This well illustrated work is a popular history of the symbiotic relationships between cheap serial fiction, criminal accounts, popular advertising and cheap melodrama. The melodrama contributed the leavening theme of vice and virtue to the popular criminal literature of the day. The cheap literature of the nineteenth century largely reflected real life societal divisions - with its emphasis on wealth, poverty and crime. The newspaper crime columns, often contributed by indolent penny-a-liners, were compared to penny crime-sheets on the same level with illustrated police newspapers and "thieves' literature." The melodrama relied on sensational fiction and real-life murders for their plots and the authors of penny dreadfuls adapted their style from the melodrama and topical crime reports.
