Question: where did the name penny mustard come from

title: Penny dreadful
text: The stories themselves were reprints , or sometimes rewrites , of the earliest Gothic thrillers such as The Castle of Otranto or The Monk , as well as new stories about famous criminals . Some of the most famous of these penny part - stories were The String of Pearls : A Romance ( introducing Sweeney Todd , `` the Demon Barber of Fleet Street '' ) , The Mysteries of London ( inspired by the French serial The Mysteries of Paris ) , and Varney the Vampire ( 1845 -- 47 ) . Varney is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney , and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences -- it was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire . Highwaymen were popular heroes ; Black Bess or the Knight of the Road , outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real - life English highwayman Dick Turpin , continued for 254 episodes . Other serials were thinly - disguised plagiarisms of popular contemporary literature . The publisher Edward Lloyd , for instance , published a number of penny serials derived from the works of Charles Dickens entitled Oliver Twiss , Nickelas Nicklebery , and Martin Guzzlewit .