Penny Bloods
The Guardian has a feature on ‘penny bloods’ with Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd movie now open in the UK.
The term “penny blood” - first used to describe a popular genre of literature in the first half of the 19th century - originated as a term of abuse. “Bloods”, as one would expect, generally retailed for the affordable price of one penny or just a bit more. They offered inexpensive serial narratives to an emerging audience of (primarily) younger readers for whom even the least expensive of the many novels being sold by booksellers would still have been considered something of a luxury.