Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations by Lydia Jakobs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations by Lydia Jakobs John Plunkett (bio) Lydia Jakobs, Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2021), pp. ix + 266, $39/ £34.66 paperback. Was there any creative endeavour that George R. Sims did not turn his hand to? A well-known journalist, comic writer, dramatist, and poet, as well as social critic and observer of London poverty and urban life, Sims was everywhere in the late-Victorian literary world. Sims was more than a prolific polymath though. As Lydia Jakobs's book makes clear, his work was fostered by a cultural landscape that encouraged crossovers between the worlds of literature, journalism, illustration, theatre, and public performance, whether in the form of penny readings, magic lantern shows, or early film. Jakobs's book joins a growing number of publications to flesh out the multifarious and extended lives enjoyed by individual texts and narratives in this profoundly intermedial world. Pictures of Poverty particularly focuses on mapping the way Sims's ballads and social exposés were remediated into lantern slide sets and film narratives. The magic lantern was at the height of its popularity in the period from 1880 to 1920, with hundreds of thousands of slides of every imaginable scientific, educational, and amusing subject, from travelogues and temperance [End Page 464] tales to illustrated hymns and adaptations of popular fiction. After 1896, audiences could also experience the cinematograph; the blossoming British film industry often sought to adapt and draw on popular narratives that were already well-known to the public. For both the lantern and early film, which coexisted happily across these decades, Sims's ballads were prime material for transferring into pictorial narratives. There were many such adaptations. Thirty-two of Sims's texts were adapted for the magic lantern, twenty-four of which are from the Dagonet Ballads (1881). Sims, according to magic lantern experts Joss Marsh and David Francis, was the most popular living writer for lantern adaptations. Jakobs's book takes us from Sims's most famous ballad, "In the Workhouse: Christmas Day," first published in 1877, to a film adaptation of the same ballad by G. D. Samuelson in 1914. Sims's own work was often a rich mix of the visual and textual. This was particularly true of his volumes on London and its underclass, which were illustrated by many photographs and illustrations. Jakobs is interested in Sims's work as an observer and reformer, evident in series such as How the Poor Live (1883) and Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes (1901–3). Jakobs's chosen title is Pictures of Poverty, and the book accordingly devotes as much time to discourses around Victorian poverty and its broader pictorial depictions, including those by Sims, as to the remediation of his work. This reviewer, however, found Sims's engagement with the lantern and cinematograph much more absorbing; it was fascinating to discover Sims's relationship with early film. He gave his name and approval to a film version of Living London produced by Charles Urban in 1904, which widely toured across England in 1905. In 1908, Sims was commissioned by the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation to write an adaptation of one of his short stories, "Lady Letmere's Jewellery" (1903); he also collaborated with Gaumont in 1909, credited as a script writer on "The Martyrdom of Adolf Beck." Sims's involvement in film was part of the narrative and social expansion of the burgeoning film industry, a drive to give the upstart medium an imprimatur of respectability through the involvement of well-known literary figures. In 1908, the Era praised Gaumont for "co-operating with Mr Geo. R Sims in the production of a high-class series of authorised cinematograph films" (104). Between 1914 and 1923, there were fifteen film adaptations of plays by Sims and his contributors. Jakobs's book is at its illuminating best when she focuses on three case studies to demonstrate the multiple remediations of Sims's work: How the Poor Live, "In the Workhouse: Christmas...