Doctor Who and the Neo-Victorian Christmas Serial Tradition

Abstract

Christmas stories are a tradition in British serial literature, be it the annuals and special weekly and monthly magazines published in the nineteenth century or the Christmasthemed episodes of popular television serials today. Festival literature produces an ‘eerie’ sense of past, present, and future, and many of these productions evoke past traumas for narrative impact. For example, Christmas editions of Charles Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round provided readers with specially commissioned stories that explored past traumas in order to enable their characters to morally improve, to the betterment of themselves and society. The rebooted Doctor Who, in ‘The Next Doctor’ (2008), ‘A Christmas Carol’ (25 December 2010), and ‘The Snowmen’ (2012), has reinvented the Victorian Christmas serial both via narrative echoes and explicit use of neo-Victorian and steampunk visual designs. In so doing, these neo-Victorian TV specials critique some of the same social problems as Dickens did, commenting on greed and the concept of ‘Victorian values’ while also remediating the affective nature of Christmas stories to help people come to terms with past traumas.