The Limehouse Golem: Female Agency and Neo-Victorian Slumming

The neo-Victorian interest in the marginalised “Other” is the driving force behind Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, a murder mystery set in the London’s East End Tower Hamlets. At the time of the novel’s setting, Limehouse was home to some of the city’s poorest residents, but it was also incredibly cosmopolitan with a mix of cockneys and emigrants, casual labourers and women working in the home industries, as well as artists and social activists. With its neo-Victorian approach to the Victorian East End, The Limehouse Golem (both original novel and 2016 film adaptation) gives representation to those East End characters beyond the pale of dominant accounts of the period: from cross-dressing pantomimes and actresses, to homosexuals, prostitutes and murderers. Cameron concentrates on the role of female agency within this neo-Victorian narrative. As a murder mystery, The Limehouse Golem invites readers into a world of criminal intrigue in which women were too often the victims. However, Ackroyd’s novel and its film adaptation ultimately thwart readers’ expectations of generic conventions—specifically, the gendered plots of melodrama and murder mystery—by giving us the female offender who insists upon writing her own “devil[ish]” plots (to quote her poisoned husband). The neo-Victorian, in this case then, encourages us modern readers to confront our own cultural biases and, more importantly, our continued need to go “slumming” in the Victorian period for characters who are still comfortably Other(ed).