The Flag of Our Union

This Boston weekly serial installment exemplifies the penny blood—sensational fiction printed cheaply on poor paper for working-class readers. The ornate title treatment and woodcut illustrations framed the serialized narratives of crime, Gothic horror, and melodrama that dominated Victorian popular literature. Such publications, issued weekly at modest cost, competed fiercely for readers hungry for excitement and moral transgression. By the mid-nineteenth century, these serialized stories had become the mass medium of choice for laborers and servants, preceding the modern comic book by decades. The penny blood's emphasis on visual spectacle, serialized narrative, and affordable accessibility established templates the sequential art medium would inherit and transform.