Ben Moore (University of Manchester) Ben.moore@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk The current BBC television series The Paradise, based on Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), arrives in the wake of a number of successful British television period dramas, most conspicuously Downton Abbey, whose popularity and critical acclaim suggests that the appetite of UK and US audiences for class-based dramas combining buttoned-up propriety with a hint of sexual and political transgression continues to provide a lucrative market for programme-makers. The
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The Delights of “Living in” and Working in a Cardiff Department Store
Michelle Matthews (Independent Scholar) The industrial revolution has typically been characterised as separating home from work. Yet as the BBC drama ‘The Paradise’ shows, home and work merged in the department store with shop assistants often living over the shop as part of their employment term. Fondly known as ‘Living in’, this practice played a crucial role in the recruitment of staff in a number of professions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the department store it functioned as
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