Penny Dreadful : dismembering and assembling the Victorian Gothic

Abstract

Nothing quite spells decadence, darkness, madness and excess than the Victorian Gothic, a literary genre which flourished in the interminable nineteenth century alongside the mental asylum, the sewer system, alienism, forensics, photography, human blood transfusion and the telephone. It would take more than the age of gaslight and the Origin of Species however to banish spiritualism, table rapping, parlour magic, mesmerism and belief in the supernatural netherworld, all of which persisted well into the fin-de-siècle. Beyond the illuminating but scant comfort of yellowish pools of light sprawled the beast that was London, with its “midnight streets” (W. Blake) and things that went bump, slash and howl in the night. Perhaps it was the same sources of artificial light, exuding the illusion of civic law and order, which nonetheless also permitted a Victorian demimonde to flit in and out of existence beyond the feebler reaches of their aura.