London 1827, ah Regency – kind of Victorian but with more
debauchery.
There are three kinds of Victoriana/Regency out there I’ve
found:
Decorous which is all big houses and pretty clothes and
intrigue, usually involving Rules of Decency and terrible terrible liberties
Swashbuckling, which has lots of brass and waist coats
and brave man facing terrible peril and monsters (like brown people) in foreign
lands.
Gritty with big bleak cities, lots of fog and poor people
and everyone has cholera.
This is definitely Gritty.
Let’s look at the characters introduced.
Firstly we have Generic Angsty White Guy, inspector
Marlott. He works for the River Patrol, hunting down opium smugglers and
generally not being super popular with his fellows because Gritty. He finds a
body of a child during one of his investigations – and this body seems to be
seven separate children’s bodies sewn together. He has been recruited by the
Home Secretary Sir Richard Pool to find out who is behind this.
Marlott also has syphilis, taking mercury, a requisite
dead, tragic family (which may or may not be his fault because ANGST) and a
loss of faith and a need for redemption.
Honestly, I’m not inspired. I’ve just seen so many of
these characters. Grim, gritty, angst-laden, standing on a fridge of dead women
and practicing his rugged grim suffering look which I’ve seen so many times
over and over. Yawn not another one!
He has sidekicks – an urchin and Nightingale. I like to
think Nightingale will be a well developed, interesting character but part of
my cynically thinks that his inclusion involved the following discussion:
Producer #1: Shit… I’ve just realised the only Black
person we have is a nasty child abusing villain
Producer #2: it’s a historical…
Producer #1: Stop, we’ve used that excuse way too often,
they’re not buying it
Producer #2: Fine, throw in a Black sidekick
Producer #1: that’s good we can introduce his family and
show how they live in 1827 London, the challenges they face and…
Producer #2: Make him an orphan.
Producer #1: Oh…
Producer #2: But a nice guy! That should do it.
Anyway, maybe this is my utter cynicism and I do hope he’s
more but I’ve seen this level of tokenism before and I’m not expecting a great
deal. We see this a lot – remove him from any POC family/community, set him up
as a sidekick quickly. It’s a pattern. I hope I’m wrong though
So, Sir Robert Peel is so focused on finding out why
someone is making macabre jigsaw puzzles out of children because he’s trying to
push a bill through Parliament that will regulate surgeons and ensure anyone
slicing and dicing you in the name of health is qualified to do so. Sounds
good. The less good part of this is that he wants to do this by also having the
bodies of people who died in Work Houses made available to doctors for dissection/exploration/experimentation
(the law allows for executed people to be dissected, but there’s not nearly enough
supply to match demand –hence why “ressurectionists” – body snatchers – have such
a roaring trade).
This law puts him at odds with Lord and Lady Hervey and
many others who are shocked and appalled at this measure.
There’s a lot of meaty class issues here – not just the
obvious one of the poor being considered akin to criminals and their agency
over their funerary arrangements being completely usurped – but also with Lady
Hermey cornering Marlott to insist he condemn the law when he carefully
sidesteps. He’s directly employed by Sir Peel, he is put in the terrible
position of telling an aristocrat, to her face, he disagrees with her or in
repudiating his employer. She may talk of conscience, but conscience is not a
luxury he can afford.
We have more gruesome class issues, of course, because
this is Gritty and nothing says Gritty like urchins in grubby waistcoats, a
brutal Fagin character, child prostitution, thievery and lots of grim.
Nightingale becomes a sidekick because the police want rid of him due to his
pesky habit of arresting wife beaters when the wives can’t pay for prosecution.
And Marlott, in looking for the children who died to make the macabre jigsaw,
quickly realises that the local police have collected a ridiculously tiny
number of names of missing children. Most poor kids disappear and no-one looks
for them
His friendly urchin does find rumours about a “beast”
preying on poor children. And he follows up on the disappearance of a girl
called Alice and stumbles across several (well 2) references to “Lyca” from a
poem by William Blake. Which he takes to be A Sign for some reason. Because
when looking for lost children one should always consider poetry
He melange of bodies sewn back together also twitched and
grabbed Marlott’s hand – yet at the same time we’re reminded he is taking
Mercury for his syphilis and is prone to hallucinations
So… I’m intrigued, but I’m not excited. I am interested in
a Frankenstein retelling which is less about the monster or Frankenstein, that’s
definitely interesting. But I can’t say Marlott particularly fascinates me
