Serialised in Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany in the 1840s, this enormous romance follows the persecuted Ada through abduction, deception and a murder at an old village smithy. Its pages are crowded with scheming villains, frightened accomplices led across midnight rooftops on a rope, and the cliffhanger turns that kept working-class readers buying each weekly number.
A full-length example of the penny dreadful at its height, for readers curious about the popular fiction Dickens’s contemporaries actually devoured. Download the free EPUB.