Popular Heroes

Paul Bedford and Mrs. Keeley, as Blueskin and Jack Sheppard
singing “Nix My Dolly Pals” at the Adelphi Theatre, 1839.
Sketched from the life by George Cruikshank

 “They’re all here to-night, my pretty Captain,” said the woman. “They muster most uncommon strong. There’s Captain Dick, and Captain Jack, and gallant Tom King, in fine array, the lot of them, and that big blackguard Blueskin, the good-for-nothing ugly varmint; and there’s all the gals of course, Miss Edgeworth Bess and Mrs. Maggot, and Polly Peachum’s here, and Lucy Lockit — all flounces and laces and patches and painted faces — you’d say it was his majesty’s court at St. James’s instead of Cutthroat court, St. Giles.”

— Red Ralph; or, the Daughter of Night, A Romance of the Road in the Days of Dick Turpin, By Percival Wolfe, Published for the London Romance Company by the News-Agents’ Publishing Company limited, 147 Fleet Street, 1865.

‘Popular Heroes,’  
in Chambers’s Journal, 
24 October, 1863, 
pp.264-266.

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Deadwood Dick Library

Deadwood Dick Library, Cleveland, Ohio : A. Westbrook, 1899. These are the prettiest dime novels I ever handled. The Westbrook versions of Deadwood Dick were tiny, about four and a half by six inches, ideal for hiding within a textbook for surreptious reading. They consisted of 32 pages of teeny-weeny type but are remarkably easy on the eyes. They were copyright to one James Sullivan.