Whenever there is a broadcast serial version of a Victorian novel – especially of a book by poor old Charles Dickens – or some anniversary of a 19th century novelist or publication to feature, then our media’s cultural opinion leaders will trot out the old claptrap about serialised Victorian novels being the “soap operas of their day”.
The serialisation of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins began 150 years ago and Radio 4’s Front Row aired the usual old blather recently as to whether Victorian fiction was in some ways the same as modern television soap opera.
Now whenever I hear these folks so confidently assert that Victorian novelists “wrote the soap operas of their day” I’m always tempted to ask: how much 19th century fiction have you actually read? And what do you mean by a soap opera?
In brief: have you much idea what you’re talking about?
Because in my view this glib media blatherchat is culturally and historically illiterate. This soap opera claim will not bear examination and falls apart the moment one starts seriously to discuss the evidence. The main points that need exploration are genre/format, audience, narrative and authorial style.
First, let’s consider the soaps. Soap opera was a new genre pioneered on commercial radio in the United States of America in the 1930s. The aim was to attract advertising for soap, washing powders and other domestic commodities by broadcasting an endless serial drama in short, daily episodes, aimed (mainly) at women listeners. The soap opera prototype thus created was centred on a street or locality (think of Coronation Street, Ramsay Street, Brookside Close and Albert Square) and dealt with the everyday goings-on of families, friends and neighbours. Soaps, on radio and television, were designed to appeal to housewives who would buy the products advertised during the commercial breaks.
On television today soaps are long running, potentially endless serials so production costs may be minimised by having a permanent set, usually a road or a small community in which the format and location are unchanging. As the sensation is of an endless band of narrative, viewers can join at any time. As Christine Gerachty says in Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps: “The longer they run the more impossible it seems to imagine them ending.”
Soaps seldom refer to events in the world outside, except royal visits, etc. They are closely related to melodramas (moral polarization; strong emotions; female interests; unlikely coincidences; excess in many respects) and to literary romance (simplified characters; female interests in love, etc).
British soaps are special in their post ’60s working class social realism, probably the long term result of their emergence in the early days of ITV (Coronation Street started in 1960) when the ITV companies had a need to build audience loyalty and achieve schedule regularity in order to deliver audiences for advertisers.
The material is substantially repetitive – including courtship, marriage, infidelity, divorce, deaths, disappearances, and the sudden arrival of lost friends or relatives. No single character is indispensable. Relationships are more important than plot. They continue to be aimed at women, especially working class women and, according to current media research, mainly women in lower socio-economic groups (see Making Sense of Television by Sonia Livingstone).
Soaps have no beginning and no end, no structural closure. No single narrative thread dominates. The plot lines interweave different characters and situations all the time. Several stories may be carried on at the same time and over for a number of episodes. It has been argued that soaps with their structural openness represent a particularly feminine narrative form. All told, not much seems actually to happen, because frequent action is rare. British soaps seem to supply a regular source of interest and anecdote that replaces the gossip of former communities and generations.
Now the plots of Victorian novels are never like this – and let’s play the feminist card while we’re at it and say not even Lady Audley’s Secret. Victorian novels invariably have that sense of going somewhere towards a denouement. And, however wide ranging, all the threads are gathered up. Even apparently unconnected characters, themes, communities, etc, are always finally seen to be all inter-related.
In Victorian novels the gender interest and social range is much wider than in contemporary television soaps. Locations are varied and often widely distant from each other. And their appeal in the 19th century was mainly to the genteel lower or middling middle classes. You can tell that, my dears, simply by looking at the goods and services advertised in which this fiction was embedded when originally serialised.
But British media opinion leaders continue to claim that this fiction was the “soap opera” of the day and say that if Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and company were alive today, they would be writing for Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks.
Storylines in such soaps inevitably focus on relationships, love, loss, marriage and minor “tragedies”. As the narrative thread is required to be unending, with no extreme actions or noticeable resolution, various interlocking and interchangeable themes recur. We all know what these are as we see them every week.
Victorian fiction does not conform to this type. Authors aimed at a mixed readership. With only a few exceptions they were serialized in monthly instalments. Additionally, they have a recognisable beginning (exposition), followed by development, various crises and a final resolution.
Television drama and narrative prose fiction are fundamentally different. Soaps is soaps and novels is novels. I really don’t believe Charles Dickens would have written TV dramas. Our greatest novelist did actually try to write stage plays. And believe me, to put it charitably as the season requires, they’re not very good.
Robert Giddings
…who is the author, with Keith Selby, of The Classic Serial on Television and Radio
