Penny Black Black design features in the innovations section of the new British passport in 2015. Also in 2015, the search engine Google marked the 175th anniversary of the postage stamp with a Google doodle of the Penny Black. Penny Black The Penny Black was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. It was first issued in Great Britain on 1 May 1840, but was not valid for use until 6 May. It features a profile of Queen Victoria. In 1837, British postal rates were high, complex and anomalous. To simplify matters, Sir Rowland Hill proposed an
Penny dreadful of value, and such hazards as war-time paper drives, the penny dreadfuls, particularly the earliest ones, are fairly rare today. Some items that have been named after this topic include a song called "Penny Dreadfuls" by Animal Collective, the Irish literary magazine "The Penny Dreadful" and a Showtime horror television series set in Victorian England titled "Penny Dreadful". Sources Penny dreadful Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in