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Black Bess; or, the knight of the road: a tale of the good old times
Black Bess is a heavily fictionalized account of the life and death of the infamous English highway bandit Dick Turpin (1705-1739). Published in 254 short volumes over five years, the entire completed work runs to some 2,228 pages – with the first murder occurring oddly late in the proceedings, on page 1,757. Black Bess was named for Dick Turpin’s horse on which, legend has it, Turpin road the 200 miles between York and London in a single night. (This detail appears to have been invented by the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth in his 1834 novel Rookwood.)
The lurid content of Black Bess and its rapid serial publication have led to it being described as a ‘penny blood’ or ‘penny dreadful’. By the 1830s, advances in printing made it possible to produce short works in large volume for an affordable price; printing onto cheap paper drove costs even lower. As a result, instalments of Black Bess and similar novels could be sold for a penny a time. The first penny dreadfuls tended to be influenced by the popular Gothic fiction of the pre-Victorian era – featuring gypsies, pirates and romantic adventure – but gradually the focus turned to tales of true-life crime, and later true-life detection.
Edward Viles, usually credited with writing Black Bess, appears to have written a number of companion volumes in parallel to his main work, among them The Black Highwayman (1866-1868) and The Ladies’ Highwayman (1864). It evidently didn’t pay to change a winning formula.
The lurid content of Black Bess and its rapid serial publication have led to it being described as a ‘penny blood’ or ‘penny dreadful’. By the 1830s, advances in printing made it possible to produce short works in large volume for an affordable price; printing onto cheap paper drove costs even lower. As a result, instalments of Black Bess and similar novels could be sold for a penny a time. The first penny dreadfuls tended to be influenced by the popular Gothic fiction of the pre-Victorian era – featuring gypsies, pirates and romantic adventure – but gradually the focus turned to tales of true-life crime, and later true-life detection.
Edward Viles, usually credited with writing Black Bess, appears to have written a number of companion volumes in parallel to his main work, among them The Black Highwayman (1866-1868) and The Ladies’ Highwayman (1864). It evidently didn’t pay to change a winning formula.
680 pages, Unknown Binding
First published July 2, 1866
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December 16, 2019
Behold, the first 423 chapters of the longest running penny dreadful!
Reading this was a real ordeal, partly because the lovely Forgotten Books edition I got preserves the original formatting, scanned from the original stuff, only reduced from the large newspaper size... so the print is very fine and decayed in places, so I had to start off with a magnifying glass, sometimes with a magnifying sheet and reading glasses too, even though I don't normally wear those. Next I tried the e-reader version, which suffers from being the result of a computer trying to interpret the same scans and convert them into text, making plenty of mistakes, which made it almost as difficult. My old Nook wound up crapping out partway through. Then Gannet Games put out a series of reprints of this, broken up into more volumes (cuz it's real long), so I got ahold of these and was able to read... yet the seemingly meager 680 pages expanded into 1,700 give or take. Either way you slice it, this was like 800,000 words.
Last year I took on George W.M. Reynolds' earlier penny dreadful, “The Mysteries of London”, or rather the first volume of it. In objective terms, Edward Viles is no Reynolds. “Black Bess” is an admittedly romantic take on the exploits of a criminal who lived 150 years before, and there is little in it apart from escapist adventure. Of course, since it makes a hero of a famous criminal, the law and the establishment are often the villains, but since it's safely historical there's none of the cry for reform that Reynolds had.
All the main characters are based on real highwaymen, being Dick Turpin, Tom King, Sixteen String Jack, and Claude Duval (who died 35 years before Turpin was born, in reality), oh, and Bess, Turpin's extraordinary loyal mare. The Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart is also shoehorned in and Turpin and company take part in his uprising, again, playing fast and loose with dates, since Turpin was dead before 1745. Some people will shake their fist at this historical mess, but for me that was part of the appeal. It's a romance, people!
There is a whole lot of everything in here, so let's get to some of what's good in this giant-ass book: pirates, codgers murdered for hidden gold, possible ghosts, monsters or exotic animals (the Tazmanian Tiger!), heroes on trial, heroes as witnesses at trial, evil asylum keepers, villains angling for inheritance, tons of Newgate prison, damsels in distress, secret lovers, anonymous lovers, haunted mansions, spooky basements, comical landed gentry, battle scenes, stereotypical Scotsmen, full moons, way too many dragoons, fields, hedgerows, and a sizable dose of highway robbery.
Despite these dramatic varieties and gothic delights, the adventure is typical of episodic content in that it is extremely repetitive and anyone trying to read it in as small a space of time as I did may find themselves a little tired of the endless supply of full-moon nights where our heroes cry “Stand and deliver!” to a coach or horseman and then must flee magically appearing soldiers across fields and over the hedgerows which seem to zig-zag all across 18th century England. Nearly every place they go is just down the road from London, various heaths and Epping Forest, all of which have since been absorbed by London. There are inns and public houses and crooked people just itching to turn in our heroes for reward money.
The dialogue is loaded with lines like “Hark!” and “Hark again!” and in fact dialogue is one of the biggest bulking tools, in which Viles frequently uses a device where characters will interrupt one another and bicker before giving exposition.
Our heroes, despite being wanted criminals, are fiercely English and shrink from leaving English soil (this is the sales pitch to the young Brits this stuff was intended for), although the three supporting highwaymen do run off and have an adventure in France, but they return as soon as possible.
In spite of the disregard for characters' actual timelines, there is historical value, for Viles continuous points out differences between the 1720s and 1860s, making a kind of oasis in the 300 year desert between the reader of today and these events.
While Viles is by no means thoroughly able in interweaving plot threads or creating the grand soap-opera that these series can sometimes be, he is never shy about introducing an interesting idea, and there are some memorable episodes, including Turpin witnessing a murder and taking the stand at risk of his life to help a lady in distress. Tom King and Turpin hiding in a sealed mansion and discovering walled up corpses and later learning they aren't alone is another.
Viewed as a traditional plotted work, this may be something of a disaster, but taking in on its own terms or even viewed as a strange trip, “Black Bess” actually excels. This is a strange drug, but it's still my drug. I've actually also ordered Viles' “Blueskin” as well.
This madness has something for everybody, even if you can't read it all. I'm going to take a break from the series before diving into the equally giant “Volume 2”, after all, one book is like 10 books.
Reading this was a real ordeal, partly because the lovely Forgotten Books edition I got preserves the original formatting, scanned from the original stuff, only reduced from the large newspaper size... so the print is very fine and decayed in places, so I had to start off with a magnifying glass, sometimes with a magnifying sheet and reading glasses too, even though I don't normally wear those. Next I tried the e-reader version, which suffers from being the result of a computer trying to interpret the same scans and convert them into text, making plenty of mistakes, which made it almost as difficult. My old Nook wound up crapping out partway through. Then Gannet Games put out a series of reprints of this, broken up into more volumes (cuz it's real long), so I got ahold of these and was able to read... yet the seemingly meager 680 pages expanded into 1,700 give or take. Either way you slice it, this was like 800,000 words.
Last year I took on George W.M. Reynolds' earlier penny dreadful, “The Mysteries of London”, or rather the first volume of it. In objective terms, Edward Viles is no Reynolds. “Black Bess” is an admittedly romantic take on the exploits of a criminal who lived 150 years before, and there is little in it apart from escapist adventure. Of course, since it makes a hero of a famous criminal, the law and the establishment are often the villains, but since it's safely historical there's none of the cry for reform that Reynolds had.
All the main characters are based on real highwaymen, being Dick Turpin, Tom King, Sixteen String Jack, and Claude Duval (who died 35 years before Turpin was born, in reality), oh, and Bess, Turpin's extraordinary loyal mare. The Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart is also shoehorned in and Turpin and company take part in his uprising, again, playing fast and loose with dates, since Turpin was dead before 1745. Some people will shake their fist at this historical mess, but for me that was part of the appeal. It's a romance, people!
There is a whole lot of everything in here, so let's get to some of what's good in this giant-ass book: pirates, codgers murdered for hidden gold, possible ghosts, monsters or exotic animals (the Tazmanian Tiger!), heroes on trial, heroes as witnesses at trial, evil asylum keepers, villains angling for inheritance, tons of Newgate prison, damsels in distress, secret lovers, anonymous lovers, haunted mansions, spooky basements, comical landed gentry, battle scenes, stereotypical Scotsmen, full moons, way too many dragoons, fields, hedgerows, and a sizable dose of highway robbery.
Despite these dramatic varieties and gothic delights, the adventure is typical of episodic content in that it is extremely repetitive and anyone trying to read it in as small a space of time as I did may find themselves a little tired of the endless supply of full-moon nights where our heroes cry “Stand and deliver!” to a coach or horseman and then must flee magically appearing soldiers across fields and over the hedgerows which seem to zig-zag all across 18th century England. Nearly every place they go is just down the road from London, various heaths and Epping Forest, all of which have since been absorbed by London. There are inns and public houses and crooked people just itching to turn in our heroes for reward money.
The dialogue is loaded with lines like “Hark!” and “Hark again!” and in fact dialogue is one of the biggest bulking tools, in which Viles frequently uses a device where characters will interrupt one another and bicker before giving exposition.
Our heroes, despite being wanted criminals, are fiercely English and shrink from leaving English soil (this is the sales pitch to the young Brits this stuff was intended for), although the three supporting highwaymen do run off and have an adventure in France, but they return as soon as possible.
In spite of the disregard for characters' actual timelines, there is historical value, for Viles continuous points out differences between the 1720s and 1860s, making a kind of oasis in the 300 year desert between the reader of today and these events.
While Viles is by no means thoroughly able in interweaving plot threads or creating the grand soap-opera that these series can sometimes be, he is never shy about introducing an interesting idea, and there are some memorable episodes, including Turpin witnessing a murder and taking the stand at risk of his life to help a lady in distress. Tom King and Turpin hiding in a sealed mansion and discovering walled up corpses and later learning they aren't alone is another.
Viewed as a traditional plotted work, this may be something of a disaster, but taking in on its own terms or even viewed as a strange trip, “Black Bess” actually excels. This is a strange drug, but it's still my drug. I've actually also ordered Viles' “Blueskin” as well.
This madness has something for everybody, even if you can't read it all. I'm going to take a break from the series before diving into the equally giant “Volume 2”, after all, one book is like 10 books.
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