What Penny Dreadful wants to do is recombine the well-known and beloved narratives of 19th-century Gothic fiction with the realities of Victorian London in 1891 — the time of the Great Exhibition, during the rise of spiritualism and Evolutionist Theory, the time when society was scared to death by ideas of social mobility, religious upheaval, and the astonishing advancement of science. Inspired by Mary Shelley and her tale of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, authors of the Victorian Age created stories centred around the supernatural, the smudged boundaries between life, death, and what divides the two. Things are out of place in Gothic fiction — things where they shouldn’t be, people where they shouldn’t be, horrors where they shouldn’t be. The word of the night is: transgression. Continue reading →