Neo-Victorian slumming on screen

Mendes, Ana Cristina

http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30011

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Authors

Mendes, Ana Cristina

Abstract(s)

In ways that directly implicate audiences in practices of consumption, an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel set in the late-Victorian London East End, whose main character is a prostitute, dovetails the idea of city streets as places of consumption with the neo-Victorian interest in sexploitation. The Crimson Petal and the White (2011, BBC Two) is one such adaptation belonging to a larger group of recent British TV series which gaze, episode after episode, at the poverty of the historical and social other. This article argues that the double engagement of audiences in the series with acts of virtual slumming and the multiplatform consumption of the Victorians, in ways that directly impinge on questions of perception and representation, is responsible for the critical success of this text as a neo-Victorian adaptation. Specifically, the focus of this article is on the ways the audiences arguably make sense of the simultaneously spectacular and unpleasant dimensions of the Victorian pasts. The emphasis rests on the processes of mediation of these ‘unattractive’ pasts (namely via the BBC’s ‘Original British Drama’ branding strategy) and the particular aspects (such as sexploitation and slumming) which are put on display when the past is turned into an unattraction.