The Flashman Papers
Series of novels and short stories by George MacDonald Fraser, about a cowardly British soldier who had been the school bully in the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Sweeney Todd
Fictional character who first appeared as the villain of the Victorian penny dreadful serial The String of Pearls (1846–1847).
Varney the Vampire
Main character in a series of penny dreadfuls produced from 1845 until 1847. The stories introduced many of the ideas represented in modern vampire stories, such as Varley’s fangs leaving two puncture wounds on the necks of his victims.
Humpty Dumpty
One of the best-known English nursery rhymes, about an egg, and almost certainly intended as a riddle.
Roy of the Rovers
British comic strip about the life and times of a fictional footballer named Roy Race, who played for Melchester Rovers.
Cheshire cat
Fictional character that appears in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Galehaut
Perhaps the most overlooked of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, who makes his appearance in the series of anonymous 13th-century French romances known as the Lancelot-Grail, or the Vulgate Cycle, in which he is portrayed as a rival to Queen Guinevere for the love of Sir Lancelot.