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.
Three-volume novels (or "triple-deckers" as they were commonly known) regularly sold for well over £1, and so were available for direct purchase only to readers in upper-middle-class households or above; novels published in two volumes usually cost about 18 shillings, and even single volume novels (typically no more than cheap reprints of earlier publications, or religious novels or tales intended to appeal to very young or very old readers) could still cost as much as five shillings.
The proliferation of circulating libraries in the earliest decades of the 19th century, as well as advances in education (such as Forster's Education Act of 1855), would eventually go some way towards ensuring the development of a larger and more comprehensively literate reading public. Those emerging generations of children who were fortunate enough to receive regular schooling throughout the century gradually benefited from the increased emphasis on a basic education in reading and writing. Industrial advances including the development of the rotary steam printing press, type-setting machines, the use of new types of paper from "esparto" grass (imported from Spain and South America), the possibilities of new paper-making machines, and (eventually) the abolition of the stamp tax on newspapers in 1855 and the duty on paper in 1861, also led to the introduction of new outlets for writers.
The many Mechanics' Institutes and educative periodicals very early in the century had paved the way for the growing literacy of the working classes; from about 1830, however, it became increasingly possible for workers - for those still set apart from the emerging middle class - regularly to purchase and to read "literature" and fiction of whatever sort they chose.
It was in this period, too, that the serialisation of novels became a popular method of publishing fiction. Eventually, serialised novels could be published in three possible formats: in newspapers, within weekly or monthly magazines, or in weekly or monthly "parts". Part issues in loose covers were widely popularised by Charles Dickens early in the period (although his early contemporary William Harrison Ainsworth disdained the form as too low), but publication in these separate monthly parts gradually gave way to magazine serialisation within the pages of larger family and literary magazines as the century progressed. Monthly serials, which generally ran for about 20 numbers, not only encouraged a taste among readers for the tension and suspense entailed by the form, but allowed authors the opportunity to respond to the emerging criticisms of readers even as they wrote their fictions.
Serialising fiction in newspapers had always been the least reputable of the three options available to writers. The widening divide that was perceived to exist between what the increasingly literate public wanted to read and what its self-designated moral and aesthetic guardians felt that it should read was a matter of considerable concern. No small amount of distress was voiced by the larger, established literary community that a new and rapidly expanding "Unknown Public" tended to display what was almost universally regarded as an unwholesome taste for the literature of crime and the underworld.
Yet the affinity of London writers for crime literature, it might be argued, could hardly be looked upon as something altogether new. As early as the 16th century, popular writers such as Thomas Dekker and Robert Greene seemed to delight in exploring the habits and features of the city's underworld; they tried as much as possible to employ the "cant" or low language of thieves themselves, and openly depicted criminal practices, ranging from detailed descriptions of robberies and various forms of "cheating law", to descriptions of the manner in which (for example) certain hidden trapdoors opening onto Fleet Ditch afforded "easy means of getting rid of bodies".
The sustained appetite among Londoners for apparently realistic depictions of the very real criminality that surrounded them would continue to manifest itself throughout the 18th century in works ranging from the fictions of Henry Fielding and the drama of George Lillo, to the earliest versions of what was eventually to become the Newgate Calendar. Alarmists early in the 19th century looked with horror on the representational excesses of the so-called "Newgate novel" - fictions that took as their heroes criminals and highwaymen (a type that flowered briefly in the 1830s in the works of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton); mid-century critics were no less alive to the potential dangers posed by "sensation" novels by the likes of Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Yet from where else did these literary modes or sub-genres arise, if not from the (now respectable) gothic fictions and novels of sentiment and sensibility that had flourished in the latter part of the 18th century? It became increasingly difficult for the moral and aesthetic guardians of the period to distinguish just what was acceptable from what was not.
Side by side with these sub-genres of novelistic fiction grew the even more popular periodical narratives of the penny bloods themselves. The bloods were often dismissed by critics for their supposedly black-and-white characterisation and their highly improbable, melodramatic plots. The form's exaggerated presentation of thrilling and bloodthirsty narratives - often of a specifically criminal nature, frequently "historical" in subject, and almost always set within a pseudo-Gothic landscape of dungeons, prison cells, castles, and wild, abandoned heaths - brought together elements of the earlier traditions of the Gothic novel with features of the morally ambivalent sensation novels, and appealed to a wider audience than would ever openly have acknowledged a stomach for such broadly sensational material. These narratives tended to be written in what has sometimes been characterised as a short-breath, "short-sentenced" style. They were frequently repetitious, and the central narrative was more often than not unapologetically padded with material only marginally related to its ostensible subject, so as to fill literally hundreds of columns.
Until recently, the bloods had never been permitted to play a significant role in the mainstream traditions of canonical English literature. Even today, such periodical literature is often admitted only with great reluctance to have formed an important strand of the narrative traditions in English prose.
Narratives such as The String of Pearls, however, from which emerge such grand and grotesque figures as Sweeney Todd himself, demonstrate that - although they may have been written at great speed (and not infrequently by stables of multiple authors assembled by publishers such as Edward Lloyd, who seems often to have passed any given narrative from one hand to the next, depending upon who happened to be available at the time) - such stories were capable of deep, even profound meaning.
Arising as they did in conditions that facilitated the production of "monodraft" or unrevised manuscripts, the bloods could give voice - and in a manner that any more considered form of writing might eventually have censored - to the untapped psyche of the Fleet Street environment. In the case of Sweeney Todd, certainly, the rapid conception and composition of the blood in which he made his earliest appearance allowed him to assume an enormous burden of significance with reference to both rural and urban anxieties; the barber who so efficiently dispatches his customers and facilitates the process by which their bodies can be turned into succulent veal pies is the embodiment of many a metropolitan nightmare. He is, in fact, a bloody marvel.