Wiktionary
n. (penny dreadful English)
Usage examples of "penny dreadfuls".
It's about a sickly, not-too-bright, lonely boy who read lots of penny dreadfuls until something snapped in his feeble mind.
Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry.
Later on, inflation turned the penny dreadfuls into dime dreadfuls.
Most of the time I read penny dreadfuls as they were all a body could find, except once in a while those paper-bound classics given away by the Bull Durham company for coupons they enclosed.
He was very popular with the English lower class and appeared in a periodical and penny dreadfuls between 1867 and 1884, then again in 1916.
Not only the old classics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West.