Penny dreadfuls: the Victorian equivalent of video games

In the 1880s and 1890s, penny dreadfuls were blamed for youth violence and suicide. Did they play a part in the grisly murder of a mother by her two sons?

On 17 July 1895, during an exceptionally hot, dry summer, the decomposing body of a woman named Emily Coombes was found in a small terraced house in Plaistow, east London. Her two sons – Robert and Nattie Coombes, aged 13 and 12, respectively – were charged with the murder. Robert said that he had stabbed his mother to death at his brother’s urging. When the police searched the house, they found in the back parlour a collection of “penny dreadfuls”, cheap magazines for boys with titles such as Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea, Buffalo Bill, The Secret of Castle Coucy and Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff. Most were 64‑page pamphlets priced at tuppence, their titles picked out in scarlet and yellow on vividly illustrated covers.

The police submitted the dreadfuls as evidence in the inquest into Emily Coombes’s death, along with a truncheon, a revolver, a smashed cash box, a blood-spattered nightshirt and a knife. When the coroner’s jury delivered its verdict, it drew particular attention to the magazines. “We consider that the Legislature should take some steps to put a stop to the inflammable and shocking literature that is sold, which in our opinion leads to many a dreadful crime being carried out.” “There can’t be any difference of opinion about that,” the coroner agreed.

Continue reading...