Victorian London

The accusation against Penny Dreadful is that it is melodramatic. The defense is that Victorian popular fiction was melodramatic, and deliberately so. John Logan's Showtime series took every monster the period produced (Dorian Gray, Dracula's Mina, Frankenstein's creature, Doyle's world of spiritualism) and assembled them in a single West London household, then asked what it would actually feel like to carry that much darkness. Eva Green's Vanessa Ives is one of the great television performances of the 2010s: religious terror, sexuality, grief, and genuine menace all in one face. The fog-drenched London the show builds is atmospheric in a way that no theme park attraction has matched. It ran three seasons and ended on its own terms.

Everything fictional set in Victorian London is in some sense downstream of Dickens. The fog, the grotesque rich, the starving children, the workhouses, the melodrama of unlikely coincidence resolving social injustice: these are Dickens's inventions, or at least his contributions to the cultural vocabulary of the period. When Oliver Twist was adapted into a musical and then a Polanski film, when Bleak House became one of the BBC's finest serialized dramas, when Dickensian tried to put all the characters into one street together, they were all working inside a universe of character types and moral furniture that one novelist assembled in less than twenty years of writing. No other Victorian writer has been adapted more; none has shaped the image of the period as completely.

Video games set in historical periods usually build a backdrop, not a world. Assassin's Creed Syndicate is an exception. Ubisoft's 2015 open-world game reconstructed 1868 London at a scale and density that no film production could afford: the Thames, the docks, the East End slums, Buckingham Palace, the underside of bridges. Jacob and Evie Frye fight the Templar grip on London's criminal gangs while navigating a class structure drawn with more care than many historical dramas. The rope launcher lets you scale any building; the carriage races cut through the city at speed. What holds it together is that the setting is not just a skin but a system: the gangs, the crime lords, the borough politics all map onto something the period actually looked like.