months the Stamp‑office discovered what they regarded as a few lines of news in the literature of the journal, and they gave the proprietor notice that he must either stamp his paper or stop it. He chose the former course, and continued the paper at twopence until January, 1843, when he enlarged it to eight pages of five columns each (about the size of an eight-page Echo), called it Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper, and charged two-pence‑halfpenny for it. During the same year he again increased its size, and sold it at threepence. At this time the general price of newspapers was sixpence, and they carried a penny stamp duty. Mr. Lloyd's innovation met with the determined opposition of the news agents. They one and all refused to sell the paper unless the owner allowed them the same profit per sheet which they obtained on the sixpenny journals. An offer of thirty per cent. was scoffed at, and the trade entered into a conspiracy to put down the three-penny weekly. The sale was considerably retarded by this opposition, but Lloyd pushed it by advertisement and otherwise, and the excellence and cheapness of the newspaper were attractions the trade could not annihilate. One of Lloyd's methods of making it known was ingenious, not to say daring. He had a stamping machine constructed for embossing pennies with the name and price of his journal, and the fact that it could be obtained "post free." The announcement was made in a neat circle round the coin on both sides. The machine turned out two hundred and fifty an hour, and Lloyd used up all the pennies he could lay his hands on. The Times drew attention to the defacement of his Majesty's coinage, and thus gave the paper a cheap and important advertisement. Parliament passed an act against the mutilation of the currency. The affair helped to make the threepenny paper known, and in spite of "the Trade," which continued to oppose it, holding meetings and combining against it in every way, it progressed in circulation and influence. From a sale of 33,000 in 1848, it rose year by year to 90,000 a week in 1853. Two years later than this, Lloyd had lived to see the most ardent desire of his life accomplished the passing of an act abolishing the stamp duty, and the establishment of a really free and unfettered press. From this period dates the enormous success of Lloyd's Newspaper. The question of production was tile next serious question. Mr. Lloyd put himself in communication with Messrs. Hoe and Co., of New York, which led to his introduction of their rotary printing-machine. The success of this new invention, exemplified in Lloyd's offices, elicited a general acknowledgment of its superiority over all others, and "the Hoe" was at once adopted, not only in the chief London offices, but by the leading newspaper proprietors of the country, and in Ireland and Scotland. Wherever there was a journal with a large circulation, there "the Hoe" became a necessity."