Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian Armelle Parey To cite this version: Armelle Parey. Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian. Études britanniques contemporaines - Revue de la Société d’études anglaises contemporaines, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017, 10.4000/ebc.3607. hal-02171903 HAL Id: hal-02171903 https://hal-normandie-univ.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02171903 Submitted on 3 Jul 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License Études britanniques contemporaines Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines 52 | 2017 Confluences Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian Confluence et le néo-victorien dans Dickensian Armelle Parey Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3607 DOI: 10.4000/ebc.3607 ISSN: 2271-5444 Publisher Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée Brought to you by Université de Caen Normandie Electronic reference Armelle Parey, « Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian », Études britanniques contemporaines [Online], 52 | 2017, Online since 01 June 2017, connection on 14 December 2018. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ebc/3607 ; DOI : 10.4000/ebc.3607 This text was automatically generated on 14 December 2018. Études britanniques contemporaines est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian 1 Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian Confluence et le néo-victorien dans Dickensian Armelle Parey 1 ‘If Dickens’s critical reputation has had its ups and downs over the years and if the tide of his literary fame has turned on several occasions, it seems that his power of attraction among today’s novelists may well be at its peak’ (Letissier 2012a, 245-6). The attraction mentioned here has led to novelists engaging with Dickens’s work by rewriting it in various ways.1 Dickens has also been a favourite for screen adaptations and, according to Joss March in 2001, ‘more films have been made of works by Dickens than any other author’s’ (204).2 Dickens’s work has also taken precedence in TV adaptations (see Butt 167) undoubtedly both building on and adding to the Victorian novelist’s popularity, even though these have rarely encountered approval from academia: ‘In discussion of TV drama and in the field of adaptation studies, classic novel adaptations are constantly critiqued as overly theatrical, formulaic, commercially driven commodities that are aesthetically unimaginative, conservative, and nostalgic’ (Butt 160). These screen adaptations however focus normally on one particular novel. 2 Dickensian purports to be different: in the 20-part-drama aired during the winter of 2015-16 on BBC1, TV screenwriter Tony Jordan, credited as the creator of the 30-minute- episode serial,3 ambitiously takes on a whole universe, the one created by Dickens, with characters from various novels now all featuring and interacting in the same televisual text, illustrating the process of confluence. In the BBC press Pack Jordan explained his project was to take a selection of Dickens' most iconic characters and free them from the narrative of the book: ‘The key for me was not to simply do another adaptation of the novels, but to take the characters that we all love from all those novels and mash them up to make something new and original’ (5).4 3 It thus appears that Kathryn Hughes’s words (2010) have become literally true: ‘Dickens’s characters appear to have become untethered from their texts, even from their creator’s control’ (qtd. in Letissier 2012b, 31). Or have they? Have they really become emancipated Études britanniques contemporaines, 52 | 2017 Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian 2 from their source text? How far have they travelled from their original part? The serial is entitled Dickensian. The suffix ‘-ian’ signifies likeness: it means ‘alike, relating to’… i.e. not identical. The title sequence confirms this when it announces the serial is ‘inspired by the works of Charles Dickens’ (italics mine). The very title claims affiliation while allowing for distance. ‘Dickensian’ is an adjective that suggests certain themes—‘relating to or associated with Charles Dickens […] ; relating to conditions, esp. squalid social or working conditions, like those described in his novels’ (Chambers). It is interesting to note that ‘even those who are unfamiliar with Dickens’s works understand what is meant by the adjective derived by its name’ (Boyce 3), which suggests that the word has acquired a certain independence from the work it comes from, because some of Dickens’s novels have this doubleness indeed: ‘the text that Dickens wrote… and the one that we collectively remember’ (see Paul Davis qtd. in Louttit 92). Finally, ‘Dickensian’ is also a noun that refers to, as the Chambers dictionary states, ‘an admirer or student of Dickens’ which indicates homage.5 The title chosen thus delimits the topic while remaining quite open. 4 ‘All adaptation is interpretation’ (205) Joss Marsh concisely says and this paper seeks to address the navigating done in Dickensian between closeness and distance, as well as the possible foregrounding of the phenomenon: while Dickensian appears postmodern in its blurring of boundaries, in its confluence of novels, how much of a self-conscious re- engagement with Dickens’s fiction does the serial offer? Is this representation of Dickens’s work ‘neo-Victorian’ in the definition established by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewelyn which posits that distance must be signalled in form and theme? ‘Texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (4, emphasis in the original), as opposed to mere representations of the Victorian era that ‘lack imaginative re-engagement with the period, and instead recycle and deliver a stereotypical and unnuanced reading of the Victorians and their literature and culture’ (6). In order to analyse if the process of confluence in Dickensian makes the TV serial a neo-Victorian production, we shall first focus on the selection of characters and stories that feature in the serial, then study the workings of confluence, before examining the development of certain themes in the serial and, finally, the distance taken from the generic conventions of the classic serial. Characters and stories 5 Supported by a cast of well-known British actors, the BBC production appropriates the world of Dickens via a selection of the novelist’s best-known stories and characters. For instance, it begins on Christmas eve and Scrooge’s office features prominently so that the viewer is immediately reminded of A Christmas Carol. This story, according to Chris Louttit, is, along with Oliver Twist and Great Expectations among ‘Dickens’s most frequently- adapted texts’ because ‘all contain quasi-mythic, iconic characters like Fagin, Sikes, Scrooge, Magwitch and Miss Havisham […] an obvious attraction to film-makers and actors involved in bringing them to the screen’ (92) and indeed, all these characters feature in Dickensian. 6 Yet, the BBC production does not depict Scrooge’s revelation brought about by Marley’s ghost. Scrooge remains an obnoxious miser throughout the serial and the focus is on his employee, Bob Cratchit, and his family. Similarly, Great Expectations is evoked but rather Études britanniques contemporaines, 52 | 2017 Confluence and the Neo-Victorian in Dickensian 3 than Pip’s story, we follow Miss Havisham’s. Miss Havisham, Georges Letissier rightly observes, is ‘the one who is the most easily remembered and the most often mentioned’ (Letissier 2012b, 33). But in fact, in every Dickens novel used as intertext, Dickensian picks characters and stories that are incidental and could range as Barthes’s ‘catalysers,’ supplementary events, in the original novel (see Porter Abbott 23-24): not Scrooge but the Cratchits, not Esther Summerson but Lady Dedlock (Bleak House), not the story of Oliver Twist but that of Mr Bumble and his wife's efforts to rise in the world, and that of Nancy’s relationship with Fagin and Bill Sikes. 7 In theory, the secondariness of these characters in the Dickens novels allows for their development in the serial. In fact, the characters that migrate from text to screen do so with their identifiable characteristics and their stories mostly run their course. Yet, developing these characters allows for the addition of ambivalence. Thus, there is the suggestion that Compeyson, the villain who colludes with Arthur Havisham to deceive his sister in Great Expectations, eventually falls in love with his victim. Characters in Dickensian, however, never act out of character and are never deliberately made to go against verisimilitude6 or ‘act […] contrary to their costumes’, which is one way for neo- Victorian adaptations to signal distance from the nineteenth century and the fact that we are dealing with a reconstruction of Victorian times (Whelehan 273). The purpose of the serial is indeed to offer the viewer the possibility to discover or rediscover Dickens’s actual characters7 and some key-scenes are therefore included. Here, as in a number of post-Dickens representations, Miss Havisham is eventually ‘easily identifiable through a set of formulaic features’ (Letissier 2012b, 31): the wedding cake covered in cobwebs, the faded wedding-dress and the non-ticking clock all feature in the final episode of Dickensian.