London's Dispossessed: Questioning the Neo-Victorian Politics of Neoliberal Austerity in Richard Warlow's Ripper Street

Abstract

The moral justification for the rollback of benefits and services under the austerity programme unleashed by George Osborne since 2010, when he was first appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by British Prime Minister David Cameron, is predicated on a neoliberal ideology that views unemployment and poverty as stemming from personal failings rather than the ways in which the free market has shaped British society since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. By using Charles Murray's neo-Victorian argument that the welfare state has created a work-shy, antisocial ‘underclass’, neoliberal politicians and journalists have mythologised the Victorian era as one of discipline and stability, providing a model for the sort of society we should aspire once more to be. This article argues that Richard Warlow's television series, Ripper Street (2012–), in showing the socio-economic causes of crime in late-Victorian London and the need for collective action and state intervention to alleviate them, challenges the construction of the era used to justify neoliberal austerity. It does so through what Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn characterise as one of the defining features of neo-Victorian fiction: its ability to demonstrate the ‘quasi-fictiveness of the Victorians to our own period’, implicitly drawing parallels between the progressive zeal of nineteenth-century social reformers and the anti-austerity movement today.