The characteristic of "Ripple Street" is that the suspense in the script is so light, because it is not concerned with grasping the truth that has become history. In this short series, the BBC's directors have painstakingly embedded fragments of Victorian history with an astonishing density. However, after a little analysis, we will find that these fragments of history, which have been rearranged, exaggerated and deformed, are no longer equal to history, and their dazzling skills are not the "representation" of realism. With the help of imagination, the audience can return to this "Victorian era" where reality and reality coexist, to witness the opening of London's first subway, the battle between direct current and alternating current, and the surging of workers and feminist movements... As a latecomer, the audience does not have to pass the fixed The rearview mirror to watch history, but to obtain a front and back perspective, more clearly feel the paradox of fate that is still in the fetal movement.
Let's take a look at the plausible fragments of history in which each narrative is real and each is metaphorical:
Take the first episode of the first season as an example, when the protagonist, Inspector Kilder, makes his debut watching the boxing match of his subordinate, Sheriff Bennet Drake. This scene is actually a metaphor for the Victorian setting: a ruthless flaunt of power and triumphant expansion. In fact, the first modern amateur boxing association was born in England in 1881, and boxing was a typically Victorian sport in which players competed without gloves for up to 50 rounds. Corrupt Inspector Thayn in Season 2 was not bluffing when he said that "this kind of game has been dead before". The first case in the series is also related to the tyranny and expansion of human nature: the first camera is used to film pornography. In fact, the Lumiere brothers won't show his famous Arrival of the Train in Paris six years after the story of the first season of Ripple, and they made a lot of money even for just ordinary street scenes, so The idea of the first case is somewhat far-fetched, but the intention to reveal the contradictions brought about by "progress" is conveyed. More importantly, the director asked all the audience at the historical origin in a slightly awkward posture: "This is an amazing invention, what can we do with it?"
The third episode of the first season is another place. Where the front and rear perspectives intersect, the philanthropy that Inspector Reed's wife is engaged in looks very different than it is today. Readers who have read "Paris and London" should be impressed by the harsh environment of the British relief system in Orwell's writings in the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century poverty was seen as a sin, charity would indulge the lazy, so the primary purpose of relief was not to help but to punish the poor! It was not until 1883, when The Salvation Army founder William Booth published The Darkest Corners of England and Their Ways out, that he began to think that both individuals and societies were responsible for poverty. Just like the rich lady in this episode, early philanthropy was often driven by the religious zeal of the wealthy rather than sympathy, and almsgiving was always tied to preaching and singing, and the recipients resented it. Mrs. Reed is obviously in line with the modern philosophy of charity. In the end, Mrs. Broad made a concession to Mrs. Reed. "No prayer" is half a century early for the rich, but half a century late for the poor. . So who will pay for this half-century of meaningless torture? The front and rear cross perspectives open up this historical entrance that was already closed.
Feminism is a major focus of Ripper Street, with almost all cases revolving around women. One of the most exciting cases is the retaliation against the employer by the female match factory worker in the third episode of the second season. The Bryant and May match factory women's strike did happen in history, and it happened in 1888 with the "Ripper case". Profitability at the Bryant and May Match Factory is over 35 per cent, while female workers are paid as little as 4 shillings a week, while enduring harsh regulations and toxic working conditions. White phosphorus toxin causes the female union to turn blue-cheeked, cancerous, and eventually stink to death—not as bloody as it appears in the show, but just as tragic. When newspapers took notice, the factory forced the female workers to sign an agreement to prove the workplace was comfortable and pleasant, a move that sparked a strike of 700 female workers. The strike ended with the employers being forced to raise wages, which marked the first record of unskilled workers' strike victory. In the play, the boss of the match factory, the foreman and the lawyer who processed the documents were liquidated by the female workers one by one, and the female worker leader paid the price of his life when he demanded blood for blood. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there is a long tradition of class reconciliation in English literature, and there are many examples of last-minute suppression of revolutions, and this perspective is indeed sequential.
Not only women from the lower classes have to launch a desperate resistance to improve their living conditions, but women from the upper classes are also constantly demanding political equality. An important female character in the second season, Jane Cobton, is a congresswoman. Unlike the desperate and desperate female workers, Cobden symbolizes a political participation game recognized by civilized people. However, this is another fiction of the screenwriter: British women did not get the right to vote and stand for election until 1918, and Ms. Cobden had to "travel" for at least 30 years to serve as a member of parliament. Some researchers believe that the state's return to women's groups for supporting war policies during the First World War was the fundamental reason for British women to gain suffrage, while others believe it was the credit of the "Women's Fight for Suffrage Movement". To be sure, in Cobton's time, the women's affirmative movement still had a long way to go. It is true that women as well-educated as Cobton first chose to preach equality in the living room suavely, and mobilized individual MPs to submit bills to Parliament in private names, but after failing to gain enough attention, the women's affirmative movement eventually to the point where it is more violent than the strike of female workers. Women fighting for suffrage include burning down houses, scratching through art gallery collections, chaining themselves to Buckingham Palace railings, and burning the words "Suffrage Women" on golf course lawns with sulfuric acid. In a window-smashing incident in 1912, police arrested 124 women protesting. In 1913, a woman named Emily Davidson protested in a more decisive way: she rushed under the hooves of the king's horse at a derby and died on the spot. According to history, Ms. Cobden, who fought for women's rights before "World War I", may have been a frequent visitor to Inspector Reed's room, and her character is unlikely to be as elegant as portrayed in the play.
In addition to women, "Ripple Street" also pays affectionate attention to marginalized groups such as retired soldiers, ethnic minorities, gays, deformed children: Sheriff Drake has been to Egypt, and the fifth episode of the first season mentioned He was rescued in Khartoum, apparently taking part in the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the siege of Kabul in General Gordon's crusade against the Mahdi uprising in 1885, which ended in a disastrous defeat for the British: when reinforcements arrived on the battlefield two days later, The general Gordon, who had commanded the "Foreign Gun Team" in the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" war, has died. Sheriff Drake saved his life, but the expansion of the empire left scars on him that would never heal. Fleet, another police officer with a story in the H precinct, is an Irishman. From the way of confession in the opening scene of the fourth episode of the second season, it can be seen that he believes in Catholicism rather than Anglicanism. The Irish Finney movement has been a scourge of successive British governments, and Conan Doyle's arrangement of a Celtic name for Sherlock Holmes' sworn enemy Moriarty illustrates how hostile Irish people were in British society at the time (see Eagleton, "On Evil"). Conservatives in Congress even recruited a volunteer army who had conquered Ireland. Only because of the outbreak of World War I did the United Kingdom escape a Civil War-style civil war. In the fourth episode of the second season, the screenwriter intends to arrange a conservative MP Died at the hands of Irish independents. The "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, who appeared in the first and second episodes of the second season, is also a real person in history. The cause of death, as described in the play, was a cervical dislocation caused by a falling pillow. These false and real narratives are intertwined, and what they reveal is neither the actual state of things nor the state they should be, but an observation of the paradox of fate. As in the last episode of the first season, Ross's date with the "Ripper" suspect happens to be the Crystal Palace, where the first World Expo was held: one side is a glorious civilization, and the other is a deep darkness.
The "Victorian Era" was the first golden age since the Industrial Revolution. Urbanization brought abundant and cheap labor, but also fostered poverty, pollution, infectious diseases and crime. Throughout the nineteenth century, the crime rate in England continued to rise. In 1805, there were 4,605 criminals tried in the UK, and in 1846 it surged to 30,349 people, the vast majority of whom were urban residents. Inspector Reid's Whitechapel district is known for its eclectic mix in the East End, a year before the first serial killer in modern history, Jack the Ripper, had just made the place famous, as if heralding an even more chaotic era. George Eliot saw in "The Mill on the Flo" a good age, an age of "wine and velvet rugs," and one that built prosperity on "no fragrance, but the roar of machines." The era above the national life of the sound, the body dyed in the mine, and the sweat beside the furnace". In such an era, what law enforcement officers have to confront is not only the ghostly figure of criminals hiding in the dark, but also the torrent of the times that is rolling in. The tragic self-splitting of the protagonist from the cross-perspective echoes the splitting of society.
(The historical materials in this article mainly refer to the second volume of "History of England" written by Clayton Roberts and others)
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