£350
5 pamphlets, 8vo, each pp. 8, stapled in coloured-paper wrappers printed in black. Poor-quality paper toned, wrappers discoloured, pamphlets chipped and torn to edges, Burke and Hare with strip lacking from front wrapper shaving edge of front illustration and ads to inside wrapper (no loss of sense), 2 spines reinforced with clear tape.
A rare survival of a late flowering of 'Penny Dreadfuls - criminous and sensational tales cheaply-produced and sold at a penny each. Publisher Felix McGlennon (1856-1943) was a prolific songwriter of music hall ditties and set up his publishing company initially to produce songbooks, but expanded to various forms of cheap literature. Each pamphlet here expounds luridly upon a famous nineteenth-century criminal case: the 1874 murder of Harriet Lane by Henry Wainwright; the 1857 trial of Madeline Smith for poisoning her lover with arsenic (the basis for David Lean's 1950 film Madeline); Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare; burglar and murderer Charles Peace, hanged in 1879; and the 1896 murder of Henry Smith by Milsom and Fowler. Criminous and sensational material like this had its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century and despite a wide variety of posited dates on the scanty institutional holdings (between 1879 and 1930), the terminus post quem of the Smith murder coupled with the advertisements within for collections of songs by Harry Lauder and a book of 'Irish Yarns Told by the Car-Driver' and the lack of any reference to the first world war, suggests a date in the vicinity of 1912.
Library Hub records one or two copies for each of the issues save Burke and Hare, which is unrecorded there, although Worldcat identfies two North American institutions holding copies. No institutions appear to hold more than two issues and even incomplete runs such as this are seemingly unknown in trade.
