It wasn’t the best of times, and it wasn’t the worst of times. For Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Cate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, Whitechapel, London in 1888 was the end of times. Known as “the canonical five” of Jack the Ripper’s victims, these women—largely invisible to London culture during their lives—can’t rest in their deaths. For 130 years writers, criminologists, armchair detectives, filmmakers, and artists have studied and reproduced all of the blood-soaked details of their murders
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BBC’s 2020 Dracula and its Others
Remakes of Victorian novels abound in the twenty-first century. While Dracula seems to be a particular favourite for re-writes, we seem consistently drawn back to the Victorian era for our gothic monsters: The Limehouse Golem, Penny Dreadful, Jekyll + Hyde, Sweeney Todd, and many more.[1] Beth Palmer describes these almost Freudian re-imaginings as ‘dramas which are often […] seeking to re-stage, in different ways, the neo-Victorian double-act of surprise and recognition: the Victorians were so strange; the Victorians were strange
Read moreThe Case of the Extraordinary Sidekick
“I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies” [1] Sherlock Holmes to Dr John Watson, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ Policing remains, today, a highly contested activity of the state.[2] It has professionalised—and bureaucratised—a great deal since its nineteenth-century inception, but it remains plagued by a fundamental anxiety that the police, not Lady Justice, are blind. This post explores the underlying mistrust of the professional police that flows from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories through to the
Read moreShannon Draucker, ‘The Queen Goes to the Opera’
Shannon Draucker is a PhD Candidate in English at Boston University. Her dissertation project, Sounding Bodies: Music and Physiology in Victorian Narrative, explores literary responses to emerging scientific understandings of the physics and physiology of sound during the Victorian period. Her project shows how new discoveries of the embodied nature of music and sound inform scenes in which authors grant their characters desires, pleasures, identities, and relationships otherwise unavailable to them. At Boston University, she teaches English and Writing courses
Read moreHila Shachar, ‘Walking New Myths: Sally Wainwright’s Brontë Biopic’
Hila Shachar is a Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, and a member of the Centre for Adaptations who specialises in the adaptation of literary works and authors in various media including film, television, and ballet. Her book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), was featured in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, as well as nominated for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She also works as
Read moreEmily Bowles, “What’s to-day, my fine fellow?”: Classifying and Dating Tony Jordan’s ‘Dickensian’
Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network and assistant administrator for the Women’s Life Writing Network. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles I had been keeping an eye out for Dickensian since October 2014, when rumours of it echoed around the Dickens Day Conference in Senate
Read moreEmma Curry, ‘Dickensian’ panel discussion, featuring Tony Jordan and Professor Juliet John: Event Report
Emma Curry is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London and recently submitted her thesis, titled ‘Language and the Fragmented Body in the Novels of Charles Dickens’. Over the past eighteen months Emma has also been coordinating the ‘Our Mutual Friend Tweets’ project, a Twitter-based adaption of Dickens’s final completed novel. You can follow her on Twitter here: @EmmaLCurry “What if it was set inside Dickens’s mind?” With that single remark, it became clear that Tony Jordan’s new TV
Read moreBenjamin Poore, Jekyll and Hyde: The Victorians’ Last Gasp?
Benjamin Poore is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. He is the author of Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (Palgrave, 2012) and Theatre & Empire (Palgrave, forthcoming). Ben is currently working on a monograph on Sherlock Holmes and stage adaptation in the new millennium. According to Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, we’re rapidly heading towards ‘peak reboot’: the point where the number of mythic and pop
Read moreJames Cutler, The Cultural Afterlives of Our Mutual Friend: ‘Adapting Our Mutual Friend for TV and Radio’ Panel Report
James John Cutler, Royal Holloway James Cutler is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously studied at Aberystwyth, Liverpool and Cambridge. His thesis examines how and why certain places dominate the cultural memory of the most enduringly popular Victorian novelists. It investigates the crucial link between Victorian literary longevity and a cultural heritage characterised by strong associations with particular places. In addition to doctoral work, James volunteers at the Charles Dickens Museum and plays cricket for
Read more‘Neo-Victorian Villainy: Adaptation and Reinvention on Page, Stage and Screen’ Conference Report
By Benjamin Poore, University of York Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig) then presented the second keynote, on Nell Leyshon and her first-person tale of murder The Colour of Milk, which has been widely compared with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Via a live Skype link with the author in the department’s Holbeck Cinema, Professor Voigts was able to interview Leyshon, and she was able to take questions from the floor. One of the questions that arose from this session, and from the
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