From text to screen: Gentleman Jack then and now

Abstract

As part of the growing genre of post-heritage quality drama for television, Sally Wainwright’s BBC-HBO production of Gentleman Jack stands out in terms of its close adherence to the original Lister diaries. While in many ways season one of Gentleman Jack follows the conventional narrative of courtship and marriage that defines much historical costume drama—as in, for example, the adaptations of Jane Austen novels—it also continually subverts the form through its unique queer content, closely based on the Lister diaries. While Gentleman Jack is not the BBC’s first queer lesbian historical series, the uniqueness of the source text, which includes explicit descriptions of Lister’s sexual practices in code, positions the series as ground-breaking in terms of prime-time television. This essay considers the ways in which the series adapts, mediates and reconfigures the original diaries for a contemporary audience. It will analyze how these transcriptions are supplemented through the performative and the visual and how to read the ideological coding of episodes that move away from the diaries into the realm of the fictional, such as the Lister-Walker marriage proposal at the end of the series. It also asks what the responsibility of the series is to the historical archive on the one hand, and to its contemporary audience on the other.