[log in to unmask] has written: > I've always assumed he took on that entire scene of sentimental > Victorian 'poetry'. The Victorians had a 'death industry' every > bit as saturating as our contempory sex industry. Their popular > poetry is absolutely stuffed with "alas" and "woe". It wasn't simply > Poe who got rapturous over the deaths of fragile and beautiful > virgins. It was that same part of the reading public that now > slurps up Silhouette romances. They were called "penny dreadfuls" in the latter half of the 19th century, and were indeed a major industry. Writers really good at it could turn out a 400-pager in two or three weeks. They were frequently serialized, like today's soap operas, to get readers to buy a novel a month. My favorite is _Varney the Vampire_, spanning about 2000 pages 40 years before Stoker's _Dracula_. The author of _Varney_ is known only by a pen name, although there are some scholarly theories. The genre is the direct ancestor of television fiction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Vicki Richman [log in to unmask] National Writers Union Bedford, Brooklyn NY PGP 2.6 UAW Local 1981, AFL/CIO "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." -Oscar Wilde ------------------------------------------------------------------------------