ABSTRACT
The Gothic chapbooks represented by the selection in this volume formed part of a revolution in popular print and popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Alongside their rich and diverse oral culture, the lower classes or common people had a cheap print culture of their own since the beginning of printing, and before that, probably a cheap manuscript culture. This body of material changed little for about 400 years when, in the late eighteenth century and over the next 100 years, it was first challenged, then marginalised, and eventually replaced by a different kind of popular print, of kinds that continue to the present, and that have also been transmuted for film, television and other media. The literature that I call ‘street Gothic’ was part of that long revolution, and it, too, is still with us, in different forms. This introduction to the selection offered here briefly surveys the elements of historic street literature, then describes similarities and differences between the historic street literature and the new cheap print, of which street Gothic formed a part, and finally comments briefly on the selections, their provenance and their context.
