“Everything comes in circles. […] The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The closer we get to the premier of FX’s Taboo, the more intel we get — and the more I look forward to this dark miniseries set in 1814 Great Britain.
Steven Knight, who is running the show, is claiming some solid historical ground in building his tale. It’s most gratifying to see a creator grappling with the primacy of commerce in the culture and history of the Empire. The Guardian ran an in-depth conversation with Knight, where he laid out his vision for Taboo.
“The history of Britain has always been written through the prism of class, and that’s fine, but the 19th century was driven by money and this story reflects that. This is a drama about the ships and money and warehouses and docks that formed the engine of the empire.”
However, he cautions against drawing too many parallels between the expansionist East India Company, whose often malign influence is felt throughout the series, and today’s corporations.
“It is a modern story because it’s about big business and corporate enterprise but I’ve tried not to make it simply ‘the East India Company were evil’ because that’s so easy to do. They did things that we now know to be evil, but if you want to learn anything from it you have to understand that they were human beings like us. They were capable of both good and bad.”
Too often in historical dramas, economic motivations are given short shrift, while in reality, trade drove everything. And that trade often had a very dark side.
And Knight also grasps something that I’ve had a hard time communicating to people who don’t have much of a historical perspective: “Progress” as we think of it is a construct. Obviously there is technical innovation and material “progress,” but the story of us humans does not move in an arc.
Take sex. Knight addresses the louche culture of Georgian England, which was one of the most sexually outré eras in history. Victorian mores shifted and pushed all that underground, but there is nothing that we see in todays society that was not on blatant display in the early 19th century. I mean, this was an era when young rakes would stick a lock of their favorite whore’s pubic hair in their hat bands…
“We tend to believe that history goes in straight lines but it doesn’t,” (Knight) says. “We look back and believe that history tells the story of how we gradually became more permissive but the reality is that history goes in circles and if you look at the morality of 1814 [when Taboo is set] it’s much more hedonistic and libertarian than the 1960s. It was all going on.”
“Before the Victorian era, England was much more of a wild place,” Knight says. “And I think that when you take away the safe harbours that you normally expect in this kind of period drama – lady so-and-so meets with lady so-and-so – then you end up with something very different.”
Tom Hardy, who conceived of the story of James Keziah Delaney (originally named Osbourne), has created a dark and dangerous character, a man returned from Africa to declare war on the Establishment — for reasons we do not yet know.
Hardy said, “To be bluntly honest, I wanted to play Bill Sykes (Oliver Twist), Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lecter, Heathcliff, Marlow (from Heart of Darkness)… just every classical character in one,” and he readily acknowledges that some may not like the character, or the tale.
I have a hunch that I, however, am it’s target audience, and I’m looking forward to Taboo with keen anticipation. Draw from that, whatever conclusion you wish…
deuce says
Yeah, the whole “progress” thing… People always want to think they’re “making a change for the better” and a PERMANENT change at that. That certainly wasn’t the attitude of REH or JRRT (whose birthday is today). The centre never holds. Not forever. That said, you do what you can.
England in the pre-Victorian period was certainly a bit “rakish”. Read a good history of prostitution in the West and you’ll also find that brothels were EVERYWHERE during the late High Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. The “brawling, bawdy, drunken medley” that REH wrote of to HPL. The wheel turns and the pendulum swings. Man is a restless animal, never content.
As far as the East India Company is concerned, take away the abolition of suttee, the weakening of the caste structure, the provision of a “universal” language and the building of a vast railroad system (while encouraging the sons of high-caste Indians to attend British universities) and where would India be today? Between vaccines/medical/sanitation advances and the widows saved from the pyres, the BEIC added far more to the native Indian population than they ever took away with bullets or misrule/misguided programs.
Who are better off, our US “Indians” or the Indians who are heirs to the Raj? Who has full autonomy? Which population has grown? Which has a thriving, intact culture(s)? One could also point to Singapore and Hong Kong.
No, the legacy of the BEIC was not unadulterated “evil”, despite what some might try to say now. Many of those saying it are the same ones pushing now for even stronger transnational entities. Strange, that.
JimC says
Excellent points all…
The concept of a professional, ethical civil service is a British one, mostly.
john roberts says
While James Clavell’s “Tai-Pan” is primarily an adventure novel it is primarily about business: the accumulation and movement of goods and money. The men at the top of the great trading houses would have been bandit chieftains in an earlier era. The level of competition was utterly vicious. You didn’t just want to beat your competitors, you wanted to ruin them. There was an almost insane need to drive your rivals into bankruptcy. It was the farthest thing from kids with new MBAs shuffling numbers on computer screens. These guys didn’t mind getting their hands bloody.
JimC says
The Age of Heroic Capitalism.
Matthew says
People tend to think the entire 19th Century was like the Victorian Era. They also see those times as the “good ole days” or an age of great hypocrisy. Even the Victorian Era was more complex than that.
Jane Austen wrote during that era. She did not really delve into the mire, but rakes appear a lot in her work. Her stories are usually do to women. People don’t notice that about her works.
john roberts says
A while back I was talking with a writer friend about the movie “Time After Time,” in which H.G. Wells uses his time machine to follow Jack the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco. In the movie
Wells walks around gaping, shocked at all the porno and drugs and gangs. I said that there was nothing in late 70s SF that wasn’t freely available in Victoria’s London. My friend pointed out that Wells had expected to see America of the late 20th century as a socialist utopia, not just more of the same.