Penny Dreadful - Brona Croft

The Penny Dreadful was a 19th-century publishing phenomenon. These cheap, sensational, highly illustrated stories were very popular with the Victorian public.

 

In the 1830s, increasing literacy and improving technology saw a boom in cheap fiction for the working classes. ‘Penny bloods’ was the original name for the booklets that, in the 1860s, were renamed Penny Dreadfuls and told stories of adventure, initially of pirates and highwaymen, later concentrating on crime and detection.

Penny Dreadfuls were issued weekly, each ‘number’, or episode, was eight (occasionally 16) pages, with a black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the rest, breaking off at the bottom of the final page, even if it was the middle of a sentence.

The bloods were astonishingly successful, creating a vast new readership. Between 1830 and 1850 there were up to 100 publishers of penny-fiction, as well as the many magazines which now wholeheartedly embraced the genre. 

There is some THING within us all.

Penny Dreadful the Showtime show is a powerfully written saga filled with dark mystery and suspense. It lives in a demimonde — a half world between reality and the supernatural — where personal demons from the past can be stronger than vampires, evil spirits and immortal beasts.

Some of literature's most terrifying figures, including Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, Dorian Gray, and iconic figures from the novel Dracula are lurking in the darkest corners of the city. They are joined by a core of original characters in a new narrative filled with alienation and dread.

Brona Croft (Alias Lily Frankenstein) 

Brona Croft is an Irish immigrant working in London as a prostitute. Brona met Ethan Chandler at The Mariner's Inn and they fall in love. Brona's illness (tuberculosis) led Chandler to seek the help of Victor Frankenstein who sped her death in hope to reanimate her to be the bride of the Creature. Brona is revived as Lilly Frankenstein with no memory of her former self. She later regains her memory and leaves Frankenstein for Dorian Gray.

"We are not women who crawl. We are not women who kneel. And for this we will be branded radicals. Revolutionists. Women who are strong, and refuse to be degraded, and choose to protect themselves, are called monsters. That is the world's crime, not ours." - Brona Croft (Lily Frankenstein)