Serialization and Story-Telling Illustrations: R.L. Stevenson Window-Shopping for Penny Dreadfuls

Abstract

The following chapter considers the practice of ‘reading’ illustrated serials in shop-windows during the second half of nineteenth-century Britain. It relies on two magazine articles published 15 years apart and retelling events separated by two decades. The first, published in 1873 by children’s author and journalist James Greenwood (1832–1929) in the shilling monthly Saint Paul’s Magazine, is partly a cautionary tale about two lower-class boys and warns against the evils of penny dreadfuls, the cheap illustrated serial literature of the day. The second, published in 1888 in the American monthly Scribner’s, features the autobiographical reminiscences of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) looking back on his childhood readings.