The Transformed Beast : Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic

After only one eight-part series, the Showtime/Sky Atlantic co-production Penny Dreadful (2014 -) has become an international success with an active and vocal fanbase. Yet the relationship of the show (which was created and written by John Logan) to the Victorian serial fiction genre, ‘penny dreadfuls’, is an oblique one, and worth unpicking. Penny Dreadful is set in a late-Victorian Gothic world in which Dorian Gray and Victor Frankenstein join central figures Vanessa Ives and Sir Malcom Murray in attempting to rescue Sir Malcolm’s daughter Mina, who is under the power of Dracula. In its embrace of anachronism and rewriting of canonical Gothic texts, the series concept seems to owe more to pastiches and fan fiction practices like crossover fiction and ‘shipping’, than to the ‘reformed’ adventure fiction published by Edward J. Brett, W.L. Emmett, and Charles Fox in the later nineteenth century. However, I argue that there are other Victorian popular fictions to which the series has a more direct bloodline, including the penny dreadfuls’ forerunner, the ‘penny blood’, and the Gothic drama of the period. In its use of both penny blood archetypes (the werewolf, the vampire) and literary sources that were either bastardised for popular fiction and drama (Frankenstein) or which were criticised as being too ‘vulgar’ or ‘noxious’ to be read (The Picture of Dorian Gray) the series stages a clash of high and low cultures, of what is now considered ‘classic’ literature, and pulp. Paradoxically, Logan’s Penny Dreadful does all this not in the name of crude commercialism, but as the flagship of a Sky Atlantic campaign to raise the profile of its productions and to achieve the critical kudos routinely awarded to the American subscription channel Home Box Office (HBO). So the invoking of Victorian low-brow fiction serves to facilitate the middlebrow trajectory of a 21st-century television channel (in stark contrast to Victorian penny-blood authors like G.W.M. Reynolds, who, on moving into the more ‘respectable’ world of newspapers, sought to deny their roots in the business). In addition to exploring the rhetorical, structural and and semantic resonances of Penny Dreadful as a title and organising concept for the series, I will consider its broad appeal as an example of what Victoria Nelson, Catherine Spooner and Kohlke and Gutleben have classified in different ways as the ‘global Gothic’, the ubiquity of commercialised Gothic tropes in contemporary culture. Finally, the article seeks to place Penny Dreadful in the context of broadcasters’ difficulties, over the last decade, in representing the Victorian period in ways that win both critical and commercial acclaim. Seen in such a light, the show can be read as a conscious ‘liberation’ (in Logan’s words) from the historical weight of twentieth-century adaptations of Victorian fiction; but it is also a liberation which relies on audiences’ cultural capital to parse the meaning of its textual infidelities.