The gift of sound and vision: Review of ‘The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show’ @ BFI IMAX

Me and My Two Friends (1898)

Taking my seat within the IMAX for this brilliantly enchanting show, I felt a strange sense of inbetweenness, a kind of Whovian inkling of being geographically located in one place but in temporal terms straddling multiple moments. The IMAX is a contemporary rotunda that I last visited for that innovatory 3D motion-capture spectacle Avatar, yet in shape and content is comparable to those in those that showed the original panoramas of the early 19th century. Not far from the IMAX site is the vantage point that was used for those same panoramas to show the previously very grounded Londoners what their city looked like from on high. Moreover, what I was about to watch would use the latest in restoration and presentation techniques to show us films of events and people that were existed 120 years ago.

Presented by Bryony Dixon, curator at the BFI National Archive, and given a live musical accompaniment from John Sweeney’s Biograph Band, this event particularly showcased the work of William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, whose British Mutoscope and Biograph Company produced film-shows for London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties for a five-year period from 1897. Having cut his teeth on producing the single-spectator Kinetoscope for Thomas Edison, Dickson had come back to the UK to make bigger films for bigger audiences and hopefully much bigger profits. The Palace was one of a number of marquee West End music halls along with the Empire and Alhambra (fittingly still showing films). Dickson’s large-format films (four times the size of the typical 35mm of early films), which last just a minute or two each, were, as the BFI publicity for the film has observed “the IMAX films of their day”.

The film shows of Dickson, the Lumieres and R.W. Paul were substantial acts in themselves, showing a number of films together in roughly 20-minute slots with the same kind of musical accompaniment and spoken commentary that Sweeney and Dixon replicated on the night. We saw over fifty of these short films back-to-back, and it would certainly be fascinating to contextualise these individual pieces in situ with the rest of the bill for a particular evening. The ‘variety’ aspect of such shows meant that the film shows were part of a miscellany of diversions, but no doubt some fascinating interplays and dialogues could be teased out as the new form rubbed shoulders with established forms, and sometimes jostled its way to the front of the popularity stakes.

This particular (picture) box of delights, in keeping with the variety show format, they presented an eclectic array of subjects: we saw the sublime in both natural and man-made forms – gorgeous panoramic vistas of mountains and crashing waves, alongside the floating firework display that was the Battleship Odin ‘firing all her Guns’ (1900). The Leviathan liner Oceania ploughed its way through the churning waters and engulfed the screen in an overwhelming spectacle that precedes the Imperial Destroyer in Star Wars by nearly 80 years. With such sublime moments came the ridiculous, in the form of slapstick skits, grotesquely grinning faces stuffing themselves with food, and nonconformist animals and children who wandered in and out of frame as they pleased.

We stood and watched the events unfold before us, but also jumped aboard moving vehicles and took journeys through cities and mountain passes from the comfort of our padded cinema seats. As vistas were swept and we kept pace with speeding trains, one wonders how some of the scenes were shot in those pioneering days of film, where much of the cinematographer’s modern gadgetry was yet to be devised.

These films unpackaged moments of history as they actually happened and were sometimes seen by audiences soon after they were filmed. Footage of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee reached American audiences a little over a week later, and the Grand National from Aintree was re-run to a West End audience the very night of the race after some hasty train-bound editing. In these films of the most newsworthy events of the day – royal visits, highlights of ‘The Season’ like the Boat Race or Henley Regatta – a fresh immediacy still radiates from the screen. But elsewhere, in a crossing of trajectories, the filming of a cavalry drill at Aldershot in 1898 almost immediately became a document of a past tradition – the last cavalry charge in action would occur just a year later in the Sudan.

Dickson’s work during the Boer War formed a central section, ‘The Biograph in Battle’, which highlighted the film-maker at his most versatile. In a series of half-a-dozen films, which would have received the full three-cheers-and-bunting treatment when originally shown, Dickson managed to capture both the triumphant pomp and deflating destruction of war – the march of the Gordon Highlanders in victory at Ladysmith was somewhat overshadowed by the preceding withdrawal from the Battle of Spion Kop as a long and winding trail of ambulances and manual stretchers trudge across the river. There was also something in between, at the moment when a detail of British troops and local labourers repair the bomb-damaged bridge at Frere working to a jaunty rhythm. And this was all done, lest we forget, on a very large, very heavy camera, with its assorted paraphernalia – 68mm film reel, motor batteries and tripod – so large that a number of crew could literally eat their dinner off it.

I was particularly engaged in the different ways that people reacted to the novel and intrusive presence of the camera: in large crowd scenes, a number simply pass by oblivious, but many of those being observed show a keenness to observe in turn, revealing their fascination with this new medium (and nearly every crowd scene includes a cheeky scamp who wants to stay in shot and persistently makes incursions across the camera’s progress). Already, figures of authority seemed to be developing a nascent media awareness: Pope Leo VIII pauses to take a seat in the Vatican Loggia to face the camera directly and wave us an avuncular benediction, flanked more camera-shy attendants. Similarly, the great Shakespearean actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree works the camera in a mesmeric minute or so as King John, who in a neat inversion is vivified during his death-throes in all of his histrionic splendour. The Australian cricket captain, filmed during their 1899 tour, is keen to stay stock-centre of the frame and hold the gaze of the camera while the rest of his team casually pass by, staring down the camera as if were an opposition batsman to be glared into capitulation. But in a welcome antidote to our ultra-media-savvy times, there was also a charming naivety about a number of the reactions: a group of lifeboatmen proudly demonstrating their live-saving skills look suitably chastened when the director informs them that they’re actually resuscitating the dummy off-camera.

I also got an incredibly strong sense of the materiality of what I was looking at, through the inevitable minor blemishes that appeared – crackles, patches of light, spidery figures dancing across the screen – and which carried an inherent beauty of their own. One of the restoration team described the amazing and painstaking work behind the restoration of these fragile fragments of film and this was a further salutary reminder of how physically and heavily industrial early film-making was.

Ultimately then, this was a ‘moving’ picture show in more ways than one: as a spectator I could not help but feel a strong emotional engagement with what I was seeing: part of our desire as Victorianists and Neo-Victorianists is to make the bones of our 19th-century for-bearers live in whatever ways we can, but few methods can feel so direct and immediate as this eyes-wide-open visceral thrill that I experienced, something I still seek out every time I enter the cinema.

The final film follows a train carriage winding its way along the Georgetown railway loop, from which ladies wave to us with handkerchiefs. Thanks to fantastic restoration projects like this, which is just a prelude to next year’s 200th birthday celebrations for Queen Victoria, it is thankfully only a temporary leave-taking.

Watching the Detectives: Review of Pete Orford’s “‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’: Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel and our Endless Attempts to End It”

The introductory chapter of this thoughtful and engaging book concludes with the Beckettian image of the elusive cipher Dick Datchery frozen in the final moment of the Drood serial as Dickens had written it. Datchery endlessly repeats the act of eating his breakfast, but with the nagging feeling he should be moving his day onwards somewhere else. He ponders all the loose ends of the story so far, and thus lays the path neatly for what will follow in this fascinating investigation into the invented myths and manufactured mysteries that lay behind The Mystery.

The fictional interjections that conclude each chapter (reminiscent of the creative interludes that are scattered through Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens) are both emblematic of the enjoyable and well-informed nature of the whole work, and a palpable demonstration of how thoroughly immersed Orford has become in the world of this novel. This also comes through in Alys Jones’s wonderful pictorial interpretations of the original serial numbers, which are a cornerstone of the Drood Inquiry website (and also made for some particularly fetching conference badges once upon a time). However, as a researcher interested in the creative dynamic between Dickens and his original illustrators, I felt perhaps, as another intervention and interpretation of the Drood story, these illustrations needed some textual explanation of their own: perhaps a future appendix or journal article might shed light on the creative process behind them?

Reading Orford’s account, it struck me how there is a sense that Dickens was being playfully prescient in entitling this book a ‘mystery’. He almost certainly lacked the hindsight to know it would be his last of course, but for an author who had grown ever closer to his consumers on his recent reading tours, here was one final present for that audience, a last giving up to his readers as if to say, ‘Go on, you can finish this one’. Moreover, as I have written elsewhere, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a text tailor-made for post-Dickensian and Neo-Victorian appropriation, speculation and experimentation: when searching for the lacunae of the text, one does not merely find single unspoken actions or individual silenced voices, but an enormous blank space where the second half of the book should be.

Like Datchery with his boiled egg, Orford falls to his task with an appetite, neatly parcelling the history of Drood reception into four chronological sections, with regular glances back and forth to show how a particular theory or approach was informed by what had gone before and how in turn it would shape what came after. It quickly becomes apparent that The Mystery of Edwin Drood has brought out the good, the bad and the outre in Dickensians both professional and amateur, and Orford’s stepping through of the tangled web is deftly done, as is his contextualisation of each new contribution within the wider overall field of Dickens studies.

Chapter 1, subtitled ‘Nostalgia and Opportunism’ covers the first 15 years in the aftermath of Dickens’s death, and reminds us that Drood‘s contemporary readers had to mourn two untimely endings, that of the Drood serial itself as well as its creator. Early Drood appreciations therefore blended both review and obituary, which partly explains why the most regular point of comparison was not Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, but his first, Pickwick Papers, a text more guaranteed to elicit a misty eye from Dickens’s original fans. For the more opportunistic, Dickens’s death also meant a kind of release, and so alongside this fond memorialisation came what the author calls a ‘breathtaking freedom’ and a ‘cavalier’ spirit. This led to both parodies, such as Orpheus C. Kerr’s The Cloven Foot, and scandals, such as Thomas Power James’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete, which claimed to be founded on the words of Dickens’s own ghost in conversation with James. As in all the chapters, the author engages in some admirable recuperative work here, rescuing neglected or maligned texts such as The Cloven Foot from what is felt to be unmerited obscurity.

Chapter 2 spans the years 1878-1939 and centres on one of the foundational groups within Drood studies, the so-called ‘detectives’, who conduct forensic analyses of the text and mine it for clues which will lead them to the apparently ‘correct’ solution. Such readers were (and still are) driven by their desire for an ending more sophisticated than the more mundane one that Dickens’s actual text suggests, whereby there is a reasonable likelihood that Edwin was killed by Jasper after all. The ‘detectives’ eschew the practical niceties of an Occam’s Razor and instead contort themselves in their search for that elusive concealed twist that would reveal the work to be a masterpiece.

It was during this intellectual arms race to become the most insightful Dickensian that Drood studies became a fully-recognised scholarly field, and also the time when the Drood lexicon took on two new terms to identify those who believed Edwin to be alive (‘the resurrectionists’) and those who believed him to be dead (yep, you guessed it, ‘the undertakers’). Taking a slightly less academic turn, this period also saw the first engagement of the services of England’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Holmes becomes a Zelig-like figure through the course of the Droodian narrative, periodically reappearing at opportune moments to revive the hunt for the ‘real’ ending.

This professionalisation of Drood studies becomes more significant in Chapter 3, which develops this adversarial narrative during a period from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s, when academics pitted themselves against the enthusiasts. For Orford, the focus had shifted to looking at what is there rather than what is not there, to a scrutiny of the text as we have it rather than speculation about the text as it might have been. From the academics’ point of view, this was a shrewd move, allowing them to play to the strengths of their critical faculties rather than stepping into the more open realms of imagination and creative free-wheeling. Again, this period saw the best and the far-from-best from Droodists – Edmund Wilson’s ‘The Two Scrooges’ was a landmark in Dickens’s scholarship as a whole, let alone in Drood studies, as he reimagines the story ‘not as a detective novel, but a psychological study’, and a final case-study of Dickens’s darker, more complex side. Conversely, Orford shows how the ‘arch-Detective’ Felix Aylmer’s attempted vindication of Jasper demonstrates the pitfalls of going too far with one’s theories and extrapolations, as it stretches the reader’s credibility to breaking point.

By the 1980s, Drood studies had hit a low point in what had become a slow winding down in interest. For me – if not the author – this is no better represented than in Timothy Forder’s psychologically promising but ultimately leaden film version of 1993. The ending monologue for this chapter, as we enter the mind of a tortured Jasper left stranded in a limbo of repeating his crime endlessly, provides a neat corollary to the state that Drood studies had reached at this point.

The final main chapter brings us up to the present day, and characterises the period as one of zestful revitalisation and a ‘return to irreverence’ within our readings and retellings of Drood, via such mechanisms as music and comedy. Sometimes these elements have been combined, for example, in a gleeful Broadway version of 1985 which harked back to those early freedoms of the 1870s and 1880s by allowing its audience to decide how it would end each night. From this period, there were yet still further curios to pull from the cabinet, such as Benny Reece’s mapping of the characters onto counterparts from classical mythology, with Jasper as Pan and Edwin as Orion, recasting Drood as a pre-Joycean Ulysses, and using this as the key to unlock the ending as Dickens would have planned it.

The new millennium and the author’s bicentenary ushered in a new phase of scrutiny with regard to Dickens’s own life, particularly his later years with Ellen Ternan. This in turn spawned a number of fictional accounts of how Dickens wrote Drood, and postulations about what biographical mystery might lie behind the fictional one. In these books, the darker private life that is revealed to be lurking just behind Dickens’s cheerier public one is once again seen as the model for John Jasper’s character. Despite feeling such biofictions are ultimately ‘enjoyable nonsense’, the author gives them due consideration, since he feels that this irreverence serves as the pathway towards an objectivity that sheds new light on the novel.

This path is pushed towards its (techno)logical limits through computational studies, which are also touched upon, and this final chapter also sweeps up other manifestations within modern popular culture, including gaming (Assassin’s Creed contains a ‘Haunted House’ mission modelled on the cardinal points of the Drood narrative) and the occasionally erotic realm of fan fiction, all of which bear their own testimony to what Steven Connor calls Drood‘s ‘undyingness’.

We also hear of the author’s own forays into Drood studies which are modestly handled here, but amount to an extensive corpus of ideas and engagements, including a conference in 2014 (which I reviewed here previously), an exhibition at The Charles Dickens Museum, and most significantly his own creation of a Drood 2.0 through his Drood Inquiry website, whereby one could participate in a shared serial reading of the novel and explore a range of supporting material before coming to some conclusions of your own about the novel’s ending. This was a significant undertaking, and could have been explored further here; I’d have particularly liked to have heard more about what opportunities the interactive world of the hypertext both theoretically and practically offered the author for this kind of textual scrutiny and exploration.

In his conclusion, Orford pulls together these different strands and reflects on the future of Drood studies. He strikes a conciliatory note when he describes how Drood doesn’t have to be divisive or diminish Dickensian scholarship – as the 2014 conference proved, the rigid oppositional dogmas of the past have given way to a more open and inclusive environment within which multiple interpretations can happily coexist. Indeed, knowing Dickens’s own desire for a harmonious extended family of readers, conflict is probably the last thing he would have wanted.  The ‘mystery’ of The Mystery is an inescapable symptom of the form of the work and the nature of its author, then, and therefore the act of asking the question, and all that that involves, becomes more important than any answer that might be reached.

Viewing all of these solutions as not the final words but merely the opening dialogue, this narrative of the reception and remediation of Dickens’s final work is a sympathetic and erudite tribute to all that have already asked the question, and an inspirational extortation to us all to keep asking it – and have fun while we do so.

Kathryn the grate: the strange assault of Emily Bronte

Due to routine domestic demands of a twin-related nature, I didn’t get round to reading Kathryn Hughes’s essay ‘The Bronte Myth’ (Guardian Review, 21 July 2018) until my Monday morning commute. Well before then, however, it seemed to have provoked some strong reactions and created its own wuthering on the wilds of social media. It received over 600 comments on the Guardian website and I for one had a Twitter timeline buffeted by the gales of readers unhappy with this ghost at the feast of the Emily Bronte bicentenary.

While I’m no Bronte expert, I did teach Wuthering Heights for several years, and could sympathise with the ire that Hughes had stoked. It felt a deliberately provocative piece, but in a sneery, Daily Mail, way rather than as the devil’s advocate position within a carefully framed argument. Indeed, what was particularly problematic was its lack of sufficient context for the reader to situate it against any other viewpoint, and indeed its lack of desire to generate such a context. Had it been presented, for example, as a counter-piece to Claire O’Callaghan’s more positive appraisal a couple of weeks earlier, it would have come across as a better-intentioned opening-up of a debate about who Emily Bronte was and what she might mean to use in the 21st century.

More qualified folks will no doubt take up more elegantly-crafted cudgels than mine on this, but even as a Victorianist a few other things struck me as discomforting about this piece. Firstly, the title: Hughes has appropriated a well-known term from Bronte studies, but without any acknowledgement of the complex geneology of this term. Aside from the issue of good scholarly manners, Hughes uses it not to engage with its wider nuances of the construction of literary identity and reputation, but mainly just to offer her own reductive version of that myth. To her, this myth is another version of the Emperor’s new clothes, whereby an exclusively female conspiracy is afoot to fool the world that Wuthering Heights is a serious piece of literature worthy of critical attention, instead of a ‘screechy melodrama’ that is simply a stroppy young woman acting out.

However, it is not enough to express her own dislike of it, she is also desperate for everyone else to dislike it too. She is dismissive of those who do, reducing Bronte scholarship to a female ‘pash’, and less than glowing towards other creative interpretations, such as that of the apparently ‘quavery’ Unthank sisters. Hughes tellingly states that her version of Emily Bronte should be put ‘in place’ of others – not be ‘measured alongside’ them or ‘offered as a corrective to’ them. It’s a piece that asks very few questions but feels it has all the answers: for example, in an ironically self-fulfilling prophecy,  male Bronte scholarship is ‘shuffled off to the side’ without further examination because apparently that’s what has always happened – no need to redress the balance here, then?

Returning to its tone as a Daily Mail takeover piece, some of Hughes’s comments seem incredibly value-laden: her Emily ‘ducks’ her domestic responsibilities like a child skipping school, and she is cast as the ‘patron saint of difficult women’ with a conspicuous lack of inverted commas around the word ‘difficult’. She also drafts in some unusual choices to add weight to her view: it’s a long time since I’ve seen someone say ‘if you don’t believe me, ask F R Leavis’, and as a Dickensian this is naturally a red-flag issue.

Hughes’s evocation of Lucasta Miller’s title reminds us that we should all be vigilant of how literary reputations are packaged and presented to us, and mindful of the motives behind such strategies. As we witnessed during the Dickens bicentenary, such anniversaries are the perfect time for reappraisals, reputational realignments and provocations, but they should be used as the key for opening the door to a much wider discussion, not for locking it completely.

The article ends with a link to details of the Bronte Bicentenary Exhibition at the Parsonage Museum, but after reading the article’s conclusion – if Emily Bronte is to be admired it should be ‘only grudgingly and from a safe distance’ – you wonder if people will bother to visit. Let’s really hope this isn’t the final sour word on the matter.

A Pleasant Haunting: The BBC’s ‘A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong’

Here at VNB Towers, nothing says Christmas like ‘Quality Street’ chocolates. The Regency couple on the packaging – Miss Sweetly and Major Quality – may have quadrilled their way into the sunset, and the solidly dependable tin container may have been replaced by a plastic tub, but the contents stay the same. There’s something for everyone … Worried you’re not getting your five-a-day? Try a Strawberry Delight or Orange Creme. Fancy something longer lasting? Go for the Chocolate Toffee Finger. Want something in a box of chocolates that isn’t even a chocolate? Have a Toffee Penny (In fact, have them all, weirdo).

Nowadays, the festive period similarly offers A Christmas Carol for everyone: A 3D one where the same actor plays Scrooge and all 3 ghosts? Try Jim Carrey’s 2009 version. One set in prehistoric times? Meet A Flintstones Christmas Carol.  Wonder what Scrooge would be like if he also suffered from myopia? Look up Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.  And so on.

Another Carol niche was filled this Christmas in the form of A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. Devised by the Mischief Theatre, and hot on the heels of their previous comedies of errors, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and The Play That Goes Wrong, this production mines its laughs from a variety of mishaps and incompetencies that ensue when the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society storm the BBC and replace its stodgy production of Dickens’s story with their own dodgy one.

This enjoyable comedy ticks along quite happily with the gentle holiday humour you’d expect from a show broadcast on an early Christmas evening (with an afternoon repeat on New Year’s Day). The live laughter track provided a gentle nudge to a TV audience possibly slumbering after its third helping of pudding (or indeed halfway through its tub of Quality Street) and carried them through some nice sight-gags and pratfalls, based around misspelled titles, faulty props and overly-intrustive props-people and scene-shifters.

However, some of the best moments of the show provide an interesting commentary on Dickens’s work, and our reception of it. For example, there are some jokes around the challenges of staging Dickens’s ghost story as live action. Jacob Marley’s chains and cashboxes are comically overheavy, pulling him through the floor and dragging him out of the window. This adds extra piquancy to his desire to cast them off, and gives it a practical as well as moral dimension. The ‘green screen’ used to animate Scrooge’s flights with the spirits breaks regularly, revealing the embarassed looking props people behind it, and being replaced at one point by a home video recording of a party. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is not Dickens’s ‘tall and stately’ figure, but an awkward, gangling construction who crashes into things and overbalances in a manner that thoroughly excises the ‘solemn dread’ experienced by Scrooge.

Elsewhere, the show plays with some of the text’s more sentimental moments: the highlighting of Tiny Tim’s smallness and frailty is lampooned by having him played by the largest actor in the troupe, who proves too heavy for the slight figure of Bob Cratchit. The confrontation between young Scrooge and Belle is played out against the backdrop of the romantic entanglements of the real-life couple; in this version, Scrooge is reluctant to let Belle go, since it appears (from the aforementioned party video) that she is having an offstage relationship with someone else.

There is also some gentle self-mockery on the part of the BBC and its position as a producer of heritage drama, represented here by Derek Jacobi and Diana Rigg. Jacobi plays the ‘original’ Scrooge, and is comically dispatched each time he pops up to attempt to halt proceedings. Rigg literally phones in her narration of the story only to appear at the end as a deus ex machina, running down Jacobi and telling him not to take everything so seriously – which is of course, an injunction for us viewers as well.

In the end, there is something charmingly Beckettian about the indomitable spirit of this hapless company to keep their production going amidst their myriad setbacks. They have to stage a number of later scenes outside the BBC studio, after being chased off set by security, and the show must go on, even if Scrooge has to present Bob and his family with a packet of turkey goujons rather than the full Christmas goose.

Ultimately A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong reflects our comfort with Dickens’s tale and the extent to which it has become so internalised by audiences that it can be presented in a way that contains so many distractions and diversions without viewers losing the thread – the enjoyment of A Christmas Carol as a story in itself is helpful but by no means mandatory here. Most encouragingly, it also shows that new and original keepers of Dickens’s flame are still appearing over 200 years after his death – even if they do wear a comically oversized candle costume and are terrorised by a giant papier mache nose.

 

 

A Tale of Christmas High Spirits

At this time of year, VNB is always on the eager lookout for references to A Christmas Carol in unlikely settings – Kim Jong Un calling Trump “a fragment of an underdone potato” at a Pyongyang rally, ill-judged reggae tribute bands called Marley’s Ghost, that sort of thing. Imagine our excitement then, when an American footballer made the remarkable claim that his failed drugs test was the work of one particular Scrooge-botherer. As reported in The Independent on 15 December, New York Jets wide receiver Jeremy Kerley claimed that “There’s a lot of ghosts around here. Ghost put it in there. You know, the ghost of Christmas past? … I don’t know”.

The Haunted Man (Photo by John Angelillo/UPI)

Now here at VNB Towers (which are Gothic Revival, of course), we love a good mystery (especially when it’s published in 30 serial parts and involves a birth-switch and/or an adventuress posing as a governess at a country house), so we looked further into this and can now publish the results of our ghost-busting investigation.

What did Kerley see? Kerley’s somewhat vague testimony makes precise identification tricky. Dickens’s own identikit of the spirit is equally flakey: “like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man”. Hmmm, riddle-me-ree indeed. As if this wasn’t sufficiently ambiguous, he can’t even tell us what body parts he/she’s got: “the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body”. So a bit like a Mr Potato Head in a centrifuge.

Artist’s impression of the Ghost (Courtesy of https://brewitandreviewit.wordpress.com/2015/09/)

What actually happened to him? One possible explanation is that Kerley, out on a shopping trip with his wife, absent mindedly wandered into the basement of a department store while checking his Instagram. He then stumbled into a room full of mannequins being prepared for the Christmas display, and was knocked unconscious by the flailing arm of a Christmas elf. And the rest was all a dream … [dissolve]

In Dickens’s story, the suspect (henceforth identified as TGCP) takes Scrooge on a trip back in time to show him how his past actions have led him to become the miserable old git he’s become. If we accept Kelsey’s claim of a supernatural visitation, this means that he was whisked back to his childhood days in Austin, his subsequent success in four sports during high school, his college days at Texas Christian University, and his rise to professional sports stardom in the NFL. Given his garlanded youth, at first glance it seems a little unclear why a return to these happy scenes would induce Kerley to reach for the medicine cabinet. He may have done it to escape what most scholars regard as the dullest of the three spirits, or maybe to run as far away as possible from the shame he must have experienced in playing college football for a team called – shudder – the Horned Frogs (I think Mr Venus in Our Mutual Friend has a couple of those in a drawer somewhere).

This horned frog was unavailable for comment

What happens next? VNB can predict that more sports stars will jump on the ‘Blame a Dickens Ghost’ bandwagon. Lethargic post-Christmas performances will be blamed on the Ghost of Christmas Present: “I don’t know. This big dude in a dressing gown dragged me into a room in the middle of the night, and force-fed me from a big golden horn, you know?”. Inexplicable panicking at crucial moments will be blamed on the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: “I don’t know. This skinny Goth guy was staring me out, you know?”. On the plus side, though, we may see a spike in charitable donations, as players donate varying fractions of their £gazillion salaries to good causes, all because some hombre with cornrows and toothache was hassling them to do so.

 

 

Wearing the damned hat: The interesting case(s) of Dr Watson and Mr Holmes

Over the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity to watch two recent Sherlock Holmes remediations – BBC’s Sherlock Christmas special ‘The Abominable Bride’ (originally aired on 1st January 2016) and Mr Holmes (another BBC product, originally released in UK cinemas on 19 June 2015). Mr Holmes itself is a remediation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, but I will not refer to the novel here (on the reasonable grounds that I’ve not read it). Furthermore, to hopefully avoid confusion, I’ll refer to these specific incarnations of Conan Doyle’s character as ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Mr Holmes’ respectively, and the wider conceptual figure that encompasses all such characters as ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

On first viewing they might feel wholly different creatures. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is clearly down with the kids, and snappier than two crocodiles in a box of mousetraps playing that card game where you match pairs; The Museum of London had to put his coat in a glass case, so eager were his disciples for a touch of its hem. We are also served up an inflatable Mycroft channeling Mr Creosote, and always ready for just one more Wildean zingathon with his “brother mine” at the drop of a buttered scone. The main plot includes a shotgun-toting blood-splattered bride straight out of Kill Bill and the whole festive pudding is laced with potentially lethal quantities of substance abuse (albeit strictly inventoried).
Ian McKellen’s Mr Holmes, on the other hand, is all liver spots and fogeyish chuntering. The film moves with a gentle, Zen-like sedateness, and its principal sub-plot is a child’s journey of loss and recovery with overtones of Goodnight Mister Tom. The more wholesome royal jelly and prickly ash are the mental stimulants of choice here.

 In summary, Sherlock temporarily borrows the ‘BBC Christmas Special’ license from Doctor Who (who will ever forget the killer Christmas trees?) to turn everything up to 11, while Mr Holmes shuffles in and politely asks if we’d mind awfully turning it down a bit.
However, if one follows the great man’s advice to observe rather than see, then the distinction becomes less clear; both clearly explore some principal neo-Victorian questions that lie at the heart of our reception and treatment of Conan Doyle’s stories and characters. Given that the Sherlock Holmes universe has been the gift that keeps on giving (and giving and giving) to fans and artists from the time of Conan Doyle’s own life onwards, some of these questions will be familiar from previous adaptations, remediations and reimaginings (including previous episodes of Sherlock), but their persistence can variously signal their continued relevance, the desire to find new answers, or, as some a few naysayers have indicated in relation to Sherlock, their staleness (see for example, James Delingpole’s Spectator review on 9th January).

Women. Both continue with the persistent interest in why Sherlock Holmes lives his life without a female companion; in Sherlock, Watson explicitly calls him out on this during their stakeout, at which point Sherlock claims that woman are Watson’s area not his, and he later recalls his earlier potential love interest Irene Adler (first encountered in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’). When we first meet Mr Holmes, he is living the same bachelor life, but now minus Watson.
To further develop this theme, both stories present women misunderstood by their partners, but understood by Sherlock Holmes; maybe he ‘gets’ women after all, they suggest. Lady Carmichael in Sherlock is dismissed as a “hysteric” by her unfeeling husband but called “intelligent” by Sherlock, while Ann Celmott, whose, you guessed it, unfeeling husband cannot fathom the depth of her grief for her lost children, proposes a form of companionship to Mr Holmes. Although this is couched as an offer to be lonely with another person, he refuses and suggests Mrs Celmott return to her husband – thus creating a backstory for his continued bachelorhood.
Through Lady Carmichael’s secret group of the Women’s Rights Movement and Mrs Celmott’s offer, these adaptations offer two alternative models for the lives of Victorian women. With the former, the enlightened Sherlock puts forward the case for female emancipation (despite his earlier claims of ignorance), but with the latter Mr Holmes only understands the nature of Mrs Celmott’s request long after the event. Incidentally, Vicky Nagy provides much more discussion of the gender politics of the ‘The Abominable Bride’ in her blog post here.

Watson. Despite their respective titles, both remediations make Watson the central architect and manager of the Sherlock Holmes myth. This initially begins with a playful treatment of its iconic, and by now thoroughly fetishistic, props. Sherlock wants to wear a top hat, but instead Watson jams the deerstalker on his head, insisting “You’re Sherlock Holmes, wear the damned hat!”. Similarly, when Madame Schirmer does not believe Mr Holmes is the real deal because he does not have that same deerstalker and pipe, he has to confess that the deerstalker was an merely an illustrator’s embellishment and that he much prefers a cigar.
However, both adaptations also recognise the dangers of that myth, as their protagonists must confront the consequences of Watson’s narratives slipping into parody. At the very epicenter of ‘The Abominable Bride’ (a suitably ramped-up title in itself), when all of the familiar tropes have been laid out before us, Moriarty asks Sherlock whether is it has become sufficiently “silly” or sufficiently “Gothic” for him. Mycroft attacks the myth of Sherlock Holmes as much as the physical figure, whom he critiques as a self-indulgent poseur and a fraud (as he had in the earlier ‘Reichenbach Fall’ episode).
An equivalent moment of confrontation occurs when Mr Holmes goes to watch The Lady in Grey, an overly mannered and stagey cinematic recreation of the Celmott case. It proves to be even creakier than the 93-year-old Mr Holmes himself, who observes how he has become “a character in a pantomime” in which everything is delivered with “the twirl of a moustache and an exclamation mark”.
Such critiques of the myth lead to a recognition that the very materials with which Watson has fashioned Sherlock Holmes, from the costumes to the catchphrases, construct a prison for its main protagonist. There is much bickering in Sherlock about whether even the words he says are his own or the invention of Watson, and Sherlock expresses considerable angst about having to hold himself to a higher standard because of Watson’s “idiot stories”. Similarly Mr Holmes complains that Watson “changed him” into “a fiction” which he had to maintain for the sake of a coherent selfhood. Thus his narrative (and indeed Sherlock’s) become driven by a desire to assert a ‘true’ self previously lost somewhere in Watson’s fictions.

The power of fictions. But Watson is eventually vindicated as both Sherlock and Mr Holmes come to understand the power of the imagination and fiction, and of telling their own stories.
Despite initially claiming that “Fiction is worthless!” Mr Holmes eventually understands the restorative potency of Watson’s storytelling, which protects the feelings of the widowed Mr Kelmot and negates Holmes’s own feelings of failure. This realization enables him in turn to restore to Mr Umezaki a positive narrative of his lost father by inventing a new version of the ‘truth’, in which his father dies a hero rather than simply a deserter of his family, which had been the narrative deduced from his father’s note in a copy of A Study in Scarlet. Mr Holmes is also able to partially compensate Roger for the loss of his father by implicating the boy in his story-writing activities, as both an inspiration and a literary critic: Roger’s mother makes it clear that Roger’s father was the story teller, not her.
Similarly, Sherlock accepts that Watson rescued his reputation when he “convinced the reading public that an unprincipled drug addict was some kind of gentleman hero”, and Watson also saves Sherlock’s life at the Reichenbach Falls by unexpectedly appearing in own story. Sure, he kicks Moriarty off the precipice, but his really important act is to convince Sherlock that he is his own person, who can tell his own story. Ultimately then, both men are only able to reconstruct a coherent self and make their ways through their respective memory palaces by constructing their own versions of their narrative.

The place of the past. Through their use of dual narratives split across time periods, both Sherlock and Mr Holmes ponder whether Sherlock Holmes truly is a man of his time, or a figure that can transcend a particular historical period.
Despite the onset of old age and enforced withdrawal from society, Mr Holmes seems as plugged into the world of 1947 as he was in 1887, globetrotting as far as Japan. But it is there, as he looks across a petrified, ashen landscape into the empty shell of a building, that we catch a note of caution in this adaptation: Mr Holmes cannot stop the A-bomb, for all of Basil Rathbone’s Nazi-chasing antics.
Of course, Sherlock’s entire premise is a refutation of this, and in this episode, the series plays with its own world and lets its ‘original’ 21st century characters loose in the dressing-up box to become 19th century versions of themselves. The fact that a return to the source setting is packaged as a fun festive novelty shows how firmly its modern milieu has established itself in the public consciousness, and Moriarty’s description of this now ‘alternative’ Victorian world as “silly” and “Gothic” has also been taken as ‘a slap in the face’ for those nostalgically seeking an authentic Victorian Sherlock Holmes (Emily Bowles’s insightful post explains this in more detail). The question of whether the 1880s is the ‘past’ of the 21st century Sherlock becomes a tangled one: even if it is biologically impossible (Mr Holmes at least ages its protagonist appropriately rather than transplanting him into the later epoch un-aged), Sherlock’s prevailing levels of metatextuality make it a cultural certainty. (See Miriam Burstein’s post for more on this intertextuality).

Moreover, at the close of the episode, the ‘Victorian’ Sherlock reveals the ‘modern’ Sherlock world to be his “conjecture of what a future world might look like and how you and I might fit inside it” before archly commenting that “I know I would be very much at home in such a world […] I’ve always known I was a man out of his time.”. This would seem to revert to the natural chronological order of things, but then this takes one final twist back when Sherlock looks out of the window of Victorian 221B to see modern London. So while both adaptations draw firmly on the past to make sense of their present, it is not a simple case of looking bidirectionally backwards or forwards: like a hall of mirrors, there are moments in the present that become the catalysts for understanding those past events afresh, in ways that in turn inform the present.

—

At one point in Sherlock, the Victorian Watson tellingly observes that “There is little use us standing here in the dark, after all this is the nineteenth-century”. Indeed, both of these imaginings of the Sherlock Holmes universe not only attempt to illuminate their nineteenth century antecedents, but also cast this light forward to illuminate our own practices as 21st century Neo-Victorians.
If you found this interesting, you may also want to read Camilla Hoel’s meticulously detailed and informed review of ‘The Abominable Bride’.

Preview of BBC’s ‘Dickensian’

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! (‘Bleak House’, Ch. 16)

Warning: This review contains some plot details from the first 2 episodes of ‘Dickensian’.

Since plans for Tony Jordan’s new Dickens-based series were announced, expectations have been, well, great. In recent years we’ve had re-tellings, relocatings and even a new ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but nothing quite as ambitious as this. Such is the power of Dickens’s characterization that his creations have often threatened to escape the ‘confines’ of his novels, with some occasional success – Pickwick and Sam Weller helped Master Humphrey’s Clock tick a little longer, in R.W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream his characters tantalizingly rub shoulders but never touch, and more recently Bob Hoskins reprised his Micawber in an eponymous spinoff. But Dickensian threatens a full-scale break-out, secret tunnels, false passports and all.

Hopes here at VNB Towers were also high – the format of 30-minute episodes and Tony Jordan’s association with EastEnders drew the inevitable soap opera comparisons (which have been eloquently dismantled by Christopher Pittard amongst others), but Jordan himself has dismissed such comparisons, preferring the term ‘continuing drama’. Moreover, as well as bringing his own televisual sensibility to the project, Jordan also evoked All the Year Round as an influence on his approach. He also pleasingly admitted “I’m not trying to be a smart-arse”. Excitement was further stoked as the project became called a ‘mash-up’ (all the rage with the kids, apparently) and comparisons were drawn with recent popular dramas such as Penny Dreadful. There were breathless descriptions of the physical scale of Jordan’s recreation of Dickens’s world – 27 2-storey houses! A 90m cobbled street! (which we were reliably informed was wide enough for a chaise and 4, presumably for all of the chase scenes?) Mindful of the Spartan sets for Dickens’s own readings (desk, book, water) and having been brought close to tears by Simon Callow as Dr Marigold on nearly bare stage, I know that you don’t need to be Steven Spielberg to make Dickens work, but I took the point: Jordan was thinking big on this, and the BBC would stump up the cash to match (although the Thames had to be CGI’d for budget reasons).

Answering concerns about his possibly irreverent treatment of Dickens’s work, Jordan likened it to putting flowers in a Ming vase, rather than putting the vase in a glass case. Music to Neo-Victorian ears, indeed, but of course it prompted the question: would I be wowed by his floristry skills or be watching him drop the vase?

Well, it’s early days, but I think it’s in safe hands. The two episodes I saw offered sequel, prequel and some things changed around: in an early bravura moment, Little Nell appears to breathe her last – only to suddenly revive (for now). But most significantly it provided a conceptual space in which Dickens’s characters were mixed and matched in intriguing combinations. This is a world in which Mr Venus can perform a post mortem on the body of Jacob Marley while overseen by Inspector Bucket; Silas Wegg, now landlord of The Three Cripples pub can serve Fagin, Scrooge and The Pickwick Club on the same night. These constellations are often glued together by one of the linking characters – the roving detective Bucket, Nancy (a ‘street-walker’ in more than one sense) and a Boy in the mould of Joe the crossing-sweeper – who roam freely and guide us through the streets in long tracking shots. While these comings-together are obviously a treat for Dickensians, they should come with a health warning: for many of the opening scenes, the visual and aural bombardment of so many familiar characters in startlingly new configurations made my head giddy as I tried to make sense of the possibilities of, for example, having Mrs Gamp as Nell’s wet-nurse, or Uriah Heep as Jaggers’s clerk.

But to avoid being simply a literary parlour game, we are also given three main plot strands, all of which are eminently Dickensian – the Marley murder plot, the Havisham romance/inheritance plot and the Barbary bankruptcy plot – and which will no doubt link and interweave further. These offer a double pleasure, in both their realization of narratives we have only previously glimpsed in brief moments and in their delicious open-endedness – will they play out the way we expect based on Dickens’s novels, or will they take a counterfactual turn?

The notion of Inspector Bucket as TV detective will be familiar to viewers of the 2005 Bleak House, and like that adaptation, Dickensian draws on the same EastEnders “Who shot Phil?” method (which had in turn drawn on Dallas’s “Who shot J.R.?” method) of showing all possible suspects at the same time prior to the murder. However, in Dickensian, the detection strand goes further (as it is able to) as Bucket explains this new approach to police work (also a nod to theories of him being the first literary detective). There is also an aural link with modern detective series, with echoes of what might be technically called the plinky-plonky “old music ‘all pianner” theme of Sherlock accompanying Bucket.

It’s also undoubtedly fun: there were some in-jokes (Nancy bursts in on Fagin, prompting him to declare that she’ll “be the death of him”, Venus doubts Bucket’s new ‘detective’ method will catch on), and in the post-preview Q&A at the BFI, Mark Lawson correctly identified the warm feelings of recognizing familiar shop-signs and guessing who characters were before they were name-checked by others. At the same time, the renowned Dickensian scholars Holly Furneaux and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst have, as literary advisors to the series, kept Tony Jordan honest and helped him maintain an internal logic to events.

Some questions remain: character development has so far focused on the main protagonists in the pre-existing Havisham and Barbary strands, but as we move beyond early plot establishment, how will the range of characters from across different novels interact further? Will they engage in any meaningful way, beyond passing encounters? Marley was a client of Nancy’s, but their exchanges occurred behind closed doors, and Marley is dead now anyway (There is no doubt whatsoever about that, as dead as doornail etc).

And what of the title? Well, we have a ‘Dickensian’ Christmas setting, scenes of ‘Dickensian’ poverty as the urchins peer through the gates of Satis House, and as I have mentioned, eminently ‘Dickensian’ plots. So far, so familiar and whether this series will just fill in some gaps or offer new ideas and meanings remains to be seen: Tony Jordan has been coy over whether the more familiar backstories will play out as we expect, but with sixty episodes storylined and Jordan’s feeling that he’s only just got started (playing with 25 characters out of a possible 2000 in Series 1), expectations are now, after just 2 episodes, even greater.

‘Dickensian’ starts on BBC1 on Boxing Day.

Exhibition Review: “The Fallen Woman” at the Foundling Museum, London

This exhibition not only aims to delineate the figure of the fallen woman as a cultural construct, but also re-listen to the voices of these women and reconstruct their tangible presence for us over 150 years later. The Founding Hospital was at the very sharp end of the fallen woman narrative, and so is a perfect location for such an exhibition.
The visitors’ path through the exhibition traces the familiar mythical narrative of Victorian ideal, the fall itself, and its consequences, with later sections focusing on the role of the Foundling Hospital and Steve Lewinson’s sound installation Fallen Voices. Objects and texts are thoughtfully combined with images from the visual arts, predominantly paintings, but also more popular and commercial forms such as newspaper sketches, etchings and stereoscopic cards, which point to the cultural pervasiveness of the fallen woman figure.
Literary texts are not really a part of this particular construction of the fallen woman myth and reality, apart from the opening excerpt from David Lean’s Oliver Twist film, although the excellent exhibition leaflet provides some famous literary examples. Instead the focus is on our reading and interpretation of the texts which tell the story within the contexts of the administrative mechanisms of ‘compassion’ operating at the hospital itself. Thus we are shown petitions from women who want the hospital to admit their children, the judgemental notes made about these women by the Hospital Porter as he met them, the lists of (often very personal and intimate) questions which the women would be asked by the (all male) selection panel, and records of successful admission. This is an emotionally powerful body of material, both in its quantity and detail.
Documentary text and popular image are linked well, sometimes in an interrogatory manner: Robert Dowling’s painting Breakfasting Out (1859), which shows a milliner’s girl at risk of seduction by a rake while breakfasting on a street corner, is juxtaposed with the petition of milliner Susannah Jane Keys, who was raped at her father’s house, somewhat belying the painting’s narrative of a danger lying outside the home.
The main exhibition room is bookended with sounds. The scene from Lean’s darkly anti-Victorian Oliver Twist provides a heightened dramatic shock as you enter the exhibition, as the unpitying storm and nightmarish symbols of constriction all around Oliver’s outcast mother (such as the trees and thornbushes) harry her to ‘refuge’ at the forbidding gates of the workhouse. Frederick Walker’s painting The Lost Path (1863) later offers a poignant counterpoint to this scene:

Frederick Walker, ‘The Lost Path’ (1863)

This picture is a calmer meditation on the same theme of a mother trying to protect her child against the harsh world. Society may have deemed her an aberration and even Nature seems to have shunned her, but her ‘natural’ instinct to protect her child suggests an inherent goodness and potential for redemption. She temporarily remains outside the whiteness, which on closer inspection is not entirely as ‘pure’ as it seems.
Steve Lewinson’s soundscape (an excerpt of which can be heard here) creates an aural landscape of the voices of the fallen women, voices that have fallen out of our earshot, but are now heard again. Although these voices are obviously doubly mediated and ventriloquized (their words were originally recorded by the male administrators of the hospital, and are now read to us by contemporary performers), this is an effective device, reminding you that it is only through women originally having the courage to tell their own story to strangers that their children (and potentially themselves) could be saved. And although the voices are mainly female, it also underscores the agency of men throughout the process of ‘fall and redemption’, as recorders and assessors, but also of course, very often as the original seducers.
In her exhibition Foreword, curator Lynda Nead draws attention to the exhibition’s contemporary relevance, as our own society asks similar questions of who deserves our pity and who doesn’t, and the shocking paintings of destitute, desperate and sometimes drowned women are echoed now in the photos of dying refugees (such as that of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi) we see on a daily basis.
Watts’s Found Drowned (c.1850) is the large and striking centrepiece in the committee room, and while its positioning here is a stark reminder to visitors of what was at stake when women were labelled as ‘fallen’, we can only hope that the men who met there to decide the women’s fates knew this already; this painting was not exhibited until 30 years later, in 1881.

George Frederick Watts, ‘Found Drowned’ (c. 1850)

The exhibition continues until 3 January 2016; visit foundlingmuseum.org.uk for more details.

Fading to Gray: Review of ‘Effie Gray’ (Sovereign Films, 2014)

It seems that big screen portrayals of John Ruskin are like omnibuses; you wait ages for one to turn up, and then …

In Mr Turner, Ruskin was a minor comic foil wittering about in the shadow of the lumbering, growling bulk of Turner himself (rather like the birds who sit on the backs of hippos), but in Effie Gray, he is our centre stage villain.

The story of the ‘love’/indifference/hate relationship between Ruskin and Gray is an intriguing one, which offers great potential in terms of our contemporary assessment of Victorian family relations: as Mark Kermode has observed, the cultural objectification of women that lies at the heart of this film is, sadly, an issue still very much with us today. However, in its somewhat flat presentation of the heroine, Effie Gray is guilty of precisely the ‘crime’ for which Ruskin is accused: by limiting the scope of what the audience sees and hears of Effie, we often only get the unseeing, silent statue that Ruskin himself so desires.

Picking up on one of Ruskin’s only gestures of tenderness to Effie, the fairy tale he wrote for her when she was a little girl, a gentle fairy tale motif runs through the film: the story begins once upon a time, when a “beautiful young girl who lived in a very cold house in Scotland.”, exchanges one type of coldness for another, facing the twin monstrosities of Ruskin’s Murdstonian parents, called “dragons in a fairy tale”, and an uncaring husband.

The infamous scene of his rejection of her naked body on their wedding night is part of a wider program of exclusion. When forbidden to help Ruskin with his work (he is “no ordinary man” and must be left to work alone), she also is deprived an outlet for her own creative expression – her pen snaps when he interrupts her drawing. Moreover, she is also unwelcome in the domestic sphere; she is kept out of Mrs Ruskin’s garden (there is no female solidarity against the patriarchy here) and barred from performing ‘housewifely’ tasks such as mending torn clothes.

Her existence at Denmark Hill becomes the kind of sterile inertia that Florence Nightingale so railed against in Cassandra, but while Nightingale so vividly evoked the stifling nature of this purgatory existence, Effie’s viewpoint is, ironically, restricted by the film’s painterly aesthetic. It is undoubtedly a beautiful looking film, both in terms of the landscape and the framing of its individual protagonists, but this overarching theme of art, portraiture, and aesthetic beauty, while obviously sympathetic to its subject matter, excludes the inner workings of the protagonists.

So although she is encouraged to express her thoughts by her proto-feminist confidante Lady Eastlake, who is keen to hear “an intelligent female voice”, we hear very little of that voice – which is particularly disappointing, since Eastlake is played by the film’s screenwriter Emma Thompson, the person best situated to give Effie that voice here. Instead, Effie’s suffering is largely written on her body – her face goes from wan to very wan, her hair falls out, and further visual links are made to other contemporary images of subjugated women: Ophelia (as painted by Millais):

Ophelia, John Everitt Millais (1851-52), Tate Britain, London

and Sylvia (by Holman Hunt):

Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, William Holman Hunt (1851), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Another Pre-Raphaelite Muse, Lizzie Siddal, served as model for both of these images, and by conflating Effie with those images and Siddal in this way (Ophelia also appears on the film’s promotional poster, shown above), these women become disappointingly homogenised. There are parallels in both the fictional and factual narratives at play here, but significant divergences as well; for example, Ruskin sponsored Siddal’s creativity art rather than stifled it, and the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet is of quite a different nature. Yet, all we have of Siddal, and to a large extent, Gray as well, is their flat, unspeaking portraits.

Equally frustratingly, we are only given a brief sense of Ruskin’s own motivations and internal states, and the stereotypical image of the stern Victorian patriarch remains prominent. We are given glimpses of his extensive views on art and architecture (his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, the role of ugliness and ‘beautiful imperfection’ in art) are interspersed, though strangely none of his rhetoric on the relative social roles of men and women is presented, even though this is a philosophy which surely lies at the heart of this story, Thus in the process of denying Effie greater access to his thoughts and motivations, we are also barred from them, making him a difficult figure with which to empathise based on the evidence of this film alone. He may well be someone who struggles to express his emotions, but it is debatable that he gives us enough of himself to be comparable to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing (as suggested by Geoffrey MacNab), who is as much a victim of his own emotional inarticulacy as those around him.

Ultimately, then, while some pictures can paint a thousand words, this picture doesn’t paint nearly enough to tell such an interesting story.

Accept No Imitations? Pondering Holmes’s Legacy in Anthony Horowitz’s ‘Moriarty’

Warning: This post contains spoilers.

Moriarty is written by Anthony Horowitz, who, according to Orion, “may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author”. However, in this, his second Sherlock Holmes novel, he also attempts to perform acts of necromancy, as he “once more breathes life into the world created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”, and ventriloquism, through his “pitch-perfect characterisation”.

The genre of detective fiction has long been linked with neo-Victorian practice, as both involve evaluating and interpreting a body of evidence, and both attempt to uncover that which has been deliberately hidden. Thus Horowitz’s first Holmesian foray, The House of Silk (2011), recounts a case “too shocking to reveal until now”, as Holmes breaks a child prostitution syndicate run from a boy’s orphanage. The dirt, violence and rent boys are present again in Moriarty, but the main theme here is another neo-Victorian preoccupation, the idea of Victorian afterlives, myths and legacies.

The story narrates the events following the supposed deaths of Holmes and Moriarty at Reichenbach, as the American criminal mastermind Clarence Devereux threatens to take over Moriarty’s evil empire unless he can be stopped by Scotland Yard’s Athelney Jones and his American assistant, Frederick Chase, newly arrived from the Pinkerton Agency. But while this story is ostensibly about the scramble for power now Moriarty is gone, the real vacuum is that left by Holmes.

The narrative initially suggests Holmes is best forgotten; in Chapter One, Chase meticulously debunks Watson’s original account of events at Reichenbach with the detached eye of the neo-Victorian reader, closing on a suitably modern image; “once I start asking [questions]. I can’t stop. I feel as if I am in a runaway coach, tearing down Fifth Avenue, unable to stop at the lights” (11). The second act of desecration occurs at a detectives’ debrief; while Inspector Gregson asserts that “We should not pretend that the loss of Sherlock Holmes is anything short of a catastrophe”, others are willing to step forward with long-standing and previously repressed misgivings about Holmes (“He had a habit of speaking in riddles”; “I was always suspicious of his methods”). They agree to “embrace his going as an opportunity for us to achieve results on our own two feet” (105-106).

The whole novel carries with it the sense that the world has moved on since Holmes’s time anyway. In The House of Silk, even Moriarty was so appalled by the nature of modern crime that he sided with Holmes, and here the incursion of American proto-gangsterism onto London’s streets brings a sense that the rules of engagement between detective and criminal have changed. Chase admits that “The American criminal has no discrimination and no sense of loyalty” (87), and the ingenious puzzle-murder has been replaced by a bullet in the back of the head.

However, not everyone has moved on, and Athelney Jones represents an appealing counter-force by emulating Holmes and his methods. Jones, whose own failure on a previous case inspired him to assiduously learn the master’s ways, seems a solid Holmes replacement, quickly demonstrating his powers of deduction by describing Chase’s mission before he has told him anything. Throughout the novel he displays fan-pleasing Holmesian tics, such as the same “maddening habit” of deferring explanations until the most theatrical moment, the predilection for disguise and even the catchphrases: “I tell you Chase, the game is very much afoot” (70). As the often bemused narrator, Chase seems to play a good Watson as well, and at one point, they consider starting their own agency around the corner from Baker Street, with “their own Mrs Hudson” to look after them (186).

But in a late and shocking twist, Chase reveals himself to be Moriarty, who has infiltrated the police investigation to get closer to and capture his rival Devereux. He regretfully (but only in an Alan Sugar Apprentice sense) kills Jones, and rides off in triumph at the end of the novel.

Moriarty’s narrative is then followed by the short story, “The Three Monarchs”, which switches time and perspective as Watson relates another case involving Holmes and Jones, who is here described sniffily as “a burly sweating figure […] whose wrong-footed assumptions and subsequent actions had caused us both irritation and amusement”. At the end of this brief story, Jones admits to Holmes that “Your methods are extraordinary […] I will learn from them. I must learn from them”, and we learn that Jones subsequently took sick leave due to this case. This neatly loops us back to our initial meeting with Jones at the start of Chase/Moriarty’s narrative, when his clothes had hung loosely from him due to that same illness.

At one point, Jones exasperatedly observes that the Devereux case is “like reading a book in which the chapters have been published in the wrong order or where the writer has deliberately set out to confuse” (135). Horowitz certainly sets out to confuse, but by placing the earlier encounter after Moriarty’s main narrative he smartly increases the impact of the latter’s tragic end, but also leaves us to wonder at the whole purpose of Moriarty.
Is it querying the wholesomeness of the entire Holmes legend? Jones’s determination to succeed makes the snootily imperiousnesss of Watson and Holmes’s treatment of him feel rather shabby, whereas even the ruthless Moriarty shows him some respect (albeit before killing him).

Or is it reinforcing that legend? Despite the attempts of the police and one of Holmes’s most ardent fans to solve the case without him, evil prevails as the good guys are thoroughly outwitted and Moriarty’s grip on the underworld becomes even stronger. It seems then that Jones’s fan-boy attempt to replace Holmes has failed. He has so thoroughly bought into the fictionalised myth of the genius detective with his faithful sidekick fighting phantom menaces that he omits to notice the flesh-and-blood reality of evil standing next to him. In perhaps a wry comment on other modern adaptations and retellings, Horowitz may be saying that the original is still the best and only version, and imitators are wasting their time. The recent (and thoroughly engaging) Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London was entitled ‘The man who never lived and will never die’, and this paradox also lies at the heart of this story: Horowitz suggests that Doyle’s original, although a fictional construct, is irreplacable, and only the foolhardy would attempt to emulate him. Cumberbatch et al, you have been warned.