a sense of historical romance
mike leigh and the 19th century
Lots has happened since the last Restorative Romance! Namely, I went to Birmingham, UK to present my Newgate research at IASPR 2023. It feels like a good milestone for this newsletter, which was in part borne out of a need to practice and document my background research for that project. I plan to return to Newgate soon after a mini-break from thinking about prisons, now that I’ve presented my research and gotten some feedback.
Reformed Rakes have also released three episodes since the last newsletter! A Taxonomy of Rakes, Stormfire, and most recently, Cheating. I have three half-baked essays to accompany these episodes, but I don’t like any of them yet.
So here’s something completely different.
#mikeleighsummer
Have you heard that it’s #mikeleighsummer? My friend Fran has been writing a lot about Leigh at Fran Magazine1 and her writing, by osmosis and intention, recently motivated me to revisit Topsy-Turvy, a movie I did not love the first time I saw it, but sensed that I would love, given the right attention and effort. I was right; I was bowled over on re-watch.
And then Mike Leigh Summer happened. Cinematically, all I’ve wanted to do is figure out Leigh.2 I immediately watched Mr. Turner (twice), Secrets & Lies, and Vera Drake. And then I went to England for two weeks, saw a bunch of Turner paintings, and then came home and watched A Sense of History, Peterloo and Topsy-Turvy again.
This is not a part of my “non-romance, romance” series, primarily because I don’t think Leigh’s historical films function much like romance novels. But based on the way Mike Leigh talks about his period-set movies (I highly recommend his director’s commentary if the edition you are watching comes with one!), he does not seem to think these period drama are that distinct of a project from his slice-of-life, dark comedy, contemporary set films. His process, with heavy reliance on improvisation and an unfolding collaboration with the actors and his technicians, is similar for all his films and his troupe of character actors overlaps between the two poles of his oeuvre.
But my angle for everything is historical romance and one of my questions of Leigh, pretty immediately when I started his films, is about this interest in history and how that unifies with his politically left, working class perspective. What is gained by these settings and how does he use them? And where does he expand, surpass or speak to historical romance?
Three of Leigh’s films (Topsy-Turvy, Mr Turner and Peterloo) are set right in the period that takes up so much of historical romance--the 19th century. I’m going to talk about them in reverse filmography order, which is actually the chronological order of their settings. And then we’ll do A Sense of History at the end.
Peterloo, 1819
Peterloo (2018) was the last new-to-me Leigh that I watched and I’m still thinking about how I feel about it. It’s sweeping in its subject matter in ways that his other movies that I have seen are not and, importantly, is about a failure on a massive political scale, whereas Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner both to some extent involve personal triumphs, though those are complicated by the nature of being about humans.
In our Stormfire episode, I noted how Napoleon haunts historical romance because Stormfire was the first book I read where he was an actual character. The Napoleonic wars and the home consequences for England do have a presence in histrom (ask any Mary Balogh hero). But sometimes this context serves more as a set dressing that situates historical romance in a moment, especially when the characters who are dealing with the fall out are landed gentry or aristocrats. Peterloo does show this class and their experienced consequences with the haunting of Napoleon.
Peterloo focuses on people less likely to get historical romance novels; not only are they working class, but they are from the north of England.3 The Peterloo Massacre happened in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester on August 16, 1819. There was a gathering of tens of thousands of people from all over the region to hear speakers talk about parliamentary reform, set against the backdrop of the economic slump that England experienced after the Napoleonic Wars, made worse by the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws (referenced all the time in historical romance) were tariffs on imported food, added in an attempt to encourage the purchase of more expensive British-grown grains, that resulted in the enrichment of landowners and the struggle of the working class, especially those who worked in new manufacturing centers, like Manchester.
The parliamentary reform issues focused on universal suffrage and really representation in parliament at all--the way that England’s parliamentary districts were carved up meant that boroughs with very few people in them had outsized representation in the House of Commons, whereas new economic centers in the north, like Manchester and Liverpool, were severely underrepresented, some to the point of no direct representation at all.
The film shows the lead up to the Peterloo Massacre, on both sides--the reformers, and the politicians and magistrates who are attempting to thwart them. There’s a sense of culminating dread throughout. Repeatedly both sides make small decisions that will lead to disastrous consequences, usually based on the reformers assuming good faith of their opponents, and the magistrates assuming bad. I was trying to think of a metaphor for the viewing experience and closest I can think of it is Titanic, with the ticking away toward known disaster.
Something Leigh excels at, even in a historical political epic, is rich, tiny scenes that build up to make a world and here, those scenes, where powerful members of Regency society treat Mancuians with disdain and disgust over and over again, could be justification for the powder keg that is going to explode at the end of the film.
One of these little scenes that has stuck with me the most is a series of criminal court sentencing early in the film. The charges of “loose, idle and disorderly conduct” (misdemeanor) and “theft of two excellent bottles of claret” are met with whipping and 14 days in jail as a sentence. Theft of a pocket watch (value of five guineas) is given transportation to Australia, for fourteen years. Theft of a coat leads to a recommendation for a hanging.
The scene emphasizes the extreme judicial discretion available to judges for the sentencing phases of a trial, the lack of legal representation afforded to accused (not provided in England until 1836), and the disdain with which judges speak to defendants, while acting as though they are showing grace. The richness of Leigh’s world building becomes an unbearable rot, in this culminating feel toward what could be a justifiable, violent response by the Peterloo crowd.
But the justifiable powder keg of revolution isn’t even what happens--the building pressure is not released by the crowd, but by the police forces, who attack the crowd under the pretense of the Riot Act. In a film that is mostly scenes of men talking in rooms on both sides of the constitutional reform fight, the movie culminates in a scene of families screaming in a square.
But importantly, Leigh, never one for tidiness, has the penultimate scene be with the Prince Regent, lest you believe that Peterloo will be properly mourned, or directly spark something greater. Prinny, in discussing the events with Lord Liverpool and Lord Sidmouth, emphasizes his pride in the work of the magistrates at Manchester to “preserve the public tranquility.” Sedition and revolution will be tamped down.
There’s no text cards at the end of the film (Mike Leigh would NEVER) explaining that the goals of the reformers were mostly been met, just incrementally, throughout the 19th century. Or hinting at the austerity movement in the 21st century United Kingdom as a continued project of suppression. The final scene is a family, followed throughout the film, burying their Waterloo soldier, who died after he returned home, at Peterloo, based on a real victim of the massacre.
The closest direct context to modern day happens in the other small scene that got stuck in my craw. This family is shown the night before they attend the gathering that will become the massacre. The mother is sitting next to her husband and she says, gesturing to her youngest daughter, “I were just thinking, in 1900, she’ll be 85…she’ll be a great grandma…I hope it’s a better world for her.” Her husband responds “Some of it’ll get better, some of it will never change.”
Peterloo has this on-the-noseness of its politics that I could see might grate some fans of Leigh’s--it's definitely the least subtle of the films I have watched from Leigh, with the clearest sides of sympathies. But as a histrom reader, where even the books that announce their “good” politics so often fall flat, especially when it comes to issues of class politics (or authors come out in favor of using generative AI to circumvent paying artists), the on-the-noseness about this depiction of an event that haunts so much of the Regency books walloped me.
Mr. Turner, 1825-1851
During an early scene in Mr. Turner (2014), my favorite Leigh so far, JMW Turner’s father is buying him pigments to make paint, and the salesman mentions that the pigment’s price is heavy because it comes all the way from Afghanistan. In the director’s commentary, Leigh says "I love the fact that we can refer to places that have a different resonance now. He talks about Afghanistan, where this particular type of pigment comes from, and of course now Afghanistan has a different meaning for us now, it takes on a different resonance."
Mr. Turner was released in 2014, just at the end of combat operations in Afghanistan by the US and the UK, though obviously not the end of the military presence in the country. In this moment in the director’s commentary, I felt like I unlocked some of Leigh’s theory of these period dramas. Of course movies are reflections of the time they are made and of the time they are set, but Leigh doesn’t take this for granted and instead delights in it as an available vector for his depiction of these specific moments in time. I watched Mr. Turner twice before I left for England to present my research on Newgate Prison’s presence in histrom and this is central to my thesis, that the angles of Newgate’s perception in these books are not incidental, but instrumental to the way criminal punishment is talked about in the genre.
But the other thing that I love about Turner himself and Mr. Turner is the watching of a life that spans basically the 75 years that make up so much of the historical romance space. Turner was an exact contemporary of Jane Austen, born in the same year (1775), though he lived thirty years longer, with the film capturing 25 years at the end of Turner’s life, the years with no overlap with the life of the main touchstone of British set histrom. But this is still a quarter century (1825-1851) that marks great change in London and England; it's the transition of ages, from Regency to Victorian (in 1837 with the crowing of Queen Victoria).
Leigh emphasizes public and private responses to Turner, with the artist and the masses in a kind of binary star system of shifting notions. Turner ages and becomes more cantankerous and gruff, more private and dodgy, looser and more chaotic in his art. The world becomes more industrial, more prudish, possibly more hypocritical. Born a Georgian, reaching a peak of his career during the (extended) Regency period, and dying a Victorian, Turner’s life and Leigh’s film connect quite a bit to the bulk settings of historical romance. We see Turner on multiple, progressively modern modes of transportation; we see him be inspired to paint The Fighting Temeraire, perhaps his most famous painting.
The Temeraire was a ship that was used at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), one of the last of its kind in commission. Launched in 1798, the ship was sold and ordered to be broken up in 1838. Turner painted the scene and exhibited his painting at the Royal Academy in 1839.
Leigh borrows Turner’s symbolism of the vast warship, powered only by wind and sails, being pulled by the coal-powered tugboat, a much smaller ship now able to pull a hero ship of the most important naval battle in England’s history. The Temeraire’s last firing of her guns was in celebration of Queen Victoria’s coronation. Dawn breaks on a new age and Turner mourns, documents and adjusts.
Mr. Turner is both narrower and wider than any given historical romance. The focus is on one man, who traveled widely, but was essentially a Londoner, working class, and newly economically mobile. The sweep of history touches his life, but in ways that don’t follow neat narrative arcs. But the film takes us all the way to his death, through these differing ages of time, whereas a romance novel may take place over a few weeks or a few months.
I’ve written before about what romance struggles to do before because of the happily ever after mandate, not as a dig, but as an exercise in finding the edges. The neatness of a happy couple is an appeal of the genre, but there is something lost in exchange, especially in historical settings I think, when death is a fiction or something that happens to other people. Mr. Turner’s connection to that arc of time, through modernity, and ending with Turner’s death, fills a gap for me.
Topsy-Turvy, 1884-1885
The first produced of Mike Leigh’s period dramas is Topsy-Turvy from 1999, which focuses on the year of Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaboration where they are at an impasse. Gilbert is leaning on tired old tricks (like magic lozenges) for his libretto and Sullivan is bored with the world of light opera and attacks his partner’s hackneyed plots. The always strained relationship seems like it is at an end, though they are still under contract with producer Richard D’Oyley Carte. Neither man can be moved from his position to collaborate with the other. When all seems lost, Gilbert becomes inspired when he visits an exhibition in London of Japanese arts and crafts to set an opera, without magical devices, in Japan.4
The Japanese setting allows Sullivan to expand his compositions and Gilbert, now armed with the distant setting, turns his libretto toward Victorian society, lampooning the prudish and hypocritical attitudes of the group, more successfully than their last production Princess Ida, which attempted the same, but used a Tennyson poem as its basis. They achieve this level of satire at a higher success than previous attempts by appropriating and misappropriating a culture as dressing and aesthetic. There are many scenes of production in the film that show an aim toward authenticity that we know can only achieve simulacrum.
Leigh acknowledges this, both in the text of the film and how he talks about the film. The Mikado is racist--flattening Japanese culture, borrowing from multiple Asian aesthetics to achieve a depiction of Japan that has nothing to do with Japan. Leigh also shows the participants in the production as bigots.
In one scene, three actors from the company sit together and discuss the assassination of General Gordon in Khartoum, a flashpoint in the occupation of India by England. They speak derisively and cruelly about the Mahdi and his forces that killed the General. A Scottish actor of the group brings up the massacre of Scottish families (The Battle of the Braes) in the same conversation as the handiwork of English militia, and the other actors move on with their oyster meal.
While watching Leigh’s commentaries for this and Mr. Turner, there were probably dozens of little details that he points out as accurate or based on research on the characters he is depicting, that wash over a viewer who doesn’t have the similar intimate knowledge of the subject. Leigh’s angle is that these men neither should be excused as of their time nor dismissed as buffoons--they’re holding beliefs reflective of the world around them and Leigh is aiming to depict that world, as wholly as possible, including the parts that embarrass or hurt.
But for the film, the racist conceit of The Mikado is an element of the opera that does not diminish Leigh’s interest in the “industrial work” of a company putting on a show, in the charm of the union of Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaborations or in the success of the appropriation of the setting to allow Gilbert’s libretto to more effectively lampoon Victorian mores and hypocrisy. Everything is both/and for Leigh.
Historical romance discourse certainly struggles with this, holding two things to be true at the same time, constantly framing current novels as “feminist” because of their depictions of 2023 feminism in the characters, implying that this is a new development or something unavailable prior to this moment. That we’ve solved it. And feminism seems to be based on depictions of girl gangs? Suffragette characters? Two of the most politically charged romance novels I have read (To Have and To Hold and Stormfire) are bodice rippers, a category routinely dismissed as old hat, outdated, products of an era we want to do away with because we’ve moved past it.
I haven’t seen him say as much, but given Leigh’s leftist politics (noted Republican, in the English way. And in the director’s commentary bit about General Gordon, he references that the General got no more than he deserved), I think there is also something here about trying not to assume we’re better off, or more progressive now than at any moment in the past on all vectors. Just as Gilbert earnestly seems to think he is doing an honor to Japan by bringing in Japanese women to teach his actresses how to walk during Three Little Maids, a song that actually has nothing to do with Japan, the current moment we are in has blind spots. Gilbert is more well-meaning than the actors discussing Gordon over oysters, but he is not off the hook, and neither are we.
A Sense of History
A Sense of History is the oddball out of these movies in a few ways. Leigh did not write it, it is a short film, and it is not actually set in the 19th century. The film was written by and stars Leigh’s frequent collaborator, Jim Broadbent.
The film is on Youtube and I’m going to try to talk about it without spoils the big reveal, but I highly recommend just watching it!
Jim Broadbent plays the 23rd Earl of Leete, an aristocrat whose family’s history reaches back to William the Conqueror. The film is shot like a documentary and Broadbent plays the Earl as doddering and slightly off-putting, but initially inoffensive, at least to an recovering Anglophile American viewer like myself. His house is literally the same house as Downton Abbey—the film predates Julian Fellows’ property by two decades, but it is set dressing primed to be sold as a compelling, just self-aware enough to be charming vision of the vestiges of feudalism.
Broadbent’s broad affability makes his devolvement into rants about property, Hitler and murder all the more jarring. But the gaps between how Broadbent defends his property lines as a duty and how he characterizes himself as a custodian of the home and his family’s history, all while blithely revealing some of the abhorrent acts he took maintain those borders and that lineage, and how a romance novel hero defends his title or home are not that wide! Even among the recent trend of benevolent landlords and Dukes.
Romance, and historical romance especially, is talked about as this site of fantasy, where personal preference trumps contextualization or self-reflection. In the word’s of a recent Chels’ footnote “I want you to imagine me saying personal preference the way that Lydia says feelings in A Gentleman Undone: “‘I’ve never asked you to give the least consideration to my feelings.’ He could picture her holding the word with fingertips at arm’s length, like a scullery maid disposing of a dead rat she’d found in the larder.”
Personal preference, as a vector to me, is at best, boring, and at worst, wielded like a weapon against the stickiest, thorniest, and often most interesting, romances. Leigh’s films, though I’m certain he is not thinking about genre fiction romance set in his home country, as read by an American, are a responsive cudgel in my brain to discussions of personal preference or personal fantasy. If a historical setting is deployed for the gowns and the ballrooms, the violence of maintaining the peerage and the gentry comes with it, whether it is addressed or not. But not because it is the exclusive bygone baggage of the 19th century. Attempts to characterize it as such will always ring hollow. Some things have gotten better and some things will never change.
Fran Magazine is great! I’ve also been inspired to try and make my own ice cream by Fran. There are really only benefits to being a subscriber.
I tend to get on one with directors, annually. David Lean was 2018, William Wyler was 2019, Martin Scorsese was 2020, I discovered romance novels in 2021, Terence Davies was 2022. I can’t pick them on purpose, they just have to be delivered to me.
I have not read any books that directly deal with Peterloo, though I have identified some: A Wanton for All Seasons and In the Dark with a Duke by Christi Caldwell (though based on the plot I have read about these books, the response to Peterloo seems somewhat ahistorical/less working class driven than it actually was) and A Seditious Affair by KJ Charles takes place immediately after Peterloo and deals seemingly directly with some of the fall out.
This is one moment where Leigh admits artistic license—Gilbert had the idea for The Mikado before he visited the exhibition in London.
"If a historical setting is deployed for the gowns and the ballrooms, the violence of maintaining the peerage and the gentry comes with it, whether it is addressed or not. But not because it is the exclusive bygone baggage of the 19th century. Attempts to characterize it as such will always ring hollow. Some things have gotten better and some things will never change."
OOF