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Dime Novel: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''It was Lord Northcliffe who killed the penny dreadful: by the simple process of producing a ha’penny dreadfuller.''|attributed to [[A. A. Milne]]}}
We're spoiled today. If you want entertainment, we got movies, video games, books, music, comics and many other things. You want a story, you have many choices.
People in the 19th century weren't so lucky. With entertainment being far more limited, you had to learn to enjoy what little you could get your hands on. Around the time of the [[American Civil War]], literacy in the US began to increase considerably, and just around then, a new form of entertainment was invented
Dime novels were basically books aimed primarily at immature adults but soon became popular with preteen and teenage boys, and they were largely pulp adventure fiction. Tough men going on exotic adventures around the world, fighting villains wherever they went - it was basically "turn off your brain" stuff, but provided the adrenaline rush and imagination boys wanted.
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The style of storytelling of the dime novel has lived on even today. Cliffhanger movies told essentially the same types of stories as dime novels, and the ''[[Indiana Jones]]'' and ''[[The Mummy Trilogy|The Mummy]]'' movies are essentially the dime novel in big budget form. While our entertainment today is much more sophisticated, there's still a market for low-brow high adventure stories. Heck, even many of today's video games have roots in these.
* [[The Chick]] - The defining characteristic of almost any woman character. Sadly, their sheer lack of characterization resulted in many boys objecting to ''any'' female character on the sole basis that she would inevitably turn out to be bland and uninteresting.
* [[Damsel in Distress]] - Women did not get much in the way of important roles in these books, that was for sure.
* [[Mighty Whitey]] - The hero naturally tends to become this when he visits any exotic land.
* [[Train Job]] - When focusing on famous outlaws of the time, particularly Jesse James.
{{reflist}}
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