The Dime Novel Roundup is a periodical devoted to the collection, preservation, and study of dime novels, a designation that includes any number examples of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century popular fiction. The term has become a catch all. Many of the books cost ten cents; others cost a nickel. They were cheaply produced for a mass audience that was available because of increased literacy . The works were generally genre fiction, such as Westerns, and evolved into pulp fiction and even today's mass market paperbacks. This particular issue contains my review of John Springhall's Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, a book that focuses on such works in Britain (where such popular fictions were generally know as penny dreadfuls or shilling shockers) and the fears that the dissemination of such works raised in numerous authority figures at various points in history. After all, neither penny dreadfuls nor dime novels have ever been considered great literature, and many educators and others fear that impressionable children and adolescents should focus their attentions on more erudite and uplifting works. Today, we often see such controversies with music or films or video games. In his book, Springhall demonstrates that such controversies have always been a part of American and British cultures.
In 1892, Lizzie Andrew Borden was accused of and tried for the brutal murders of her father and step mother. She was acquitted, and no one was ever convicted of the crime, which arouses interest today, over one hundred years later. In August 1996, the house where the murders took place opened as a Bed and Breakfast. As one of the site's first visitors, I wrote this article about the experience of staying there.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has long been a research interest. Few works have been explored as much in both popular and scholarly culture. Interestingly, the novel (or romance) supports both conservative and liberal cultural, political, and social interpretations, and those who adapt the work seem to find their efforts to impose a particular interpretation futile. Such was the case even with Mary Shelley, who published three different editions of the novel in her lifetime. The article here does claim in error that Edison's film adaptation of Frankenstein (1910) is lost. Actually, by the time this article was published, the late film collector Alois F. Dettlaff had discovered that he possessed a copy. However, his copy remained extremely difficult to view until several years later. This short film is now available for viewing on demand at the wonderful Archive.Org website.