In the 1840s, a publisher named Edward Lloyd ran an operation out of Salisbury Square in London that would have made a modern content farm blush. His writers churned out penny serials at industrial speed: knockoff Dickens novels with titles like Oliver Twiss and Nickelas Nicklebery, pirate adventures, highwayman romances, and Gothic horror stories sold for a single penny per eight-page installment. The knockoffs sold up to 50,000 copies per week, likely outnumbering Dickens’ originals. When Dickens’ publishers sued Lloyd over his Pickwick knockoff for “fraudulent imitation,” they lost.
Lloyd’s penny profits eventually funded something more respectable: Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, which in 1896 became the first British paper to sell over a million copies. But the cheap fiction that built his empire created something more lasting than any newspaper. It created the modern horror genre.
The term for these publications shifted over the decades. In the 1830s and 1840s, when the audience was adult and working-class, they were called “penny bloods.” By the 1860s, as the readership skewed younger, they became “penny dreadfuls.” The establishment hated them. Journalist Francis Hitchman called them “the literature of rascaldom.” Courts blamed them for juvenile crime. One thirteen-year-old boy in Plaistow was declared “a homicidal maniac under the influence of pernicious literature” after police found over a hundred penny dreadfuls in his house. Sound familiar? The same argument would be recycled for comic books in the 1950s, video games in the 1990s, and social media today.
What the moral guardians missed, or chose to ignore, is that these disreputable little publications invented some of the most enduring characters in horror fiction.
The Monsters That Came from the Gutter
The most important penny dreadful ever published was Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, which ran in 109 weekly installments from 1845 to 1847 under Edward Lloyd’s imprint. The collected edition runs to 876 double-columned pages, 232 chapters, approximately 667,000 words. Its authorship is disputed between James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (Lloyd’s policy was to keep authors anonymous), but its influence is not disputed at all.
Varney invented the vampire as we know it. Before this serial, vampires in fiction were vague, ghostly presences. Varney gave the vampire fangs (“with a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth”), the signature two-puncture bite mark on the neck, hypnotic power over victims, superhuman strength, and the ability to be healed by moonlight. Most significantly, Varney is a reluctant monster, someone who despises his own nature but cannot escape it. That archetype, the sympathetic vampire who suffers under his own curse, runs in a direct line from this penny serial to Anne Rice’s Louis, Joss Whedon’s Angel, and every brooding bloodsucker since.
Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, fifty years later. The tropes he used, the aristocratic predator, the neck bite, the hypnotic seduction, the night-stalking figure who passes among humans, all of them were already established in a publication that cost a penny and was printed on cheap wood pulp paper.
Then there was The String of Pearls, published in Lloyd’s People’s Periodical in 18 weekly parts from November 1846 to March 1847. It introduced Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. A playwright named George Dibdin Pitt adapted it for the stage before the serial had even finished running. Pitt added the mechanical barber’s chair that flipped victims into the basement. From there, the character traveled through 130 years of theatrical adaptations until Christopher Bond gave Todd a backstory and revenge motive in 1973, Stephen Sondheim turned it into a Tony-winning musical in 1979, and Tim Burton filmed it with Johnny Depp in 2007.
And there was Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure from genuine urban legend (women in Kensington and Hammersmith reported being attacked by a cloaked creature with clawed hands and eyes like “red balls of fire” in 1837-1838) who was picked up by penny dreadful writers and serialized into a costumed avenger. A villain in early serials, he evolved by the 1900s into something like a proto-superhero: a figure who leaps across rooftops and punishes the wicked.
These weren’t literary exercises. They were mass entertainment produced at speed for a working-class audience that the publishing establishment considered beneath notice. By the 1860s, over a million boys’ periodicals were selling per week. And the characters born in those cheap pages, the sympathetic vampire, the serial killer hiding in plain sight, the costumed vigilante, outlived every respectable novel published in the same decade.
What John Logan Built
In 2014, Showtime premiered a television series called Penny Dreadful that took the name and the spirit of those Victorian publications and turned them into something no one expected: the best Gothic horror show ever made.
The creator was John Logan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Gladiator, The Aviator, Hugo, Skyfall) whose play Red, about the painter Mark Rothko, won six Tony Awards in 2010 including Best Play. Logan wrote 24 of the show’s 27 episodes across three seasons, with Andrew Hinderaker and Krysty Wilson-Cairns contributing scripts in Season 3. That level of single-author control is almost unheard of in television. It reflects a playwright’s instinct: one voice controlling nearly every word.
Logan has said the show was born from rereading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and personally identifying with the monster. As a gay man, he said, he “knew what it was like not to feel socially acceptable.” That identification shapes the entire series. Every character in Penny Dreadful is, in one way or another, a creature who doesn’t fit: too strange, too dangerous, too broken for the world they inhabit.
The production was filmed at Ardmore Studios in County Wicklow, Ireland, with Dublin locations (Dublin Castle, King’s Inns, Kilruddery House, Powerscourt Estate) standing in for Victorian London. Ireland was chosen partly for its Section 481 tax incentives and partly because J.A. Bayona, who directed the first two episodes, wanted the particular quality of Irish light. Sam Mendes served as executive producer but was pulled away to direct Spectre. Production designer Jonathan McKinstry spent over a million dollars at Irish auction houses sourcing period-authentic props. Costume designer Gabriella Pescucci, an Oscar winner for The Age of Innocence, had each costume quadrupled so bloody scenes could be reshot without delay.
Abel Korzeniowski composed the score, which won a BAFTA Television Craft Award. That score deserves particular attention. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of television music in recent memory: sweeping, romantic, full of longing. It sounds like what the inside of a Victorian séance room feels like.
A Shared Universe of Monsters
The show’s premise is deceptively simple: what if the characters from the great Victorian Gothic novels all existed in the same London, at the same time?
So you get Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), reimagined as a young, lonely, opium-touched doctor who creates not one but three creatures over the course of the series. His first creation, the Creature (Rory Kinnear), is the show’s secret weapon. Unlike the shambling, mute brute of the 1931 Boris Karloff film, Kinnear’s Creature is eloquent, well-read, and devastatingly articulate, exactly as Mary Shelley wrote him in 1818. The Creature in the novel educates himself by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. He speaks fluent English. He is philosophical, lonely, and furious at his creator for abandoning him. The show preserves all of this. Den of Geek called it “the most faithful rendering of Shelley’s creature ever onscreen.”
The Creature is given the name “Caliban” (from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) by his employer at the Grand Guignol theatre, then later chooses the name “John Clare” after the real English poet (1793-1864) who was known as “the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” and spent decades in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he wrote his most famous poem, “I Am.” The Creature identifies with Clare because Clare “felt a singular affinity with the outcasts and the unloved.” It’s a perfect choice. Both figures exist on the margins of a society that has no place for them.
You get Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), already immortal, preserving Oscar Wilde’s core concept (the hidden portrait that absorbs his sins) while adding supernatural healing. You get Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), an American gunslinger whose real name turns out to be Ethan Lawrence Talbot, a reference to Larry Talbot from Universal’s 1941 Wolf Man. You get Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), an aging explorer modeled on Richard Francis Burton, searching for his daughter who has been taken by vampires.
And at the center of everything, you get Vanessa Ives.
Eva Green and the Performance of the Decade
There is no way to talk about Penny Dreadful without talking about Eva Green’s performance as Vanessa Ives, because the show simply would not exist without it. Vanessa is an original creation, not drawn from any single literary source. She is a woman who has been touched by something vast and dark since childhood, pursued by forces that want to claim her, and she fights them with a combination of Catholic faith, raw fury, and something that might be called grace under supernatural pressure.
The standout scenes are legendary. In the second episode of Season 1 (“Séance”), Vanessa attends a parlor séance that goes catastrophically wrong. Green performs an unbroken possession sequence lasting eight to ten minutes, her body contorting, her voice shifting between Vanessa and whatever has seized her, while the other actors can only watch. It is one of the most extraordinary scenes in the history of horror television.
In Season 1, Episode 7 (“Possession”), roughly 75 percent of the episode is Green’s performance. Vanessa is possessed and confined to her bed while the other characters attempt to save her. The episode carries an 8.7 rating on IMDb.
But the crown jewel is Season 3, Episode 4 (“A Blade of Grass”), the highest-rated episode of the entire series at 9.1 on IMDb. It’s essentially a two-hander: Vanessa in a padded cell, attended only by an orderly played by Rory Kinnear (in a dual role separate from the Creature). The episode peels back Vanessa’s past, her time in an asylum, through two performances of such intensity that the rest of the show’s considerable spectacle becomes almost unnecessary.
Green was nominated for a Golden Globe and won the Fangoria Chainsaw Award. She was, infamously, never nominated for an Emmy. Whether this says more about the Emmys or about the genre bias that still haunts horror is an open question.
The Books Behind the Show
Part of what makes Penny Dreadful so rich is that it doesn’t just borrow names from Victorian literature. It actually engages with the source material in ways that reward readers.
Frankenstein (1818): Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she began writing it during the “Year Without a Summer” at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in 1816. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year had filled the atmosphere with ash, making the summer the coldest in recorded European history. Trapped indoors by incessant rain, Shelley, her future husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori told ghost stories to pass the time. Byron proposed they each write one. Shelley’s became the foundational text of science fiction and horror. Polidori took a fragment Byron had started and abandoned, developing it into The Vampyre (1819), the first modern vampire story in English, predating even Varney by twenty-six years.
The show preserves Shelley’s most radical idea: that the real monster is not the Creature but the creator who abandons him. Victor Frankenstein in the show is sympathetic but ultimately selfish, driven by intellectual vanity rather than genuine compassion. The Creature’s rage is earned.
Dracula (1897): Bram Stoker spent seven years developing his novel, producing over a hundred pages of research notes. The working title was The Un-Dead, and the villain was originally called “Count Wampyr.” On 8 August 1890, while staying at a guesthouse in Whitby, Yorkshire, Stoker found a book in the public library: William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), which mentioned a fifteenth-century prince called “Dracula.” He replaced “Wampyr” with the name that would become immortal. Those research notes are now at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, acquired in 1970 and first examined by scholars Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in 1972.
The show takes a radical approach to Dracula. He doesn’t appear as the Eastern European aristocrat of Stoker’s novel. Instead, he’s reimagined as the brother of Lucifer, walking in daylight under the alias “Dr. Alexander Sweet,” a zoologist at the Natural History Museum. His goal isn’t blood and conquest but winning the love of Vanessa Ives, whom the show identifies as his eternal counterpart. It’s a theological reimagining that owes more to Milton than to Stoker.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890): Oscar Wilde’s novel was commissioned at a dinner at the Langham Hotel on 30 August 1889, where the editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine also commissioned Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Sign of the Four. When Dorian Gray was published, the Daily Chronicle called it “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents.” WHSmith pulled all copies from its bookstalls. Five years later, passages from the novel were read aloud at Wilde’s trial as evidence of “a certain tendency.” The book became a weapon used to destroy its own author.
The show uses Dorian as something more subtle than a villain or a hero. Carney’s Dorian is melancholic, restless, bored by immortality. He’s a catalyst who moves through other characters’ stories, drawn to intensity because he can no longer feel anything on his own.
Poetry as Architecture
One of the show’s most distinctive choices is its systematic use of English Romantic poetry, not as decoration but as structural material. Characters quote Keats, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Clare at moments of emotional extremity, and the poems function as character markers.
The key poem is John Clare’s “I Am,” written during his decades in the asylum. In Season 2, Episode 5 (“Above the Vaulted Sky”), Vanessa and the Creature recite it together in a homeless shelter. The poem’s meditation on isolation, identity, and longing for peace mirrors both characters’ emotional states so precisely that the scene becomes one of the most moving in the entire series.
The series ends with the Creature reciting Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” over Vanessa’s freshly dug grave. It is the most literate ending in television horror, and it works because the show has earned it. “All sad people like poetry,” a character says earlier in the series. It sounds like a throwaway line. It turns out to be the show’s thesis.
Victorian London as the Real Monster
The show’s London is not just a backdrop. It’s a functioning ecosystem of privilege and misery that makes the supernatural horrors feel almost redundant.
By the 1890s, London was the largest city in the world, the capital of an empire governing a quarter of the globe. Victorian writers “binarized their urban world into zones of light and darkness” where “all the drainpipes and sewers of the metropolis seemed to empty into the East End.” The real East End housed immigrant communities in cramped tenements with overflowing cesspits and inadequate drainage. The first public gas street lighting had appeared on Pall Mall in 1807, but each lamp illuminated only a few feet around its post, leaving pools of darkness between them. A city of four million people, lit by something dimmer than a modern 25-watt bulb.
The show uses this context intelligently. Sir Malcolm Murray’s wealth comes from colonial exploration in Africa, and the show doesn’t flinch from the violence that funded it. His servant Sembene (Danny Sapani) carries his own traumatic past connected to the slave trade. The Creature finds work in a wax museum on the margins of respectable society. Brona Croft (Billie Piper), an Irish immigrant dying of consumption, sells her body to survive. These are not subplots. They are the show’s argument that the real horrors of Victorian London were human, and that the supernatural monsters are, in a sense, more honest about what they are.
The séance culture that features so prominently in the show was historically real. The Society for Psychical Research was founded on 20 February 1882, with Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick as its first president. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was established in 1888. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society was active throughout the period. The Victorians were genuinely obsessed with penetrating the veil between the living and the dead. The show’s Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale, knighted in 2019 and considered one of the greatest living stage actors) works at the British Museum translating hieroglyphs that turn out to contain a prophecy about the end of the world. This is not far from what real Victorian Egyptologists believed they were doing.
The Ending, and What It Cost
Penny Dreadful ran for three seasons, 27 episodes, from 2014 to 2016. The critical reception improved with each season: 81% on Rotten Tomatoes for Season 1, 100% for Season 2, 93% for Season 3. It won three BAFTAs, with thirteen Emmy nominations (no wins, a fact that says more about the Emmys than the show).
The ending is the one thing fans still argue about. In the Season 3 finale (“The Blessed Dark,” 19 June 2016), Vanessa dies. Ethan kills her at her request, as an act of mercy, to prevent the darkness that pursues her from consuming the world. Logan claims he knew during Season 2 that this would be the ending, and that continuing without Vanessa would be “an act of bad faith.” Showtime president David Nevins said they deliberately kept the ending secret to avoid spoilers.
Not everyone bought it. Season 3 introduced Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) and Catriona Hartdegen (Perdita Weeks), characters who felt like setups for future seasons. Jekyll never transforms into Hyde. Bloody Disgusting ran an editorial arguing the three-season plan felt like a post-hoc justification for what was actually a cancellation.
Both readings have merit. What’s undeniable is that the ending, whatever its origins, fits the show’s emotional logic. Penny Dreadful is fundamentally a tragedy about a woman who is too powerful and too dangerous for the world she lives in, and who finds peace only in choosing her own death. It’s not a comfortable ending. It’s not supposed to be.
A spinoff, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, aired in 2020, set in 1938 Los Angeles with no character connections to the original. It was cancelled after one season. The less said, the better.
Why It Matters
Penny Dreadful matters for the same reason the original penny dreadfuls mattered: it took disreputable material and made something genuinely extraordinary out of it. The Victorian publications took horror, crime, and the supernatural and sold them to an audience that respectable culture considered beneath notice. The TV show took horror television, a genre still fighting for critical respect, and produced something that stands alongside the best drama of its era.
The original penny dreadfuls gave us the sympathetic vampire, the serial killer next door, and the costumed vigilante. The TV show gave us Vanessa Ives, one of the great tragic heroines of twenty-first century television, and a version of Frankenstein’s creature that finally does justice to what Mary Shelley actually wrote.
Both versions of Penny Dreadful, the publications and the show, understood something that more respectable forms of entertainment often forget: that horror, when it’s done right, is not about monsters. It’s about what it feels like to be one.
Penny Dreadful is available on Paramount+ (which absorbed Showtime’s library) and various streaming platforms.
By the Author
For fiction set against these traditions: The Vampire: Novel from Bulgaria by Hans Wachenhusen, trans. Rade Kolbas
