Jerry Abershaw, roaring boy of the Kingston road, laughed on the cart to Kennington and finished in chains on his own hill, where the crowd he had terrified picked his bones clean for pipe-stoppers. The Bones on Jerry's Hill. #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon #PennyDreadful

The schoolmaster who buried his friend in a cave, then out-argued the bones at York. Thirteen years and one sentence gave him away. Tonight's dispatch on Eugene Aram. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-schoolmaster-who-knew-too-many #TrueCrime #PennyDreadful #18thCentury

Jack Sheppard had been dead a hundred years and more when the penny serial brought him back — and a valet in Park Lane said it put a murder in his head. Tonight: the housebreaker everyone knew. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-housebreaker-everyone-knew #PennyDreadful

An 1839 Edinburgh penny serial sold Mediterranean terror by instalment - a ship that wore her own name in flames across her stern. Tonight in The Midnight Dispatch. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-demon-ship-off-malta #PennyDreadful

No one in a Holborn inn should ever bear a dead man's face. Tonight's dispatch turns the opening of Reynolds' penny serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London. https://bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/the-likeness-at-the-george-and-blue #VictorianLondon #PennyDreadful

Will they never copy the Devil with a penny? So ran the taunt on Prest's 'Maniac Father' (Lloyd's, c.1842), where a seduced girl's wronged sire turns lunatic and the scaffold darkens the page. A penny bought the shiver. #PennyDreadful #VictorianLondon

Here is the dreadful sold for a penny — 'Black Bess; or, the Knight of the Road,' by Edward Viles (1844): a mare with wings, galloping Dick Turpin from London to York in one night. All legend, sir, and all irresistible. #PennyDreadful #LondonHistory

Tonight's dispatch: the old bargain in the Black Forest — Reynolds's Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, where a stranger comes to the door and the price is two conditions. #PennyDreadful #VictorianLondon

Lloyd's #PennyDreadful, 1846, no. 8 — a barber in Fleet Street who keeps his cellar stairs measured. In 'The String of Pearls' the laugh runs thin, the coins jingle, and a reader counts the steps down. Sixpence buys the shudder. #VictorianLondon