The penny dreadful was what I intended to write about, and perhaps I will. The serious side of me is appalled, of course, since how can I write about the penny dreadful when James Comey, the former director of the FBI just got indicted by the Justice Department? I should tell you, at least, that Comey went before a senate committee and told the truth. The Russians had done everything they could to help Trump win the election, and that’s just what we know.
It's just like my drinking was: a lot worse than you can imagine. So if we know that Putin set up a full-time shop in St. Petersburg to peddle fake news (sorry, but yeah) to gullible conservatives in 2015, you can be sure he did a lot more that we don’t know about.
I remember the first time I realized that the president had been…compromised? Breached? What’s the word for a guy who is being blackmailed and has to get elected to save his skin?
Even worse, what’s the word for a guy who knows that the Russians have the dirt on him, but he doesn’t know what dirt it is? There being a lot of dirt, of course, and the Epstein files (which may or not be in Putin’s top right-hand desk drawer) are perhaps the least of it.
The idea that the president was compromised—that he was under the thumb to a large if not a complete extent of the Russians—was utterly jarring. I stood still in the living room in 2015, after the news of the Steele Dossier came out, and pondered if it was true. The sensational tidbit, of course, was the golden showers scene that Trump allegedly enjoyed with the two prostitutes in the room where Barrack and Michele Obama had slept.
Some stuff I believe because it’s entirely believable. Some stuff I believe because it’s not believable—it’s so unbelievable that who would cook it up? And some stuff I believe because it fits: Trump is traumatically insecure, his weak ego demands that others be humiliated, and sex is dirty for him (as it is for me, because we both grew up in the fifties and early sixties). Whether the story is true or not misses the point. It’s the old story of needing to ask if a woman is a lady: she’s not, by definition, because if you need to ask the question, you already have your answer.
Nobody, by the way, has ever had to ask whether either of the Bush presidents or Obama himself were diddling anyone on the side. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, on the other hand….
So this is serious, more serious by far than the penny dreadful. The penny dreadful is absolutely ridiculous and I am not going to say another word about it. I will devote myself to serious topics, today.
It’s a shame, really, since who could not love the dreadful? And I was going to say something about the book, which is more important than golden showers and senate committees.
You may scoff at the penny dreadful, of course, and if so, you’re in excellent company. Everybody sneers at the dreadful, which I will tell you (finally) is not much of a book at all. It’s a couple of sections of eight or sixteen pages each sewn crudely together, with no cover but a slightly thicker paper (for me, cardstock) with a cheap illustration. The whole affair is slipshod and cheap, as it had to be since the dreadful cost, as you can very well imagine, a penny.
It was trash, in many instances, but what a wonderful thing trash is! Trash (without sounding too much like John Steinbeck) is the mark of high civilization. In the slums of Bombay or Haiti, there’s no trash. They make musical instruments out of oil drums and coke cans; they build houses out of packing crates. You’ve got to be seriously well off to throw stuff away.
So the penny dreadful occupies a very serious place (he said flippantly) in the history of the book. The price of paper, which had been very expensive but was at least cheaper than raising and killing calves for parchment, had plummeted. True, the paper was lousy quality, but nobody ever intended the dreadful to be around for longer than a week or two. Who cared?
So paper was cheap, and guess what? Everybody had learned to read, by the time the dreadful rolled around, which was great. Literacy rates in the 18th and 19th century were at last out of the single digits, though far from 100%. Still, the days of producing elaborate, jeweled tomes for the elite and the entitled were not over but…well, shared, perhaps. Not everybody could afford to buy this (myself included):
That, of course, would cost a pretty penny.
We can all agree that the book above demands respect; you should probably go to confession before you touch it. But the dreadful gloried in its cheapness. It invited the dirtiest hands and the filthiest minds to enjoy it. Its purpose was amusement, not instruction—though in fact the dreadful could concern itself with religious instruction and educational material as well. But mention the penny dreadful, and everybody will immediately see this, in their mind’s eye:
I utterly love this, and in fact, I utterly need this. Because I can’t spend the morning horrified by a president who is trying to put his political enemy (meaning a guy who told the truth) in jail. It’s Friday, and I want to make it into Saturday sober.
The penny dreadful came along with the rise of the literate population, and was helped by the availability of cheap paper. But it was also helped by the rise of peddlers, who walked the countryside selling knives and pins and pots and (if he had some room in his bag) cheap stuff for people to read. The chapbook, which is the dreadful’s more respectable elder brother, was also carried around by peddlers. Both the penny dreadful and the chapbook were, as the name implies, cheap. In fact, the “chap” in chapbook is derived from the old English cēap which, yes, means cheap.
The book, in short, has been evolving with us over time. When monks were in charge of things, we got the bejeweled, illuminated manuscripts which we marvel at (and walk past) today. When the economy got perking, and ordinary folk started reading, we got the penny dreadful and the chapbook.
Now we have the internet, which everybody (including Meryl Streep) thinks is going to kill the book.
Will it?
I have no idea. But I couldn’t make books, nowadays, without the internet. I wouldn’t even knowabout the chapbook or the penny dreadful without the internet. I couldn’t decide, as I have just decided, to download the tale of Varney the Vampire.
Gotta go—my fingers are itching!
