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

Abstract

After only one eight-part season, the television series Penny Dreadful, a Showtime/Sky Atlantic co-production, had already 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. The first part of this article focuses on the task of teasing out the connections between Penny Dreadful and the penny dreadful genre, arguing that the show's title performs significant cultural work in positioning itself in relation to Victorian fiction and in relation to modern television. In the second part of the essay, I explore how Penny Dreadful works as an adaptation, using Kamilla Elliott's insights into the contradictory and overlapping concepts of adaptation in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Finally, the essay considers Penny Dreadful as a reflection – and, it is argued, an appropriation – of contemporary media fandom.

Monsters in Mirrors: Duality, Triangulation, and Multiplicity in Two Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde

“…74-78). To the best of my knowledge, no scholarship focuses on the depiction of Henry Jekyll in Penny Dreadful, though Monterrubio Ibáñez (2020) and Poore (2016) do consider how the series adapts Gothic fictions.…”

“…The links are thematic as well as visual, for both films feature androgynous, crossdressing killers who invert and collapse the binary oppositions of gender and family. 10 For analyses of how Penny Dreadful adapts Gothic fictions, see Monterrubio Ibáñez (2020) and Poore (2016). Farizova (2020) discusses the influence of Romantic poetry on the series.…”

The lures of neo‐Victorianism presentism (with a feminist case study ofPenny Dreadful)

“…Hence, it might seem misguided to expect the latter from Logan's series. Yet as Benjamin Poore remarks, the series draws on actual “cultural history (for example, spiritualism; the Whitechapel murders; imperial adventurers)” (Poore, , p. 66), deliberately positioning itself “between period‐specificity and anachronism” (77). Penny Dreadful makes a self‐conscious effort to get (some) historical details right—for instance, in aspects of dress and fashion; medical treatments for hysteria; London locations such as Kew Gardens, the British Museum (since 1992 the Natural History Museum), and slum neighbourhoods; and popular pastimes and entertainments such as taxidermy, Wild West shows, wax works and séances.…”