Victorians on Screen

Neo-Victorianism, or ‘retro-Victorianism’, to use Gutleben’s (2001) term, has, in recent years, emerged as a thriving and influential field of art and literature as well as an academic study engaging with similar concerns. Neo-Victorian literature, for instance, as fiction about the Victorian age rather than of the Victorian age, plays with and explores its own distance from its object of scrutiny. As critics such as Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010) and Kaplan (2007) have established, neo-Victorianism is an endeavour that explores the historiography of the Victorian age in a retrospective and revisionist fashion. Thus, through often self-reflexive and metafictional engagement with the processes of accessing history, neo-Victorianism asks questions concerning the fictionalisation of the past and its situatedness vis-à-vis the present. In neo-Victorian fiction this allows authors to construct images of the period that are often created out of the silences and omissions of the Victorian text and out of pieced-together fragments. Even while these stories are at times intensely personal in the way they explore the secrets of the period to form an image which offers an alternative to ‘official’ versions of Victoriana,¹ they also rely on knowledge provided by academic research and often encourage an element of scientific detachment.

As discussed in the previous chapter, adaptations of classic novels have formed a traditional part of broadcasting in Britain, both on radio and on television, and while the popularity of the classic serials fluctuates, it has remained an important and recognisable part of programming. However, the number of adaptations of Victorian texts and their association with British literary and cultural heritage, quality and public service has also often drawn attention away from the fact that there are types of period drama which are not adapted from literary sources. Upstairs Downstairs (LWT, 1971–75) is a well-known example of this type of drama, but more recently there have been other high-profile examples through the BBC remake of the 1970s series from 2010 to 2012, and ITV’s Downton Abbey (Carnival Films, Masterpiece, 2010 onwards). During the period relevant for this study alone, there were also several series which were situated more firmly in the Victorian period, such as Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (WGBH Boston, BBC, 2000) and the subsequent four-part series Murder Rooms: The Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Homes (WGBH Boston, BBC, 2001), all written by David Pirie and focusing on the young Arthur Conan Doyle. In addition, drama series such as Micawber (Carlton, LWT, ITV, 2001–2), which was based on a minor character in Dickens’s David Copperfield, and written by John Sullivan, and the series Bramwell (Whitby Davison Productions, 1995–98), a drama about a female doctor in the late nineteenth century, and Servants (BBC, 2003), which focuses on the staff of a large country house in the nineteenth century, both written by Lucy Gannon, all deal with aspects of Victorian life.

While traditionally research into representations of history has often primarily dealt with film or, if interested in television, has often exclusively focused on fictional genres and in particular adaptation, there is now a growing field of research into factual television history, which, in recent years, has been particularly interested not only in traditional questions of legitimacy which have, in the past, often sparked debates about the medium’s approach to historical research, and which arise from television’s situatedness as a popular medium and its representation of the past and presentation of historical knowledge, but also in the modes of engagement which they elicit from the viewer and the way they are situated within television as a medium. The modern media and television in particular, and their way of presenting the relationship between past and present, objective factual history and personal memory and experience, have a significant impact on the way our relationship with history and the past has altered. Thus, with the wide proliferation of history programming on television, as Ann Gray and Erin Bell point out, ‘the majority of people in the UK, mainland Europe and the US gain at least some of their knowledge about the past through television’ (2013, p. 1). Indeed, the changes in our relationship with history have been traced even outside television studies, with scholars such as Andrew Huyssen (2003) exploring the way historical memory is evolving and changing.