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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION
AND VISUAL CULTURE

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary
Adaptations of Victorian Women

Antonija Primorac
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Department of English
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode
of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is
its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations,
and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as
videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and
nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute
to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one,
form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts
that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other
pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres,
appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series espe-
cially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between
adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome pro-
posals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance
of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual ­culture.

Editorial Board
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Turkey
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, Australian National University, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud, France

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14654
 Antonija Primorac

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations
of Victorian Women
Antonija Primorac
Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences
University of Split
Split, Croatia

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-64558-2 ISBN 978-3-319-64559-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949208

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making, and I would therefore like to
thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their patience and sup-
port. The seeds were sown at the 2nd Annual Association of Adaptation
Studies conference held in 2007 at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta,
USA, where a panel on nineteenth century on film brought a wide-
eyed and somewhat opinionated PhD candidate together with inspira-
tional academics pursuing research on adaptation studies. It was the start
of many a conversation on the shape-shifting beast that is adaptation,
leading eventually to fruitful work collaborations, university exchange
programmes and the organisation of an international conference, Neo-
Victorian Networks, held in Amsterdam in 2012. Had that cross-­Atlantic
trip not been possible, my life would certainly have taken a different
turn, so I am immensely grateful to the Croatian Ministry of Science for
its generous funding programme for young researchers’ international
conference attendance (sadly no longer available).
I would like to thank the US Department of State for awarding
me the Fulbright scholarship that enabled me to spend a year at New
York University’s English Department in 2008–2009 where, with the
­generous help of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and John Maynard, I started
to develop my initial musings on film adaptations of Henry James’
novels. I was also fortunate enough to be awarded the Fulbright Alumni
Grant that went towards academic journal subscriptions n ­ecessary
for a continuation of research at my home institution. The resulting
PhD, written in Croatian and defended at Zagreb University’s English

v
vi Acknowledgements

Department, was supervised by Borislav Knežević, to whom I am

indebted for his guidance and support. I would also like to thank the
head of my PhD committee, Nikica Gilić, for his constructive comments
and encouragement.
A huge thank you goes to Eve Patten whose invitation in early 2013
to use the library facilities at Trinity College Dublin was a turning
point that made the idea of this particular book project plausible. The
Visiting Fellowship at TCD enabled the much needed access to valuable
resources and helped me to develop some already published articles into
a full-blown book written in English.
The completion of this project would not have been possible without
the non-stipendiary Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of English
Studies, University of London from July to September 2013. The
lengthy stay in London was made possible thanks to the generosity
and hospitality of Wendy Bracewell and Robert Shoemaker, Andrew
Asibong, Zoran Milutinović and Alan Kennedy, to whom I offer my
deepest thanks. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Faculty
of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, for the short-term
research trip grants that made holding the Visiting Fellowships at IES
and TCD financially feasible.
While in Split, my research often relied on the comradeship of
­colleagues at universities abroad with better access to databases and j­ournal
subscriptions. Thank you Erik Steinskog, Ana Franjić, Christine Ferguson,
Emily Elizabeth Direen, Joyce Goggin, Tara MacDonald, Monika Pietrzak-
Franger, Ivan Lupić, Lejla Kučukalić, Linda Warley, Sarah Artt and Eckart
Voigts—without you the completion of this book would have been
­well-nigh impossible.
I am indebted to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb
and Karina Jakupsdottir, for their continuing support and assistance.
A special thank you goes to my husband Aidan for patiently reading
through the different drafts and offering his insightful editorial advice—
all this despite his heartfelt dislike for costume drama (and heritage
cinema in particular).
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, Slavka and
Ljubo, and my sister Jaka for their unwavering faith in me and my work.
Od srca hvala.
A version of the chapter on the adaptations of Irene Adler was pre-
viously published as ‘The Naked Truth: The Postfeminist Afterlives of
 Acknowledgements vii

Irene Adler’ (2013) and is here revisited with the kind permission of the
general editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke. A shorter
version of the chapter entitled ‘In the Grip of the Corset’ was published
in the inaugural issue of Film, Fashion & Consumption as ‘Corsets, Cages
and Embowered Women in Contemporary Victoriana on Film’, and is
rewritten here with the journal’s approval. A smaller part of the chap-
ter on the representations of colonial space and gender roles was previ-
ously published by Palgrave Macmillan as ‘Cultural Nostalgia, Orientalist
Ideology and Heritage Film’ in The Politics of Adaptation: Media
Convergence and Ideology (2015) edited by Dan Hassler-Forest and
Pascal Nicklas.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture 1

2 Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock

Holmes Stories: The Case of Irene Adler 27

3 Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space

and Cultural Nostalgia in Neo-Victorianism on Screen 55

4 In the Grip of the Corset: Women as Caged Birds

in Contemporary Victoriana on Screen 97

5 Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations:

Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation
and Appropriation 133

6 Conclusion: No Country for Old Women 177

Index 191

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Caught between two worlds: woman as exotic spectacle

in Ripper Street’s Season 2, Episode 1, ‘Pure
as the Driven’ (detail). BBC 84
Fig. 4.1 Victoria being tight-laced in Tim Burton’s
The Corpse Bride (2005), Warner Bros. Pictures 100
Fig. 4.2 a, b The corseted centre of the film. Stills from
The Portrait of a Lady (1996), dir. Jane Campion.
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment 105
Fig. 4.3 Nicole Kidman as Satine performing ‘Diamonds
are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Moulin Rouge! (2001), Bazmark
Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox 112
Fig. 4.4 Caged birds. Joanna singing ‘Green Finch and Linnet
Bird’ in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007), DreamWorks
Pictures 114
Fig. 4.5 Crinoline as shelter: Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).
Australian Film Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman
Productions 116
Fig. 4.6 Dressed up for the part of a Victorian wife. Jane
Campion’s The Piano (1993). Australian Film
Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman Productions 117
Fig. 5.1 Hosing down the sins of the body. Still from ‘Closer
than Sisters’ (2014 Series One Episode 5), Penny Dreadful.
Sky Atlantic/Showtime 152

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture

In his Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland

introduces two related concepts: ‘legislated nostalgia’, which he uses
to describe a phenomenon whereby ‘a body of people… [is] force[d]
to have memories they do not actually possess’, and the ‘Now Denial: To
tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only
time that may ever be interesting again is the future’ (Coupland 1991,
p. 41). Published in 1991, Coupland’s book captures the fragmented,
self-consciously retro ennui of the early 1990s in the West with uncanny
precision. This postmodern, self-conscious backward gaze has found
prominent expression since the early 1990s in a proliferation of ­historical
fiction set in the Victorian past and in screen adaptations of Victorian
literature and culture. Whether they have sought to retrieve the certain-
ties of the pre-modernist narrative and its attendant social structures or if
they aimed to challenge received ideas about the past through a critical
rewriting and re-visioning of the Victorians, what all these adaptations
and appropriations of the Victorian era have in common is a desire to
retrieve and re-present the past by translating it into a vocabulary under-
standable and relatable to contemporary audiences. The representations
of the long nineteenth century that have been brought to life on the big
and small screens alike can be read as variants of Coupland’s ‘legislated
nostalgia’ and examples of the ‘now denial’: as cultural products created
for, and often consumed as anachronistic cultural memories by, audiences
in the Anglosphere, and which, more often than not, end up disseminat-
ing their versions of legislated nostalgia on a global scale.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Primorac, Neo-Victorianism on Screen, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9_1
2 A. Primorac

Whereas before 2012 it was unusual to come across the ­ adjective

outside academia, ‘neo-Victorian’ has by now become a widely accepted
term used to describe these adaptations and appropriations of Victorian
literature and culture across media.1 As Cora Kaplan pointed out in one
of the first studies of the phenomenon, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions,
Criticism (2007), the interest in the material remnants of the Victorian
era started in Britain in the 1960s and gradually expanded so that all
other aspects of the period came to be appropriated and used in art,
literature and design (pp. 2–3), and also, crucially, since the 1980s, in
political discourse: first through the appropriation of the ‘Victorian
Values—thrift, family, enterprise’ by Thatcher’s Conservative govern-
ment, which was followed by Blair’s retooling of ‘Christian Socialism’ in
his branding of New Labour (Kaplan 2007, pp. 5–7). Neo-Victorianism
has gathered momentum in the last couple of decades, and it now refers
not only to the numerous screen adaptations of Victorian literature and
Victorian-inspired TV series and films, fiction and graphic novels, but
also to the ways in which fashion, art and interior design have hearkened
back to the Victorian era, which has also led to a mainstreaming of the
Steampunk and Goth subcultures’ aesthetic.2 After some terminological
jousting in which the prefix neo won out over the backward looking ones
of post and retro,3 neo-Victorian studies has emerged as an academic field
of endeavour, and this was solidified with the launch of the open access
journal Neo-Victorian Studies in 2008.4
However, even though neo-Victorian studies has grown rapidly in
the last decade, its critical spotlight has, so far, primarily been directed at
fiction (including, to a smaller degree, graphic novels5), resulting in, as
Caterina Grasl noted, the marginal status of neo-Victorianism on screen
in the field (Grasl 2015, p. 21). What attention has been paid to film and
theatre6 adaptations of Victorian and/or neo-Victorian fiction has usu-
ally been in the context of a broader discussion of the relevant adapted
text7; indeed, neo-Victorianism on screen as a subject in its own right
has rarely been dealt with independently8: it is usually a part of the big-
ger argument about neo-Victorian afterlives.9 Like the two special issues
of Neo-Victorian Studies (2:2 and 4:2),10 book-length studies of neo-
Victorian screen adaptations have primarily focused on filmic adaptations
of Victorian literature that critically interpret the lacunae of Victorians’
attitudes to gender, race, class and empire.11 This does not come as a
surprise, since the field itself took off within literature studies, with focus
on explorations of self-conscious, postmodern takes on the historical
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 3

novel set in the Victorian period; as such, it has generally been aligned to
the genre of historiographic metafiction. What is surprising, as the adap-
tation studies scholar Imelda Whelehan notes (2012), is the persistent
reluctance to approach neo-Victorianism on screen on equal terms with
neo-Victorian literature, especially as from its inception as a discipline,
neo-Victorian studies scholars recognised adaptation as ‘a fundamental
part of neo-Victorianism as a concept’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010,
p. 244). Whelehan stresses that neo-Victorian studies’ approach to neo-
Victorian adaptations (understood as both adaptations of classics that
offer new readings of Victorians’ silenced or marginal points of view, and
screen adaptations of neo-Victorian texts) has mostly treated them as sec-
ondary to literary texts:

A favoring of reading over spectating and a nagging belief that reading is

better because “adaptations often flatten out the complexities of Victorian
fiction” (Hadley 2010, 142) positions screen adaptation as the ersatz
“nineteenth-century dress-ups,” as if historical authenticity (even reim-
agined history) is the peculiar domain of fiction. Neo-Victorian fiction’s
intertextual universe is part of “a cultural memory, to be re-membered,
and imaginatively re-created, not revised or understood” (Mitchell 2010,
7); whereas adaptation’s intertextual potentialities roam across eras and
genres in fantastic and dangerous liaisons yet to be emulated by the neo-
Victorian novel. (Whelehan 2012, p. 289)

The hierarchical approach to neo-Victorianism on screen is all the more

vexing because, as Whelehan points out, ‘neo-Victorian literary texts are
themselves adaptations; even when they do not refer back to a single
Urtext, they remain compatible with contemporary definitions of adapta-
tion and appropriation’ (Whelehan 2012, p. 272). Since screen adapta-
tions of Victorian classics by and large belong to the genre of costume
drama, these connections are all the more pertinent because, in Julianne
Pidduck’s words, ‘historical fiction and costume drama alike depict the
past through the stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies of present cul-
tural production’ (Pidduck 2004, p. 4). So far, the only monograph deal-
ing solely with the nineteenth century on screen that gives equal space
to adaptations of classics as well as to neo-Victorian meta-adaptations
(original screenplays set in the nineteenth century) is Iris Kleinecke-
Bates’s Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television,
1995–2005 (2014). Kleinecke-Bates also introduces a chapter on a genre
not usually examined in the context of costume drama—the so-called
4 A. Primorac

factual history programming, characterised by popular TV shows such as

What the Victorians Did for Us and The 1900 House, where she analyses
the transformation of the latter genre under the influence of reality TV
in the UK and reads it within the broader context of the affective turn in
the humanities.
This book aims to address this imbalance in neo-Victorian studies by
focusing solely on neo-Victorianism on screen, which is here understood
as an umbrella term that encompasses adaptations of Victorian texts that
offer a critical re-visioning of Victorian narratives; screen adaptations
of neo-Victorian texts; contemporary biopics of Victorians; and meta-
adaptations of Victorians (mash-ups and appropriations of more than
one Victorian text, as well as original screenplays set in the Victorian era
that play with and adapt received ideas about the period). Central to this
analysis is the figure of the Victorian heroine and how she is represented
for contemporary audiences, because the Victorian woman—with her
corseted body epitomising her repressed sexuality, limited social roles,
career and life choices—is the pivotal image through which contempo-
rary ideas about the period are dramatically tested. Following Pidduck,
these representations of the Victorian woman are examined in terms of
their ‘stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies’. The adaptations I con-
sider span the period from 1993 (the premiere of The Piano) to 2016
(the premiere of ITV’s first season of Victoria). My aim is to highlight
and examine the important role that films and TV series have played in
this period in contemporary understandings of the Victorian past in gen-
eral and in notions of women’s agency, gender, colonial space and family
in particular.
1990 is most commonly taken as the beginning of the boom in neo-
Victorian fiction, marked as it is by the publication of one of the most
studied and by now canonical neo-Victorian novels—A.S. Byatt’s Booker
Prize winning Possession: A Romance.12 The early 1990s have also been
identified by film studies scholars as the time when the nostalgic, imperi-
alistically inclined subgenre of historical film—heritage cinema—started
to change in tone and focus, giving way to darker, more critical visions
of the past in adaptations of the classics and begetting variants usu-
ally dubbed post-heritage or anti-heritage13 (more on the heritage film
debate and its relevance to neo-Victorianism in Chap. 3). From the point
of view of feminist media studies, this was also a time when a perceiv-
ably postfeminist sensibility started to permeate cultural production in
the West.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 5

‘Postfeminist sensibility’ was introduced as a term by Rosalind Gill

in her Gender and the Media (2007), where she developed Angela
McRobbie’s interpretation of postfeminism as a ‘double entanglement’
of anti-feminist and feminist ideas (cf. McRobbie 2004). Gill suggests
that since ‘postfeminism’ has accrued many, often contradictory, mean-
ings—denoting at the same time the object of study, a period and an
approach—the analytical gaze should rather be directed at the study of
postfeminist media culture and its resultant sensibility. This approach
allows the discussion to move away from the impasse of debates about
‘authentic feminism’, and it can instead concentrate on identifying what
is new in contemporary representations and definitions of gender in the
media (cf. Gill 2007, pp. 254–255). For my purposes, it thus enables a
focused analysis of the many different, yet connected, ways that Victorian
heroines have been adapted and appropriated across contemporary exam-
ples of neo-Victorianism on screen.
Following Gill, the postfeminist media culture is one in which key
feminist notions of empowerment and choice have been appropriated
by the neo-liberal media that seeks to inspire women (especially young
women) to perceive their agency as that of active, self-monitoring, het-
erosexually desiring consumers who are now encouraged to choose tra-
ditional gender roles (cf. Gill 2007) as a way of tackling the social
imperative to ‘have it all’ (marriage, children and a career) (Negra 2009,
p. 31). Considering this context, it is not surprising that postfeminism’s
favourite author is Jane Austen because she has become, in Shelley
Cobb’s words:

a sign of female agency also doubly entangled. She is both popular and a
member of the canon; she writes ‘romances’ but is taken seriously; her life
does not match the stories she wrote, and forever some critics will call her
feminist and some an anti-feminist. For a contemporary woman to navi-
gate postfeminism and its expectations successfully is impossible; Austen
makes space to express the illegible rage against the oppression of agency
possible. At the same time, she offers the option to identify with someone
who did not fulfil the expectations of women in her life but who is remem-
bered as great for her work. (Cobb 2015, p. 136)

This postfeminist appropriation of Austen uncannily mirrors the

Victorian appropriation of Austen as an honorary Victorian. In this
guise, Austen appears in numerous postfeminist adaptations and appro-
priations, especially the popular ‘chick-lit’ and ‘chick film’ appropriations
6 A. Primorac

that Shelley Cobb analyses (such as Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in
Austen and Austenland) as well as in the academic studies of the film
adaptations of the long nineteenth century.14 This fact is perhaps best
exemplified by the way in which Austen has been visually represented for
generations. The most commonly used portrait—and the one chosen to
be put on the 2017 issue of the ten pound note—is, in fact, a re-visioned
Victorian adaptation of the only surviving en face painting of the nov-
elist by her sister Cassandra. Commissioned by J.E. Austen-Leigh, Jane
Austen’s nephew, for the 1870 publication of his Memoir of Jane Austen,
James Andrews’s portrait shows Austen remade for a Victorian audience:
the cross-armed and rather stern-looking Jane of Cassandra’s watercol-
our was transformed by the addition of hair-curls, bonnet frills, a wistful
look and a completely redundant wedding ring (luckily omitted from the
banknote design). As such, his portrait reflects Austen-Leigh’s reinven-
tion of the author in line with Victorian notions of femininity. Both the
portrait and the biography turn the highly sardonic, undeniably ambi-
tious and fairly unconventional author into the tame, apolitical and
sweet-tempered ‘dear Aunt Jane’. The Memoir further bowdlerised the
remaining letters (many of which had already been burnt by Cassandra
or revised by the author’s siblings) editing out any mention of politics,
drinking or, heaven forbid, passion. However, like the portrait, this sani-
tised Victorian image of Austen, which makes her into an author of sen-
timental and romantic plots rather than one of wit and irony, seems to
stubbornly prevail over and against all subsequent investigations of Jane
Austen’s life and writing.15 The endurance of Jane Austen’s Victorian
makeover can be quickly confirmed by the sheer plethora of Jane Austen
fan websites and fan fiction or by a perusal of the online debates that
ensued after the Bank of England announced in 2013 that it was going
to put her image on the ten pound note. More than anywhere else,
though, this makeover survives in the screen adaptations of her life16
and in TV and film adaptations of Austen’s novels, which by and large
prioritise romance and a nostalgic, class-specific, whitewashed view of a
utopian past of stately homes and bucolic countryside. Apart from influ-
encing the future popular perceptions of Jane Austen, Andrews’ and
Austen-Leigh’s joint makeover of the author’s image illustrates the way
different periods reinterpret writers and their works of art in accordance
with their own zeitgeist, and vividly demonstrates the nature of adapta-
tion as a process that generates subsequent perceptions of the adapted
text or image.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 7

I have brought up the case of Jane Austen not only because of her
continuing status as an honorary Victorian in postfeminist media and
the numerous studies of Victorian adaptations, but in order to highlight
two issues pertinent to this study: the long-term transformative and gen-
erative repercussions of visual adaptations on the one hand and on the
other, the postfeminist context in which the adaptations I shall be analys-
ing have been created. While Jane Austen the honorary Victorian may be
the individual mobilising figure of postfeminist angst because, as Cobb
highlights, her life and work have been interpreted as emblematic of
both an anti-feminist and (proto-)feminist agency, the vacuum for more
or less nostalgic fantasies of the past created by a postfeminist media cul-
ture has arguably been filled by neo-Victorian adaptations. By providing
what Aantje Ascheid has identified as ‘safe rebellions’ (2006)—narra-
tives of (invariably heterosexual, white-, middle- or upper-class) women’s
struggle for self-fulfilment displaced into a repressive Victorian context—
neo-Victorian costume dramas’ representations of Victorian women offer
the fulfilment of postfeminism’s impossible goals, with the added frisson
of engaging with sexual taboos and corsets. Resembling the way in which
contemporary perception of Austen is still dominated by her Victorian
makeover, the success of these narratives depends heavily on certain pre-
sumptions about the period becoming cultural memories that, following
Coupland’s legislated nostalgia, the audiences are expected to share and
believe in. Yet, as I show in Chaps. 3 and 4 in particular, these presump-
tions often rely on unquestioned tropes and stereotypes about the past
which come to constitute cultural memories that are taken as immutable,
even when they invariably shift with time.
The relationship between neo-Victorian fiction and cultural memory
was examined by Kate Mitchell in her monograph History and Cultural
Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2010), where she argues that neo-Vic-
torian texts pose as ‘acts of memory’ (p. 4) and as ‘a means toward his-
torical recollection […] [wherein] nostalgia might be productive, giving
voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear wit-
ness’ (p.5). Moreover, she sees neo-Victorian texts as

less concerned with making sense of the Victorian past, than with offering
it as a cultural memory, to be re-membered, and imaginatively re-created,
not revised or understood. They remember the period not only in the
usual sense, of recollecting it, but also in the sense that they re-embody,
that is, re-member, or reconstruct it. (p. 7)
8 A. Primorac

This approach is based on a reading of Svetlana Boym’s notion of

‘reflective nostalgia’ that is open to ambiguous and/or critical inter-
­
pretations of the past (see Boym 2001, p. xviii; for more on Boym and
cultural nostalgia see Chap. 3). For Mitchell, cultural memory thus
becomes a part of ‘the “matrix” (Rigney 2007: 53) formed by history,
historical fiction, film, memory, memorials and material heritage, all of
which contribute to the way we, in the twenty-first century, think about
ourselves historically.’ (Mitchell 2010, p. 31, added emphasis) Mitchell’s
approach to neo-Victorian fiction as ‘memory texts’ that re-member the
past offers the most developed, if culturally and linguistically circum-
scribed, interpretation of neo-Victorianism’s relationship with cultural
memory: circumscribed because it is culturally limited to the notion of
a shared Anglophone culture and history in which re-visiting and re-
membering the Victorians is important because of the role ‘they’ play for
‘us’ and ‘our’ own feeling of history. Mitchell’s exploration of cultural
memory is thus beholden to the idea of a shared past that leads to (seem-
ingly uncomplicated) post-imperial, contemporary, Anglophone identi-
ties. This assumption is problematic on several levels. As Aidan O’Malley
has noted, such a conception of nostalgia relies on a very limited per-
spective on the varieties of experience in the Victorian era—even within
the Anglosphere. Nostalgia cannot name any sort of approach to the
Irish Famine, as O’Malley argues in his reading of Joseph O’Connor’s
2002 Star of the Sea, an immensely popular neo-Victorian novel that is
regularly overlooked by neo-Victorian scholars (see O’Malley 2015), nor
can it be applied to describe the workings of the British Empire in India
during the Opium Wars as described in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
(2008). Furthermore, such a conceptualisation of neo-Victorianism as
a memory-text contingent on nostalgia does not explain the persistent
appeal of neo-Victorianism to global audiences outside the Anglosphere
and its transnational popularity and consumption that goes beyond the
notion of a shared history, culture or language. While Mitchell proposes
the memorable figure of ‘re-membering’ as neo-Victorian fiction’s domi-
nant procedure (the how) of bringing the readers and writers together
in their attempt to ‘participate in making historical meaning’ (Mitchell
2010, p. 8), the crucial questions of who remembers what, where and
for what purpose are left open.17 Mitchell’s explanation that it is because
Victorians are important to us does not quite explain their uses or the
pleasure of their consumption outside the Empire-identified parts of the
Commonwealth.18 This focus on a shared experience brings to mind the
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 9

other side of nostalgia as theorised by Boym: the restorative nostalgia

that ‘stresses nostos and attempts at a transhistorical reconstruction of the
lost home’ (Boym 2001, p. xviii). As a work such as Mitchell’s suggests,
this lost home can be read as the lost imperial influence of the metropoli-
tan centre. While an identification of the metropolitan centre as home
was encouraged throughout the British Empire, this study explores how
the post-imperial legislated nostalgia of the analysed screen texts re-con-
firms this, only now far beyond the boundaries of the former Empire,
thanks to the cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere.
Neo-Victorianism on screen’s rapid global dissemination today has
been made possible thanks to several overlapping aspects of contem-
porary media consumption: the sharing of digital and digitised content
through social media; the easy global distribution of said content via
streaming services and sharing platforms (both legal and not); and the
possibility of consuming content in the original as box sets or, in the case
of pirated material, as torrents with quickly produced subtitles, thanks
to the status of English as a global lingua franca. It is no wonder then
that, in this new, digitally redefined space, the neo-Victorian campaign
for Hendrick’s gin—a recently revived brand made in Scotland and
debuted in New York—was created by a Madrid-based marketing agency,
DraftFCB Spain.19 What is more, the quirky, steam-powered Victorians
featured in the campaign’s ads owe as much to images from Edward Lear
and Lewis Carroll’s books as to Terry Gilliam’s collages and animation
for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.20 The latter phenomenon—the crea-
tion of neo-Victorian images as adaptations of adaptations of Victorian
images—is one that has raised questions about the issues of authenticity
in neo-Victorian studies.
Visual neo-Victorianism’s complex web of textual, visual and filmic
references which does not link an adaptation clearly to one or more iden-
tifiable adapted texts seems to be the reason at the heart of neo-Victorian
adaptations’ relatively subordinate status in neo-Victorian studies. Faced
with this characteristic of adaptations, Heilmann and Llewellyn raise the
following questions in their field-defining study Neo-Victorianism: The
Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009:

This internalization of the nature of adaptation, whereby adaptations speak

to themselves and one another rather than only to the precursor text, has
led to a paradigmatic shift in the nature of adaptation itself. What, now,
does it mean to adapt the Victorians? And what are we adapting: the
10 A. Primorac

Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone

in popular culture? Does each adaptation move us further away from the
Victorians, just as chronology creates a greater number of years between
us and them, or does this very fact represent a new challenge to adaptors
in terms of how they deal with the issue of authenticity itself? (Heilmann and
Llewellyn 2010, p. 212, added emphasis)

These unanswered questions about the issue of authenticity are picked

up in the recent polemic on the breadth of neo-Victorian studies’ pur-
view by Marie-Luise Kohlke (2014). Expanding the already broad
description of the field published in the ‘Aims and Scope’ section of the
journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008), Kohlke makes a claim for an
inclusive definition of neo-Victorianism that goes beyond geographical,
national, or linguistic divisions. She also argues against the field’s nar-
row focus on self-conscious, postmodern fiction’s revisiting and rewriting
of Victorian literature and culture and its attendant cerebral pleasures of
detecting intertextual links. Kohlke suggests that neo-Victorian studies
should examine

cultural and critical practice that re-visions the nineteenth century and its
latter-day aesthetic and ideological legacies in the light of historical hind-
sight and critique, but also fantasy—what we want to imagine the period
to have been like for diverse reasons, including affirmations of national
identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in
escapist exoticism. (Kohlke 2014, p. 21)

Using Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) to point out

that the view that ‘rescription/revision is hardly postmodern (or ‘neo’)
and may have little more critical legitimacy or usefulness than the con-
cept of originality’ (Kohlke 2014, p. 25), and drawing on Hutcheon’s
caution that adaptations appear as variants of intertextuality only to
those who are familiar with the adapted text, Kohlke maintains that
even the ‘unacquainted may take pleasure of a different sort from the
adaptation: from a visceral immersion in the vividly re-imagined world,
a renewed faith in the power of stories, their moral purpose and poetic
justice – none of which require palimpsestic double-vision or knowledge’
(p. 25). However, Kohlke then shows reluctance bordering on unease
when addressing Heilmann and Llewellyn’s remark about adaptations’
propensity to adapt other adaptations (Kohlke 2014, p. 26). Despite
arguing for an inclusion of immersive examples of neo-Victorianism that
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 11

do not necessarily make their adapted texts obvious to the reader/viewer,

Kohlke dismisses the study of ‘free-floating simulacra that have taken on
virtual life of their own, no longer reducible to particular source-texts or
adaptation histories’ and suggests that they do not qualify for ‘being ele-
vated to the defining characteristic of neo-Victorianism’ (Kohlke 2014,
p. 26, original emphasis).
This ‘phantasmatic quality’, however, is precisely what is fascinating
about neo-Victorianism on screen as an adaptive phenomenon. Film
adaptation in particular can be read, via Dudley Andrew, as a peculiar
kind of celluloid palimpsest, ‘in that the surface layer engages, rather
than replaces, a previous inscription’ (Andrew qtd. in Geraghty 2008,
p. 195, added emphasis). Building on this image, Christine Geraghty
suggests that the adaptation process, considered as a layering of previ-
ous adaptations, ‘involves an accretion of deposits over time, a recogni-
tion of ghostly presences, and a shadowing or doubling of what is on
the surface by what is glimpsed behind’ (Geraghty 2008, p. 195). Every
adaptation, after all, contains ghosts of not only the adapted text or its
previous adaptations, but also of other renditions of the period the adap-
tation is set in. As such, the adaptive process that creates screen neo-
Victorianism (as well as visual neo-Victorianism in general) can better be
read via Thomas Leitch’s concept of ‘generation’, which looks to include
the generative aspect of adaptation usually missing from theoretical dis-
cussions: ‘generation looks both backward, in terms of genealogy, and
forward, in terms of production’ (Leitch 2011, p. 44). This conceptu-
alisation makes the dynamic, complex nature of screen adaptations more
apparent, highlighting the fact that they are in dialogue not just with one
(or more) adapted text(s), but also with previous adaptations of the said
text(s), the related images and adaptations that depict the era, extending
into the future towards new adaptations.
An application of Leitch’s, Andrew’s and Geraghty’s approaches to
film adaptation—as a generative process of dynamic layering, creat-
ing a mutating palimpsest of related adaptations—to the study of neo-­
Victorianism on screen, combined with feminist media and culture
studies’ examinations of contemporary postfeminist media discourse
and production contexts informs this study’s perspective on questions
about the contemporary uses of memory, nostalgia, and the past. This
investigation goes beyond exploring the relationship between individual
adapted texts and their adaptations as a dialogue between (or, rather
often, monologue on) our own time and contemporary ideas about the
12 A. Primorac

past that is being brought to life. In its examination of the uses of the
past in contemporary screen adaptations of Victorians, this study seeks
to expose the push and pull between the demands of a given genre, the
marketing priorities of the industry, the creative vision of the makers and
the audiences’ expectations of the costume drama and their conflicting
(often nostalgia-imbued) demands for authenticity and pleasure on the
one hand, and novelty and difference on the other.
Representing and recreating the past on screen is an enterprise always
fraught with the issues of authenticity, agency and ethics, which in turn
reflect the questions of who gets to tell the story, how true to the his-
torical events the adaptations really are or whose side of the story gets
depicted. Film and television play a key role in the re-interpretation of
the past and the creative re-imagining of the period’s events and fic-
tion. Neo-Victorianism on screen actively contributes to the creation of
spectral moving images of the past in contemporary popular culture. In
turn, these images often take on the function of an imagined memory,
contributing to the growth of a ‘legislated nostalgia’ for a Victorian
past that never was—but which, nevertheless, mobilises the emotions
and reactions of its audiences, challenging some of their ideas about the
past while reinforcing others. Developing Leitch’s work, I look at neo-
Victorianism on screen as a generative phenomenon that adapts and
absorbs aspects of what is understood as Victoriana, creating along the
way a neo-Victorian imaginarium that enables a sensory immersion in a
fantasy of the past. ‘Imaginarium’ is here used as an umbrella term that
illustrates neo-Victorianism’s dual character: as a dynamic and generative
(creative) process that builds on preceding adaptations, and as an evolv-
ing compendium of the said generated images.
As Kleinecke-Bates pointed out, the success of an adaptation depends
on the look of the adaptation (2014, p. 55). This is because the look
is crucial to the creation of the effect of authenticity that is an integral
element of the generic expectations of costume drama (the umbrella
term that encompasses heritage cinema, history film, romantic drama
and a number of other related genres that deal with representation of
the past).21 Crucially, these audiences’ expectations are moulded less
by a knowledge of the period based on the archival data (maps, blue-
prints, lithographs, paintings, photographs, life-writing, fictional and
newspaper accounts), but more by the images generated by other, pre-
ceding, films and TV series set in the same period. There is always, as
a result, the risk of what might be termed excessive metonymy in this
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 13

enterprise: where parts are chosen as representative of the whole, the

same parts start to define the period as a whole. More specifically, the
dynamic of ‘­legislated nostalgia’ derives from and generates stereotypes
or the already accepted ideas about the Victorians for the sake of period
authenticity. Furthermore, as Kleinecke-Bates demonstrates in her analy-
sis of original TV series set in the nineteenth-century, the shows which
deviate from audiences’ expectations of the genre of costume drama or
assumptions about the period (class relations and dynamics)—end up
‘flopping’.22 What this means, in no uncertain terms, is that stereotypes
about the Victorian past are (still) an important foundation on which
popular adaptations rely.
Successful and subversive adaptations often offer a deviation from
and/or variation on an accepted generic aspect, trope, or a stereotype,
following on Hutcheon’s (2006) notion of adaptation as a repetition
with a difference. I therefore analyse the use of some of the most com-
mon tropes and stereotypes about Victorians in general and Victorian
women in particular in contemporary adaptations and appropriations, by
focussing on women’s clothes and agency, gender roles, sexuality, atti-
tudes to the colonial space and the idea of Victorian families as heter-
osexual nuclear units. Through a close study of their representations I
examine how the image of the Victorian woman is employed for con-
temporary debates on women’s agency and gender roles, and functions
as an implicit figure of comparison between past and present expansion-
ist policies of the West. I also examine how fantasy and the supernatural
are used to implicitly debate the notion of the queer and the family of
choice.
Chapter 2 (‘Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
Stories: The Case of Irene Adler’) examines the depiction of Victorian
women’s agency in contemporary adaptations and appropriations of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories by studying the portrayal
of Irene Adler, the only female antagonist to have outsmarted Holmes.
The spotlight is on the rendering of Adler in the BBC’s TV cult series
Sherlock from 2012 (‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, series 2, episode 1), with
reference to the use of the character with the same name in the Primetime
Emmy award-winning CBS television series Elementary (2012–2016),
as well as the two equally successful Guy Ritchie films, Sherlock Holmes
(2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). This reading
also considers the appropriation of Adler in the neo-Victorian mystery
novel Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas (1990) and
14 A. Primorac

several other earlier screen adaptations and appropriations. The chapter

demonstrates how Irene Adler’s on-screen afterlives reflect the contem-
porary postfeminist media’s use of the naked, sexualised, female body as
the source of women’s power and agency. Special attention is paid to the
historical parallels made by the screen texts between the ‘now’ of adapta-
tions’ production contexts and ‘then’ of Doyle’s short stories, particularly
in those adaptations—such as BBC’s Sherlock—which update the narra-
tives to a contemporary setting. The spectacle of the naked or overtly
sexualised body, coded as a liberation of the repressed Victorian heroine,
is identified as a distraction from a significant diminishment of Adler’s
agency. I furthermore point to the ways in which the naked body of the
heroine and its counterpart, the veiled woman of the former colonial
space, are used to draw parallels between the Empire of the Victorian era
and its equivalents today.
The relationship between cultural nostalgia and cultural mem-
ory in neo-Victorian screen adaptations is at the heart of Chap. 3
(‘Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space and Cultural Nostalgia
in Neo-Victorianism on Screen’). The analysis examines adaptations of
Victorian texts directed by prominent women directors (Jane Campion’s
adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Mira
Nair’s adaptation of W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (2004) and Andrea
Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (2011))
and contrasts them to an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel (Gillian
Armstrong’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997)) and
the neo-Victorian TV show Ripper Street (S02E01, ‘Pure as the Driven’,
2013), with reference to Sally Wainwright’s Brontë biopic premiered on
ITV, To Walk Invisible (2016). Identifying belated uses of, amongst other
things, orientalism and self-orientalism in the adaptive process, I exam-
ine the use of historical costumes for the heroines’ characterisation. The
analysis explores the relationship between neo-Victorianism on screen
and heritage cinema and its later forms—post-heritage, anti-heritage and
alternative heritage film. I show that adaptations which aim to critically
address Victorian gender roles often employ the colonial space in an ori-
entalist fashion, while adaptations of neo-Victorian texts which challenge
the Victorian attitudes to the colonial space often perform a postcolonial
critique of imperialism at the cost of female characters’ agency.
Chapter 4 (‘In the Grip of the Corset: Women as Caged Birds
in Contemporary Victoriana on Screen’) analyses the ways in which
the Victorian metaphor of the caged bird is visually translated in
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 15

contemporary screen adaptations of Victorian women through the

use of period costumes—specifically, through the use of corsets and,
where the adapted fashions of the period allow for it, crinolines.
Unveiling how the image of a tightly laced, corseted female figure has
become the accepted visual shorthand for the notion of the literally and
metaphorically repressed Victorian woman, I argue that this is more
­
due to the cumulative effect of contemporary screen appropriations
and their interpretations of what ‘Victorian’ means than to any other
source. By tracing the numerous metaphorical and literal connections
between corsets and crinolines on the one hand and cages and caged
birds on the other in contemporary Victoriana, I chart the tangled roots
of their symbolic usages to specific Victorian topoi of the fallen woman
and the embowered woman and, in the process, unearth a key aspect
of the inherently metonymic structure of neo-Victorian adaptations.
The analysis focuses on the use and abuse of corsets in the portrayal
of Victorian heroines in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
and, to a lesser degree, the director’s own neo-Victorian film The Piano
(1993); Baz Luhrmann’s mash-up musical Moulin Rouge! (2001); Tim
Burton’s adaptation of a Broadway musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and his animated feature The Corpse Bride
(2005); and the four-part TV adaptation for BBC of Michel Faber’s
­neo-Victorian behemoth, The Crimson Petal and the White (2011),
written by Lucinda Coxton and directed by Marc Munden. The anal-
ysis further demonstrates how the representations of the Victorian era
on screen often rely heavily on unquestioned visual stereotypes and
assumptions that reinforce rather than question or dispel the received
notions about the period.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and its less successful
sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass directed by James Bobin (2016),
John Logan’s TV show Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), especially its first
season, and the TV film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian
novel Affinity (1999) adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Tim
Fywell and first broadcast on ITV in 2008 are all examined in Chap. 5
(‘Re-Fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations: Tailoring and
Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation and Appropriation’). These screen
texts, which share a Gothic visual style, employ the concepts of tailoring
and shape-shifting, transformation and re-fashioning to signal changes
to Victorian gender relations generated by the adaptations. Most promi-
nently, these include a rejection of the mother figures by the young,
16 A. Primorac

shape-shifting heroines, who instead seek male characters to play the role
of authority figures. What these adaptations also implicitly or overtly pre-
sent is a redefinition of traditional, heteronormative family relationships,
introducing either a reversal of gender roles or a construction of queer
‘families of choice’ (Weston 1997, p. 3). In this light, the chapter inves-
tigates the ways and the extent to which these screen texts, originally
aimed at mainstream audiences, succeed in queering narratives about
Victorian heroines and their families, concluding that the downplaying of
queer relations or happy endings primarily derives from their production
contexts.
The concluding Chap. 6 (‘No Country for Old Women’) examines
the representation of Queen Victoria in contemporary biopics: Mrs
Brown (1997) directed by John Madden; the two-part BBC mini-series
Victoria & Albert (2001); the feature film The Young Victoria (2009)
written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée; and the
first season of ITV’s eight-part TV show, Victoria, created by Daisy
Goodwin and first broadcast in 2016 (with a second season to be aired
in late 2017). The three most recent adaptations (2001–2016) shift the
attention entirely to the early years of the Queen’s life. Such a focus
enables the representations to be generically coded as romance since
they are concentrated primarily on her relationship with Prince Albert.
Furthermore, they centre on her personal growth as a young woman,
wife and mother, downplaying her role as a ruler. Victoria’s interest in
the ‘job’ of the monarch is introduced in a fashion that makes her duties
relatable to the contemporary audiences’ notions about women’s work
and ambitions. Victoria becomes the ideal postfeminist subject because
the fulfilment of her ambition to be a successful queen is ultimately
defined through motherhood.
In these biopics, authenticity is achieved either by stressing period
detail and costume (Victoria & Albert, Mrs Brown), introducing tab-
leaux that bring to life famous Victorian paintings (The Young Victoria)
and, most worryingly, privileging stereotypical Victorian femininities that
foreground ‘heterosexiness’ (Gill and Scharff 2011), and effectively writ-
ing out historically documented stories of the intelligence and achieve-
ment of the women at Victoria’s court. The oldest of the four biopics
under discussion, Mrs Brown, is also the only one to focus on Victoria’s
later years. As a heritage film about monarchy, it respectfully shies away
from depicting Victoria and Brown’s relationship as anything but chaste.
Through its avoidance of representing an older woman as a passionate
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 17

subject on screen, it reflects postfeminist media culture’s limited per-

spective on women’s subjectivity which prioritises sexy, youthful, white,
middle- (and upper-)class heroines and narratives of motherhood over
all others. Cumulatively, these re-visions of Queen Victoria as the ideal,
youthful, postfeminist subject end up rewriting the received image of the
monarch as a stern-looking, old widow in black weeds, generating a cul-
tural memory that expands the neo-Victorian imaginarium.
What the recent biopics of Victoria share with other screen texts
here discussed is a stress on the heroines’ youthfulness: Alice of Alice
in Wonderland, Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White, Selina in
Affinity, Joanna in Sweeney Todd and Edith in Crimson Peak (as well as
the protagonists of the adapted Victorian novels—Becky at the begin-
ning of in Vanity Fair and Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady) are, or are
about to turn, 19. The neo-Victorian past is thus imagined as a youthful
era of generative potential. This idealisation of the past as holding out
the promise of a better future recalls, to some extent, the dynamics of
Coupland’s ‘Now Denial’: these screen texts offer the pleasures of a nos-
talgic return to an era of perceived gender certainties for a generation of
viewers who take feminism’s achievements for granted and who do not
have a memory of its struggle. As the following chapters illustrate, it is
through the fashioning of young heroines that the legislated nostalgia of
neo-Victorianism on screen merges with, and assists in the generation of,
a postfeminist sensibility.

Notes
1. 
These include examples as various as the Mann Booker prize win-
ning novel The Luminaries (2013) by the New Zealand author Eleanor
Catton, the globally popular TV shows such as BBC’s Sherlock (2010–
2017) and Sky Atlantic/Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), biop-
ics like ITV’s TV series Victoria (2016–present) or reality TV-inspired
factual programming such as Victorian Farm (BBC2, 2009), Victorian
Farm Christmas (BBC2, 2011) or Victorian Bakers (BBC2, 2016). The
Victorian period is the setting of some popular video games, such as
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate or PS4 The Order: 1886 (both 2015). These
have come on the heels of popular graphic novels such as Bryan Talbot’s
Grandville series (2009–present) and Alan Moore’s From Hell (1989)
and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (1999–2007), both
adapted for the big screen in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
18 A. Primorac

2. See, for example, American Vogue’s December 2015 fashion editori-

al’s praise of Victoriana and lace (‘The Big Tease’), Vogue Nederland’s
November 2012 neo-Victorian spread, Prada’s corset inspired autumn/
winter women’s collection for 2016 and its Steampunk-inspired mens-
wear collection for autumn/winter 2012, or the decidedly neo-Victorian
turn in wallpaper design. The latter was notable throughout all the major
brands in Britain over the last few years and was lavishly displayed on the
set of Ripper Street or, more interestingly, in the Baker Street interiors
of BBC’s Sherlock further promoted through WearSherlock, the series
blog on costumes and props (see http://wearsherlock.tumblr.com/). In
terms of arts and crafts, the Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition Victoriana:
The Art of Revival (7 September–8 December 2013), accompanied by
the eclectic publication Victoriana: A Miscellany edited by Sonia Solicari,
offered an insight into the state of contemporary neo-Victorian arts and
crafts, showcasing works as various as pottery by the Turner prize win-
ner Grayson Perry, Miss Pokeno’s taxidermy chair and a postcolonial
photographic reimagining of Dorian Gray by Yinka Shonibare. Recently
the photographic collages by Charlotte Cory have also been attracting
attention (e.g. Cory’s Capturing the Brontës exhibition at the Brontë
Parsonage, 4 October–31 December 2013).
3. Most notable examples would be Sally Shuttleworth’s introduction of
‘retro-Victorian’ (1998) and Andrea Kirchknopf’s case for ‘post-Victori-
anism’ (2008) following its tentative use by Kucich and Sadoff (2000).
4. The peer-reviewed, open access journal of Neo-Victorian Studies is hosted
by Swansea University and edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke, who is also
the co-editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s (now Brill’s) Neo-
Victorian Series.
5. See, for example, the collection of essays Drawing on the Victorians: The
Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (2016) edited by
Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell.
6. See, for example, Benjamin Poore’s Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern
British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (2011).
7. See, for example, the final chapter in Shachar’s Cultural Afterlives
and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and
Company (2012) and selected chapters in Functions of Victorian Culture
at a Present Time (2002) edited by Krueger or Victorian Afterlives
(2000) edited by Kucich and Sadoff. Monographs dealing with contem-
porary uses of Victorianism give a single-topic analysis of fiction (e.g.
Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–
2000 (2004), Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing (2009) or
King’s The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 19

(2005)). Books that tackle screen adaptation as part of neo-Victorianism

usually mention it in passing—for example, Heilmann and Llewellyn’s
seminal Neo-Victorianism: Victorians in the Twenty-first Century 1999–
2009 (2010) deals with one film adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel in
one of the chapters; Joyce’s The Victorians in a Rearview Mirror (2007)
dedicates one chapter to heritage film industry; and Victoriana: Histories,
Fictions, Criticism (2007) by Kaplan discusses Campion’s film The Piano
in a chapter. Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss’s edited collection includes two
essays on screen adaptations of Victorian literature (by Anne Enderwitz
and Doris Feldmann, and Jessica Cox respectively).
8. Notable exceptions are Julia Kinzler’s article on The Young Victoria and
Kara M. Manning’s article on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, both
published in Neo-Victorian Studies 4:2 (2011).
9. For an example of a well-balanced, thematically focused, study of both
textual and screen afterlives of Victorians, see Helen Davies’s Neo-
Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show
(2015).
10. At the time of writing, Neo-Victorian Studies published a call for papers
for the 2017 special issue entitled Screening the Victorians in the Twenty-
First Century, to be edited by Chris Louttit and Erin Louttit.
11. See, for example, Liora Brosh’s Screening Novel Women: From British
Domestic Fiction to Film (2008), Dianne Sadoff’s Victorian Vogue: British
Novels on Screen (2010) or Burnham Bloom and Sanders Pollock’s edited
collection Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation (2011). Shachar’s
monograph on adaptations of Wuthering Heights (2012) dedicates a
chapter to a neo-Victorian adaptation. The forthcoming collection edited
by Benjamin Poore entitled Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and
Transformations in Popular Culture (2017) includes a number of essays
on screen adaptation with a thematic focus on the representations of
villainy.
12. While the first titles to be studied as neo-Victorian were published in late
1960s (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and John Fowles’s The
French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969), it is in the 1990s that there is a
surge in self-conscious historical novels that will be described as neo-Vic-
torian (see Mitchell 2010, pp. 1–3; Hadley 2010, p. 2). Recently, argu-
ments have been put forward to consider as neo-Victorian a number of
novels published earlier in the twenty-first century (see Grasl 2014).
13. For a detailed overview, see Monk (2011).
14. See, especially, Kucich and Sadoff’s edited collection Victorian Afterlife
(2000); Sadoff’s monograph Victorian Vogue (2010), the collection
of essays Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation (2011) edited by
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twenty-four hours was correspondingly decreased; while many a
tenement-house family spent Sunday in the country because for the
first time the head of the family could not use up his money in getting
drunk. The one all-important element in good citizenship in our
country is obedience to law, and nothing is more needed than the
resolute enforcement of law. This we gave.
There was no species of mendacity to which our opponents did
not resort in the effort to break us down in our purpose. For weeks
they eagerly repeated the tale that the saloons were as wide open as
ever; but they finally abandoned this when the counsel for the Liquor
Dealers’ Association admitted in open court, at the time when we
secured the conviction of thirty of his clients and thereby brought the
fight to an end, that over nine tenths of the liquor dealers had been
rendered bankrupt because we had stopped that illegal trade which
gave them the best portion of their revenue. They then took the line
that by devoting our attention to enforcing the liquor law we
permitted crime to increase. This, of course, offered a very congenial
field for newspapers like the World, which exploited it to the utmost;
all the more readily since the mere reiteration of the falsehood
tended to encourage criminals, and so to make it not a falsehood.
For a time the cry was not without influence, even with decent
people, especially if they belonged to the class of the timid rich; but it
simply wasn’t true, and so this bubble went down stream with the
others. For six or eight months the cry grew, first louder, then lower;
and then it died away. A commentary upon its accuracy was
furnished toward the end of our administration; for in February 1897,
the Judge who addressed the grand jury of the month was able to
congratulate them upon the fact that there was at that time less
crime in New York relatively to the population than ever before; and
this held true for our two years’ service.
In re-organizing the force the Board had to make, and did make,
more promotions, more appointments, and more dismissals than had
ever before been made in the same length of time. We were so
hampered by the law that we were not able to dismiss many of the
men whom we should have dismissed, but we did turn out 200 men
—more than four times as many as had ever been turned out in the
same length of time before; all of them being dismissed after formal
trial, and after having been given full opportunity to be heard in their
own defence. We appointed about 1700 men all told—again more
than four times as many as ever before; for we were allowed a large
increase of the police force by law. We made 130 promotions; more
than had been made in the six preceding years.
All this work was done in strictest accord with what we have grown
to speak of as the principles of civil service reform. In making
dismissals we paid heed merely to the man’s efficiency and past
record, refusing to consider outside pressure; under the old regime
no policeman with sufficient influence behind him was ever
dismissed, no matter what his offence. In making promotions we
took into account not only the man’s general record, his faithfulness,
industry and vigilance, but also his personal prowess as shown in
any special feat of daring, whether in the arresting of criminals or in
the saving of life—for the police service is military in character, and
we wished to encourage the military virtues. In making appointments
we found that it was practicable to employ a system of rigid
competitive examinations, which, as finally perfected, combined a
very severe physical examination with a mental examination such as
could be passed by any man who had attended one of our public
schools. Of course there was also a rigid investigation of character.
Theorists have often sneered at civil service reform as
“impracticable;” and I am very far from asserting that written
competitive examinations are always applicable, or that they may not
sometimes be merely stop-gaps, used only because they are better
than the methods of appointing through political endorsement; but
most certainly the system worked admirably in the Police
Department. We got the best lot of recruits for patrolmen that had
ever been obtained in the history of the force, and we did just as well
in our examinations for matrons and police surgeons. The uplifting of
the force was very noticeable, both physically and mentally. The best
men we got were those who had served for three years or so in the
Army or Navy. Next to these came the railroad men. One noticeable
feature of the work was that we greatly raised the proportion of
native-born, until, of the last hundred appointed, ninety-four per cent.
were Americans by birth. Not once in a hundred times did we know
the politics of the appointee, and we paid as little heed to this as to
their religion.
Another of our important tasks was seeing that the elections were
carried on honestly. Under the old Tammany rule the cheating was
gross and flagrant, and the police were often deliberately used to
facilitate fraudulent practices at the polls. This came about in part
from the very low character of the men put in as election officers. By
conducting a written examination of the latter, and supplementing
this by a careful inquiry into their character, in which we invited any
decent outsiders to assist, we very distinctly raised their calibre. To
show how necessary our examinations were, I may mention that
before each election held under us we were obliged to reject, for
moral or mental shortcomings, over a thousand of the men whom the
regular party organizations, exercising their legal rights, proposed as
election officers. We then merely had to make the police thoroughly
understand that their sole duty was to guarantee an honest election,
and that they would be punished with the utmost rigor if they
interfered with honest citizens on the one hand, or failed to prevent
fraud and violence on the other. The result was that the elections of
1895 and 1896 were by far the most honest and orderly ever held in
New York City.
There were a number of other ways in which we sought to reform
the police force, less important, and nevertheless very important. We
paid particular heed to putting a premium on specially meritorious
conduct, by awarding certificates of honorable mention, and medals,
where we were unable to promote. We introduced a system of pistol
practice by which, for the first time, the policemen were brought to a
reasonable standard of efficiency in handling their revolvers. The
Bertillion system for the identification of criminals was introduced. A
bicycle squad was organized with remarkable results, this squad
speedily becoming a kind of corps d’elite, whose individual members
distinguished themselves not only by their devotion to duty, but by
repeated exhibitions of remarkable daring and skill. One important bit
of reform was abolishing the tramp lodging-houses, which had
originally been started in the police stations, in a spirit of unwise
philanthropy. These tramp lodging-houses, not being properly
supervised, were mere nurseries for pauperism and crime, tramps
and loafers of every shade thronging to the city every winter to enjoy
their benefits. We abolished them, a municipal lodging-house being
substituted. Here all homeless wanderers were received, forced to
bathe, given night-clothes before going to bed, and made to work
next morning, and in addition they were so closely supervised that
habitual tramps and vagrants were speedily detected and
apprehended.
There was a striking increase in the honesty of the force, and
there was a like increase in its efficiency. When we took office it is
not too much to say that the great majority of the citizens of New
York were firmly convinced that no police force could be both honest
and efficient. They felt it to be part of the necessary order of things
that a policeman should be corrupt, and they were convinced that
the most efficient way of warring against certain forms of crime—
notably crimes against person and property—was by enlisting the
service of other criminals, and of purveyors of vice generally, giving
them immunity in return for their aid. Before we took power the
ordinary purveyor of vice was allowed to ply his or her trade
unmolested, partly in consideration of paying blackmail to the police,
partly in consideration of giving information about any criminal who
belonged to the unprotected classes. We at once broke up this
whole business of blackmail and protection, and made war upon all
criminals alike, instead of getting the assistance of half in warring on
the other half. Nevertheless, so great was the improvement in the
spirit of the force, that, although deprived of their former vicious
allies, they actually did better work than ever before against those
criminals who threatened life and property. Relatively to the
population, fewer crimes of violence occurred during our
administration of the Board than in any previous two years of the
city’s history in recent times; and the total number of arrests of
criminals increased, while the number of cases in which no arrest
followed the commission of crime decreased. The detective bureau
nearly doubled the number of arrests made compared with the year
before we took office; obtaining, moreover, 365 convictions of felons
and 215 convictions for misdemeanors, as against 269 and 105
respectively for the previous year. At the same time every attempt at
riot or disorder was summarily checked, and all gangs of violent
criminals brought into immediate subjection; while on the other hand
the immense mass meetings and political parades were handled with
such care that not a single case of clubbing of any innocent citizen
was reported.
The result of our labors was of value to the city, for we gave the
citizens better protection than they had ever before received, and at
the same time cut out the corruption which was eating away civic
morality. We showed conclusively that it was possible to combine
both honesty and efficiency in handling the police. We were attacked
with the most bitter animosity by every sensational newspaper and
every politician of the baser sort, not because of our shortcomings,
but because of what we did that was good. We enforced the laws as
they were on the statute books, we broke up blackmail, we kept
down the spirit of disorder, and repressed rascality, and we
administered the force with an eye single to the welfare of the city. In
doing this we encountered, as we had expected, the venemous
opposition of all men whose interest it was that corruption should
continue, or who were of such dull morality that they were not willing
to see honesty triumph at the cost of strife.

FOOTNOTES:
[14] Atlantic Monthly, September, 1897.
[15]My predecessor in the Presidency of the Police Board.
[16]The italics are my own.
 IX
THE VICE-PRESIDENCY AND THE CAMPAIGN OF
1896[17]

The Vice-President is an officer unique in his character and

functions, or to speak more properly, in his want of functions while he
remains Vice-President, and in his possibility of at any moment
ceasing to be a functionless official and becoming the head of the
whole nation. There is no corresponding position in any
constitutional government. Perhaps the nearest analogue is the heir
apparent in a monarchy. Neither the French President nor the British
Prime Minister has a substitute, ready at any moment to take his
place, but exercising scarcely any authority until his place is taken.
The history of such an office is interesting, and the personality of the
incumbent for the time being may at any moment become of vast
importance.
The founders of our government—the men who did far more than
draw up the Declaration of Independence, for they put forth the
National Constitution—in many respects builded very wisely of set
purpose. In some cases they built wiser than they knew. In yet other
instances they failed entirely to achieve objects for which they had
endeavored to provide by a most elaborate and ingenious
governmental arrangement. They distrusted what would now be
called pure Democracy, and they dreaded what we would now call
party government.
 Their distrust of Democracy induced them to construct the
electoral college for the choice of a President, the original idea being
that the people should elect their best and wisest men who in turn
should, untrammeled by outside pressure, elect a President. As a
matter of fact the functions of the electorate have now by time and
custom become of little more importance than those of so many
letter-carriers. They deliver the electoral votes of their states just as
a letter-carrier delivers his mail. But in the presidential contest this
year it may be we shall see a partial return to the ideals of the men
of 1789; for some of the electors on the Bryan-Sewall-Watson ticket
may exercise a choice between the vice-presidential candidates.
The distrust felt by the founders of the constitution for party
government took shape in the scheme to provide that the majority
party should have the foremost place, and the minority party the
second place, in the national executive. The man who received the
greatest number of electoral votes was made President, and the
man who received the second greatest number was made Vice-
President, on a theory somewhat akin to that by which certain
reformers hope to revolutionize our system of voting at the present
day. In the early days under the present constitution this system
resulted in the choice of Adams for President and of his anti-type
Jefferson as Vice-President, the combination being about as
incongruous as if we should now see McKinley President and either
Bryan or Watson Vice-President. Even in theory such an
arrangement is very bad, because under it the Vice-President might
readily be, and as a matter of fact was, a man utterly opposed to all
the principles to which the President was devoted, so that the
arrangement provided in the event of the death of the President, not
for a succession, but for a revolution. The system was very soon
dropped, and each party nominated its own candidates for both
positions. But it was many years before all the members of the
electoral college of one party felt obliged to cast the same votes for
both President and Vice-President, and consequently there was a
good deal of scrambling and shifting in taking the vote. When,
however, the parties had crystallized into Democratic and Whig, a
score of years after the disappearance of the Federalists, the system
of party voting also crystallized. Each party then as a rule nominated
one man for President and one for Vice-President, these being voted
for throughout the nation. This system in turn speedily produced
strange results, some of which remain to this day. There are and
must be in every party factions. The victorious faction may crush out
and destroy the others, or it may try to propitiate at least its most
formidable rival. In consequence, the custom grew of offering the
vice-presidency as a consolation prize, to be given in many cases to
the very men who were most bitterly opposed to the nomination of
the successful candidate for President. Sometimes this consolation
prize was awarded for geographical reasons, sometimes to bring into
the party men who on points of principle might split away because of
the principles of the presidential candidate himself, and at other
times it was awarded for merely factional reasons to some faction
which did not differ in the least from the dominant faction in matters
of principles, but had very decided views on the question of offices.
The presidency being all important, and the vice-presidency of
comparatively little note, the entire strength of the contending
factions is spent in the conflict over the first, and very often a man
who is most anxious to take the first place will not take the second,
preferring some other political position. It has thus frequently
happened that the two candidates have been totally dissimilar in
character and even in party principle, though both running on the
same ticket. Very odd results have followed in more than one
instance.
A striking illustration of the evils sometimes springing from this
system is afforded by what befell the Whigs after the election and
death of the elder Harrison. Translated into the terms of the politics
of continental Europe of to-day, Harrison’s adherents represented a
union between the right and the extreme left against the centre. That
is, the regular Whigs who formed the bulk of his supporters were
supplemented by a small body of extremists who in their political
principles were even more alien to the Whigs than were the bulk of
the regular Democrats, but who themselves hated these regular
Democrats with the peculiar ferocity so often felt by the extremist for
the man who goes far, but not quite far enough. In consequence, the
President represented Whig principles, the Vice-President
represented a rather extreme form of the very principles to which the
Whigs were most opposed. The result was that when Harrison died
the presidency fell into the hands of a man who had but a corporal’s
guard of supporters in the nation, and who proceeded to oppose all
the measures of the immense majority of those who elected him.
A somewhat similar instance was afforded in the case of Lincoln
and Johnson. Johnson was put on the ticket largely for geographical
reasons, and on the death of Lincoln he tried to reverse the policy of
the party which had put him in office. An instance of an entirely
different kind is afforded by Garfield and Arthur. The differences
between these two party leaders were mainly merely factional. Each
stood squarely on the platform of the party, and all the principles
advocated by one were advocated by the other; yet the death of
Garfield meant a complete overturn in the personnel of the upper
Republican officials, because Arthur had been nominated expressly
to placate the group of party leaders who most objected to the
nomination of Garfield. Arthur made a very good President, but the
bitterness caused by his succession to power nearly tore the party in
twain. It will be noted that most of these evils arose from the fact that
the Vice-President under ordinary circumstances possesses so little
real power. He presides over the Senate and he has in Washington a
position of marked social importance, but his political weight as Vice-
President is almost nil. There is always a chance that he may
become President. As this is only a chance it seems quite impossible
to persuade politicians to give it proper weight. This certainly does
not seem right. The Vice-President should, so far as possible,
represent the same views and principles which have secured the
nomination and election of the President, and he should be a man
standing well in the councils of the party, trusted by his fellow party
leaders, and able in the event of any accident to his chief to take up
the work of the latter just where it was left. The Republican party has
this year nominated such a man in the person of Mr. Hobart. But
nominations of this kind have by no means always been the rule of
recent years. No change of parties, for instance, could well produce
a greater revolution in policy than would have been produced at
almost any time during the last three years if Mr. Cleveland had died
and Mr. Stevenson had succeeded him.
 One sure way to secure this desired result would undoubtedly be
to increase the power of the Vice-President. He should always be a
man who would be consulted by the President on every great party
question. It would be very well if he were given a seat in the Cabinet.
It might be well if, in addition to his vote in the Senate in the event of
a tie, he should be given a vote, on ordinary occasions, and
perchance on occasions a voice in the debates. A man of the
character of Mr. Hobart is sure to make his weight felt in an
administration, but the power of thus exercising influence should be
made official rather than personal.
The present contest offers a striking illustration of the way in which
the Vice-President ought and ought not to be nominated, and to
study this it is necessary to study not only the way in which the
different candidates were nominated, but at least in outline the
characters of the candidates themselves.
For the first time in many years, indeed for the first time since
parties have fairly crystallized along their present lines, there are
three parties running, two of which support the same presidential
candidate but different candidates for the vice-presidency. Each one
of these parties has carried several states during the last three or
four years. Each party has a right to count upon a number of
electoral votes as its own. Closely though the Democratic and
Populistic parties have now approximated in their principles as
enunciated in the platforms of Chicago and St. Louis, they yet do
differ on certain points, and neither would have any chance of
beating the Republicans without the help of the other. The result has
been a coalition, yet each party to the coalition has retained enough
of its jealous individuality to make it refuse to accept the candidate of
the other for the second position on the ticket.
The Republican party stands on a normal and healthy party
footing. It has enunciated a definite set of principles entirely in
accord with its past actions. It has nominated on this platform a
President and Vice-President, both of whom are thorough-going
believers in all the party principles set forth in the platform upon
which they stand. Mr. McKinley believes in sound finance,—that is, in
a currency based upon gold and as good as gold. So does Mr.
Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in a protective tariff. So does Mr.
Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in the only method of preserving
orderly liberty,—that is, in seeing that the laws are enforced at
whatever cost. So does Mr. Hobart. In short, Mr. Hobart stands for
precisely the same principles that are represented by Mr. McKinley.
He is a man of weight in the community, who has had wide
experience both in business and in politics. He is taking an active
part in the campaign, and he will be a power if elected to the vice-
presidency. All the elements which have rallied behind Mr. McKinley
are just as heartily behind Mr. Hobart. The two represent the same
forces, and they stand for a party with a coherent organization and a
definite purpose, to the carrying out of which they are equally
pledged.
It will be a matter of much importance to the nation that the next
Vice-President should stand for some settled policy. It is an
unhealthy thing to have the Vice-President and President
represented by principles so far apart that the succession of one to
the place of the other means a change as radical as any possible
party overturn. The straining and dislocation of our governmental
institutions was very great when Tyler succeeded Harrison and
Johnson succeeded Lincoln. In each case the majority of the party
that had won the victory felt that it had been treated with scandalous
treachery, for Tyler grew to be as repulsive to the Whigs as Polk
himself, and the Republicans could scarcely have hated Seymour
more than they hated Johnson. The Vice-President has a three-fold
relation. First to the administration; next as presiding officer in the
Senate, where he should be a man of dignity and force; and third in
his social position, for socially he ranks second to the President
alone. Mr. Morton was in every way an admirable Vice-President
under General Harrison, and had he succeeded to the presidential
chair there would have been no break in the great policies which
were being pushed forward by the administration. But during Mr.
Cleveland’s two incumbencies Messrs. Hendricks and Stevenson
have represented, not merely hostile factions, but principles and
interests from which he was sundered by a gulf quite as great as that
which divided him from his normal party foes. Mr. Sewall would make
a colorless Vice-President, and were he at any time to succeed Mr.
Bryan in the White House would travel Mr. Bryan’s path only with
extreme reluctance and under duress. Mr. Watson would be a more
startling, more attractive, and more dangerous figure, for if he got the
chance he would lash the nation with a whip of scorpions, while Mr.
Bryan would be content with the torture of ordinary thongs.
Finally, Mr. Hobart would typify as strongly as Mr. McKinley himself
what was best in the Republican party and in the nation, and would
stand as one of the known champions of his party on the very
questions at issue in the present election. He is a man whose advice
would be sought by all who are prominent in the administration. In
short, he would be the kind of man whom the electors are certain to
choose as Vice-President if they exercise their choice rationally.
The men who left the Republican party because of the nomination
of McKinley would have left it just as quickly if Hobart had been
nominated. They do not believe in sound finance, and though many
of the bolters object to anarchy and favor protection, they feel that in
this crisis their personal desires must be repressed and that they are
conscientiously bound to support the depreciated dollar even at the
cost of incidentally supporting the principles of a low tariff and the
doctrine that a mob should be allowed to do what it likes with
immunity. There are many advocates of clipped or depreciated
money who are rather sorry to see the demand for such currency
coupled with a demand for more lawlessness and an abandonment
by the government of the police functions which are the essential
attributes of civilization; but they have overcome their reluctance,
feeling that on the whole it is more important that the money of the
nation should be unsound than that its laws should be obeyed.
People who feel this way are just as much opposed to Mr. Hobart as
to Mr. McKinley. They object to the platform upon which the two men
stand, and they object as much to the character of one man as to the
character of the other. They are repelled by McKinley’s allegiance to
the cause of sound money, and find nothing to propitiate them in
Hobart’s uncompromisingly honest attitude on the same question.
There is no reason whatever why any voter who would wish to vote
against the one should favor the other, or vice versa.
 When we cross the political line all this is changed. On the leading
issue of the campaign the entire triangle of candidates are a unit. Mr.
Bryan, the nominee for the presidency, and Messrs. Sewall and
Watson, the nominees for the vice-presidency, are almost equally
devoted adherents of the light-weight dollar and of a currency which
shall not force a man to repay what he has borrowed, and shall
punish the wrong-headed laborer, who expects to be paid his wages
in money worth something, as heavily as the business man or farmer
who is so immoral as to wish to pay his debts. All three are believers
in that old-world school of finance which appears under such protean
changes of policy, always desiring the increase of the circulating
medium, but differing as to the means, which in one age takes the
form of putting base metal in with the good, or of clipping the good,
and in another assumes the guise of fiat money, or the free coinage
of silver. On this currency question they are substantially alike,
agreeing (as one of their adherents picturesquely put it, in arguing in
favor of that form of abundant currency which has as its highest
exponent the money of the late Confederacy) that “the money which
was good enough for the soldiers of Washington is good enough for
us.” As a matter of fact the soldiers of Washington were not at all
grateful for the money which the loud-mouthed predecessors of Mr.
Bryan and his kind then thought “good enough” for them. The money
with which the veterans of Washington were paid was worth two
cents on the dollar, and as yet neither Mr. Bryan, Mr. Sewall, nor Mr.
Watson has advocated a two-cent copper dollar. Still, they are
striving toward this ideal, and in their advocacy of the fifty cent dollar
they are one.
But beyond this they begin to differ. Mr. Sewall distinctly sags
behind the leader of the spike team, Mr. Bryan, and still more
distinctly behind his rival, or running mate, or whatever one may
choose to call him, the Hon. Thomas Watson. There is far more
regard for the essential fitness of things in a ticket which contains Mr.
Bryan and Mr. Watson than one which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr.
Sewall. Mr. Watson is a man of Mr. Bryan’s type, only a little more
so. But Mr. Sewall is of a different type, and possesses many
attributes which must make association with him exceedingly painful,
not merely to Mr. Watson, but to Mr. Bryan himself. He is a well-to-do
man. Indeed in many communities he would be called a rich man.
He is a banker, a railroad man, a shipbuilder, and has been
successful in business. Now if Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson really stand
for any principle it is hostility to this kind of success. Thrift, industry,
and business energy are qualities which are quite incompatible with
true Populistic feeling. Payment of debts, like the suppression of
riots, is abhorrent to the Populistic mind. Such conduct strikes the
Populist as immoral. Mr. Bryan made his appearance in Congress
with two colleagues elected on the same ticket, one of whom stated
to the present writer that no honest man ever earned $5000 a year;
that whoever got that amount stole it. Mr. Sewall has earned many
times $5000 a year. He is a prosperous capitalist. Populism never
prospers save where men are unprosperous, and your true Populist
is especially intolerant of business success. If a man is a successful
business man he at once calls him a plutocrat.
He makes only one exception. A miner or speculator in mines may
be many times a millionaire and yet remain in good standing in the
Populist party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in his mind the
belief that silver is a cheap metal, and that silver money is, while not
fiat money, still a long step toward it. Silver is connected in his mind
with scaling down debts, the partial repudiation of obligations, and
other measures aimed at those odious moneyed tyrants who lend
money to persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have put their
ill-gotten gains in saving banks and kindred wicked institutions for
the encouragement of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable
associations quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact that the silver
man himself is rich. He is even for the moment blind to the further
fact that these pro-silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor
Altgeld, and their compeers, strenuously insist that the obligations to
themselves shall be liquidated in gold; indeed this particular
idiosyncrasy of the silver leaders is not much frowned upon by the
bulk of the Populists, because it has at least the merit of savoring
strongly of “doing” one’s creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver
mine owners may have earned their money honestly can outweigh
the other fact that they champion a species of currency which will
make most thrifty and honest men poorer, in the minds of the truly
logical Populist.
 But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the way of owing his
wealth to silver. He has made his money precisely as the most
loathed reprobate of Wall Street—or of New York, which the average
Populist regards as synonymous with Wall Street—has made his.
The average Populist does not draw fine distinctions. There are in
New York, as in other large cities, scoundrels of great wealth who
have made their money by means skilfully calculated to come just
outside the line of criminality. There are other men who have made
their money exactly as the successful miner or farmer makes his,—
that is, by the exercise of shrewdness, business daring, energy and
thrift. But the Populist draws no line of division between these two
classes. They have made money, and that is enough. One may have
built railroads and the other have wrecked them, but they are both
railroad men in his eyes, and that is all. One may have swindled his
creditors, and the other built up a bank which has been of
incalculable benefit to all who have had dealings with it, but to the
Populist they are both gold bugs, and as such noxious. Mr. Sewall is
the type of man the contemplation of which usually throws a Populist
orator into spasms. But it happens that he believes in free silver, just
as other very respectable men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith-
cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot of a
graveyard rabbit. There are very able men and very lovely women
who believe in each or all of these, and there are a much larger
number who believe in free silver. Had they lived in the days of
Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin being at that
time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which would
give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been
dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they
only believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the
domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as
a public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men.
He can hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago
platform. In the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are
given to thinking at all about public questions, the free-silver plank is
very far from being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put
together with such perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A
platform which declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and
which has the same strenuous objection to the exercise of the police
power by the general government that is felt in the circles presided
over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose
pictures appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, cannot
appeal to persons who have gone beyond the unpolished-stone
period of civilization.
The men who object to what they style “government by injunction”
are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty
sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves,
fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth
and woolly rhinoceros. They are interesting as representing a
geological survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the
least chance of their making the principles of this ages-buried past
living factors in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men
of good minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish
to pay one’s debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a
much less nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by
providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown
scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy
sentiment in the world, and there are always a certain number of
people whose minds are weak and whose emotions are strong and
who effervesce with sympathy toward any man who does wrong, and
with indignation against any man who chastises the criminal for
having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are always
reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to do
wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, very
practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great political
party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.
Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked the Supreme
Court. Again this represents a species of atavism,—that is, of
recurrence to the ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors.
Savages do not like an independent and upright judiciary. They want
the judge to decide their way, and if he does not, they want to
behead him. The Populists experience much the same emotions
when they realize that the judiciary stands between them and
plunder.
 Now on all these points Mr. Sewall can hardly feel complete
sympathy with his temporary allies. He is very anxious that the
Populists shall vote for him for Vice-President, and of course he feels
a kindly emotion toward those who do intend to vote for him. He
would doubtless pardon much heresy of political belief in any
member of the electoral college who feels that Sewall is his friend,
not Watson,—Codlin, not Short. He has, of course, a vein of the
erratic in his character, or otherwise he would not be in such
company at all, and would have no quality that would recommend
him to them. But on the whole his sympathies must lie with the man
who saves money rather than with the man who proposes to take
away the money when it has been saved, and with the policeman
who arrests a violent criminal rather than with the criminal. Such
sympathy puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist camp. He is
loud in his professions of belief in the remarkable series of principles
for which he is supposed to stand, but his protestations ring rather
hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubtless intends to support
Sewall, for he thinks him an unimportant tail to the Bryan kite. But,
though unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling of irritation,
as being at the best a rather ludicrous contrast to the rest of the kite.
He contributes no element of strength to the Bryan ticket, for other
men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of their toil simply
regard him as a renegade, and the average Populist, or Populistic
Democrat, does not like him, and accepts him simply because he
fears not doing so may jeopardize Bryan’s chances. He is in the
uncomfortable position always held by the respectable theorist who
gets caught in a revolutionary movement and has to wedge
nervously up into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not
troubled by any of his scruples, and who really do think that it is all
very fine and glorious. In fact Mr. Sewall is much the least
picturesque and the least appropriate figure on the platform or
platforms upon which Mr. Bryan is standing.
Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a Georgia cracker, is in
reality a far more suitable companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest.
It must be said, however, that if virtue always received its reward Mr.
Watson and not Mr. Bryan would stand at the head of the ticket. In
the language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely represents Mr.
Bryan raised several powers. The same is true of the Populist as
compared to the Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to
believe that free silver does represent the ultimate goal, and that his
friends do not intend to go further in the direction of fiat money. Mr.
Watson’s friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are much more
fearless and much more logical. They are willing to accept silver as a
temporary makeshift, but they want a currency based on corn and
cotton next, and ultimately a currency based on the desires of the
people who issue it. The statesmanlike utterance of that great
financier, Mr. Bryan’s chief rival for the nomination and at present his
foremost supporter, Mr. Bland, to the effect that he would “wipe out
the national debt as with a sponge,” meets with their cordial approval
as far as it goes, but they object to the qualification before the word
“debt.” In wiping out debts they do not wish to halt merely at the
national debt. The Populists indorsed Bryan as the best they could
get; but they hated Sewall so that they took the extraordinary step of
nominating the Vice-President before the President so as to make
sure of a really acceptable man in the person of Watson.
With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is
largely a mere form of intellectual entertainment; but with Mr. Watson
it represents an almost ferocious conviction. Someone has said that
Mr. Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South
for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who gives
him his strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the
North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the
South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is
certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is
infinitely more in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson’s followers
belong to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that
the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads,
dry-goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of
the mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished
Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. Not
only do they believe this, but they say it with appalling frankness.
They are very sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are.
They are also very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot
understand; and as they understand but little this opens a very wide
field for distrust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they
are then at least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort
they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a
man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at
any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being
symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning
and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause
them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with
jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at least
they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. They
possess many strong, rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible
politically, because they always confound the essentials and the non-
essentials, and though they often make war on vice, they rather
prefer making war upon prosperity and refinement.
Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place when he was born in
Georgia, for in Georgia the regular Democracy, while it has accepted
the principles of the Populists, has made war on their personnel, and
in every way strives to press them down. Far better for Mr. Watson
would it have been could he have been born in the adjacent State of
South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed the Democrats with a
gulp. Senator Tillman, the great Populist or Democratic orator from
South Carolina, possesses an untrammelled tongue any middle-of-
the-road man would envy: and moreover Mr. Tillman’s brother has
been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he never
wore either an overcoat or an undershirt, an issue which any
Populist statesman finds readily comprehensible, and which he
would recognize at first glance as being strong before the people. It
needs a certain amount of mental subtlety to appreciate that it is for
one’s interest to support a man because he is honest and has broad
views about coast defenses and the navy, and other similar subjects;
but it does not need any mind at all to have one’s prejudices stirred
in favor of a statesman whose claim to the title rests upon his
indifference to the requirements of civilized dress.
Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his
extreme suspiciousness, his distrust of anything he cannot
understand, and the feeling he encourages against all the elegancies
and decencies of civilized life, is an interesting personage. He
represents the real thing, while Bryan after all is more or less a sham
and a compromise. Mr. Watson would, at a blow, destroy all banks
and bankers, with a cheerful, albeit vague, belief that thereby he was
in some abstruse way benefiting the people at large. And he would
do this with the simple sincerity and faith of an African savage who
tries to benefit his tribe by a sufficiency of human sacrifices. But Mr.
Bryan would be beset by ugly doubts when he came to put into effect
all the mischievous beliefs of his followers, and Mr. Sewall would
doubtless be frankly miserable if it ever became necessary for him to
take a lead in such matters. Mr. Watson really ought to be the first
man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan second; for he is much the superior
in boldness, in thorough-going acceptance of his principles
according to their logical conclusions, and in sincerity of faith. It is
impossible not to regret that the Democrats and Populists should not
have put forward in the first place the man who genuinely represents
their ideas.
However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Watson will receive the
support to which he is entitled as a vice-presidential candidate. In the
South the Populists have been so crushed under the heel of the
Democrats, and have bitten that heel with such eager venom, that
they dislike entering into a coalition with them; but in the south the
Democrats will generally control the election machinery. In the far
West, and generally in those States where the Populist wing of the
new alliance is ascendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of
the Democrats. They know that their principles are substantially
identical, and they think it best to support the man who seems to
represent the majority faction among the various factions that stand
behind Bryan.
As a consequence of this curious condition of affairs there are
several interesting possibilities open. The electoral college consists
of the men elected at the polls in the various States to record the
decrees of the majorities in those States, and it has grown to be an
axiom of politics that they must merely register the will of the men
who elected them. But it does seem possible that in the present
election some of the electors may return to the old principles of a