James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre's creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814-1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called 'penny bloods' and 'dreadfuls' for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and about urban working families. Editing family magazines early in that genre's history, he deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s-1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-si