Street & Smith's New York Weekly

This penny weekly serialized sensational fiction for working-class readers hungry for melodrama and crime. The cover illustration shows figures in Victorian dress gathered indoors, rendered in the theatrical style that defined the genre. Street & Smith's New York Weekly, like its competitors, offered serialized stories of murder, betrayal, and social transgression at prices working people could afford. These publications—ancestors of the modern comic book—delivered weekly installments of lurid narrative across multiple pages of dense text and wood-engraved images.