A mysterious man in 1830s England, eventually dubbed Spring-Heeled Jack in contemporary news reports, spent several months terrorising unsuspecting people in the nighttime streets by clawing their faces, spewing flames from his mouth, and then bounding away. During his menacing spree, newspapers throughout the country enflamed public hysteria with numerous articles detailing the “outrages” committed by the “fiend”. For no discernible reason, the attacks stopped as suddenly as they began and no more was heard about the man. Yet, a few decades later, he was resurrected in the public consciousness through various fictional genres as a character who was not a crazed villain but rather a misunderstood antihero who repented of his past actions. These skillful reconfigurations on the stage and in penny dreadfuls changed public perception about Jack from the horror and fear of his real-world behaviour to excitement and intrigue at his fictional exploits. Through a consideration of the language and tone of the original news articles combined with a close-reading of some of the later penny serials, this paper details the ways in which different media and their conventions shaped the public’s attitude towards Jack, and asserts his significance as a pervasive transmedial character of the Victorian era.

The introduction to this special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, “Victorian Transfictions and Transmedia Storytelling,” reviews the state of the field of transmedia studies, and differentiates between commonly conflated terms, such as transmedia and adaptation. It argues that Victorian popular fiction lends itself particularly well to investigation through the concepts of transmediality and transfictionality. The production of popular fictions across the period was dominated by practices of recycling and seriality, and the flow of stories and characters across all kinds of creative and commercial outputs was unstoppable. The introduction identifies the contributions that this issue’s articles make to the fields of transmedia and popular fiction studies and invites further scholarship that, like ours, seeks to understand the rich field of nineteenth-century popular culture through transmedial lenses.

The art of caricature is essential to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A Musical Thriller, so much so that its 1979 world premiere can be understood as a time-based, three-dimensional caricature. This article contends that Robert Seymour’s caricature masthead of Figaro in London informs James Malcolm Rymer’s Victorian Sweeney Todd serial The String of Pearls and that subsequent contributions to the Sweeney Todd transmedia universe revive nineteenth-century caricature, often characterising Sweeney Todd as a personification of satire itself. Cozette de Charmoy’s collage novel The True Life of Sweeney Todd (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1973) is a particularly insightful and original contribution to this tradition.

This article considers Lifetime’s Penny Dreadful as transmedia adaptation, offering a methodological approach for analysing the closely related storyworlds of the show and its nineteenth-century adapted texts. Adaptation and neo-Victorian studies often use metaphors and aesthetics to describe the relationship between adapted and adaptive texts. Building on the work of transmedia scholars, the article proposes the concept of overlapping storyworlds with permeable boundaries, a framework that arises from metaphors like the palimpsest and Gothic thresholds and yet aims to provide further precision in discussing the relationship between source texts. While the tools of transmedia narratology are more often reserved for unified narratives occupying a single storyworld rather than adaptations spread across multiple storyworlds, this article furthers the conversation between transmedia and adaptation in borrowing the language of continuity and expansion, language that encapsulates the movements across and between texts in neo-Victorianism, a category already defined by its relationship to adapted texts. The latter half of the essay turns to another example of transmedia adaptation, the podcast Tales from the Penny Bloods, to show how a transmedia approach can intervene in ongoing discussions in neo-Victorian scholarship. The proposed framework helps address more nuanced and ephemeral elements that move between storyworlds beyond character and plots as well as the historical presentism inherent in neo-Victorian stories.

Arnold Schmidt, writer and director of the Tales from the Penny Bloods podcast series, offers insights from himself and his team into the makings of a podcast series. Processes of selection and adaptation are discussed and the project is theorised in relation to transmedia storytelling. Tales from the Penny Bloods provides points of access to Victorian adaptations across visual, textual and aural media, and can enhance our pedagogical interventions with Victorian popular culture. The interview makes a case for the continuing importance of the Penny Blood, particularly as adapted and re-formatted for a twenty-first century listener.

Both Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault were well-known in the nineteenth century as writers who adapted and re-fashioned across multiple sources and media. Foul Play (1868) brought these two successful cultural producers together and this article discusses their collaboration and its parodies as intertextual, transfictional, and transmedial enterprises. I suggest that sensational narratives like Foul Play are particularly alive to intertextual and transmedial strategies because the aims of both sensation writers and transmedial producers were aligned: creating affective bonds and encouraging increased engagement and consumption. This article explores three different versions of Foul Play (one novelistic and two dramatic) as well as the parodies that almost immediately followed. Examining transfictional characters and plot tropes across these productions reveals that transfictionality can have significant consequences on the distribution of power in a collaborative venture and on the scope and success of its cultural reverberations.