Ripper Street and steampunk

I talked recently about the Canadian show Murdoch's Mysteries as an entertaining exploration of late Victorian Toronto, which is not exactly steam punk but close enough.

I am now watching Ripper Street, which like the Canadian series is about the late 19th century and is not exactly steampunk but shares Murdoch mysteries fascination with new technology and science.

The fascination of a variety of creative people with the modernity of the late 19th century and the early 20th is fascinating to me!

Murdoch's Mysteries: we live in a new and incredible age

For about a decade, CBC has been broadcasting an interesting murder mystery series set in Edwardian Canada, or rather, Edwardian Toronto. I have been watching reruns of the show over the last two or three weeks and like most series television, it is much more enjoyable when seen that way.

It would be easy enough to call the show "steampunk" except that the technology that sets the pace in the show is electricity. Murdoch, the lead character, is a Toronto detective who is enthusiastic about modern technology -- x-ray machines, electrical automobiles, movie cameras -- and uses it very effectively to solve crimes. In the course of his adventures he also runs into many leading figures of the time – Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Tesla, Marconi, Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill. He does not run into Sherlock Holmes, but he does run across somebody who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes.

I am also impressed by the depiction of the city of Toronto. Toronto circa 1899 is shown as being multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, wrestling with a variety of political, racial, and social conflicts, which are reasonably realistically portrayed. One of the main characters, for instance, gets in trouble for promoting contraception, which is illegal at the time. Other characters are properly shocked by this and there is a bit of a riot.

I think there may be more in-jokes in the series than I'm picking up. Two days ago I saw an episode where I was pretty sure two characters were modelled after Toronto's Ford brothers. The characters were not politicians, but they looked like the Fords and their personal interactions with each other matched what I know of the Fords.

All too often we think that people in the past were old-fashioned fuddy-duddies. In some places in some areas that is undoubtably true. But in other times people -- or many of them – are seized by an awareness of modernity. One of the great virtues of Murdoch's Mysteries is that it reminds us of that fact. "We live in a new and incredible age," says one character, and she is quite right.

The national anthem of steampunk

I am a great fan of the era of explosive growth that is the 1850s -- a period which might be called the original and real steampunk era.   A friend of mine, Tim Moran, a recent PhD in American history, cited in his dissertation an actual poem (advertised as a folk song) from the 1850s that catches the excitement of that era:  

Our Fathers gave us liberty, 

But little did they dream,

 The grand results that flow along 

This mighty age of steam; 

For our mountains, lakes and rivers, 

Are all a blaze of fire, 

And we send our news by lightning, 

On the telegraphic wire

Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., 1850, Roude Folk Song Index 4556.

The painting, "American Progress," is by John Gast and dates from the 1870s.

Search this blog for "Beamish" for more unapologetic steampunk fandom.

Beamish and Puffing Billy!

In County Durham there is an amazing outdoor museum called Beamish, where various structures have been relocated and restored.

So there is an Edwardian high street, a coal mine of the 1850s, a "home farm" of the late 19th century, a Georgian-era gentleman's country house of the 1820s, and more.

Somehow I managed to miss this amazing place until now.

One of the best parts for me were the vehicles and the steam engines. The high point, a ride on an 1820s train pulled by Puffing Billy!

Kate Bush steampunk!

Steampunk

Here is a nifty article at the Smart Set, via the League of Ordinary Gentlemen (how appropriate!).

The aesthetic movement Steampunk wants to bring the wonder back into our relationship with machines. Its tack is to fully embrace (and affect) an Edwardian orientation to the world. Though Steampunk has been a growing cultural trend for a few decades, it really came into its own in the aughts and is now a full-fledged phenomenon. Steampunks dress like the Wright Brothers and Arctic explorers. They write alternate history fantasies in which alien clones ride around in dirigibles by the light of gas lamps. Steampunks are fascinated by mechanics, and Steampunk art, jewelry, and fashion often involve gears, wheels, pulleys, and, of course, steam: a laptop computer fused with a rickety typewriter; an arcade game redesigned to look like a mini-submarine. What most defines Steampunk as a culture, however, is attitude. The “punk” in Steampunk confronts technology's alienating qualities with messy DIY defiance. The “steam” (besides its literal connotations) is almost like another word for magic: brute, utilitarian contraptions powered by clouds, and breath — ephemeral energy.

Steampunk tries to capture that Edwardian moment when steam power still ruled and the romance of technology lay precisely in the line it toed between destruction and possibility. Equally fascinated by flying machines and trench warfare, Steampunk is both optimistic and nihilistic. I like to think of this attitude as Gleehilism. It's this Gleehilism that makes Steampunk one of the defining aesthetic movements of the early 21st century.

Image: Extraordinary gentlemen/woman.