Neo-Victorian Storyworlds and Transmedia Adaptation in Penny Dreadful

This article considers Lifetime’s Penny Dreadful as transmedia adaptation, offering a methodological approach for analysing the closely related storyworlds of the show and its nineteenth-century adapted texts. Adaptation and neo-Victorian studies often use metaphors and aesthetics to describe the relationship between adapted and adaptive texts. Building on the work of transmedia scholars, the article proposes the concept of overlapping storyworlds with permeable boundaries, a framework that arises from metaphors like the palimpsest and Gothic thresholds and yet aims to provide further precision in discussing the relationship between source texts. While the tools of transmedia narratology are more often reserved for unified narratives occupying a single storyworld rather than adaptations spread across multiple storyworlds, this article furthers the conversation between transmedia and adaptation in borrowing the language of continuity and expansion, language that encapsulates the movements across and between texts in neo-Victorianism, a category already defined by its relationship to adapted texts. The latter half of the essay turns to another example of transmedia adaptation, the podcast Tales from the Penny Bloods, to show how a transmedia approach can intervene in ongoing discussions in neo-Victorian scholarship. The proposed framework helps address more nuanced and ephemeral elements that move between storyworlds beyond character and plots as well as the historical presentism inherent in neo-Victorian stories.