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 certainties 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 understandable 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 disseminating their versions of legislated nostalgia on a global scale.
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 government, 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 subculture s’ 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 novels 5 ), 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 theatre 6 adaptations of Victorian and/or neo-Victorian fiction has usually been in the context of a broader discussion of the relevant adapted text 7 ; indeed, neo-Victorianism on screen as a subject in its own right has rarely been dealt with independently 8 : it is usually a part of the bigger 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 novel set in the Victorian period; as such, it has generally been aligned to the genre of historiographic metafiction. What is surprising, as the adaptation 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 secondary 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 reimagined 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 adaptation and appropriation’ (Whelehan 2012, p. 272). Since screen adaptations 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 cultural production’ (Pidduck 2004, p. 4). So far, the only monograph dealing 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...