The Crimson Petal and the White

First published on 18 Aug 2011. Updated on 18 Aug 2011.

Dickens’ London teemed with harlots, from drunken streetwalkers to high-class strumpets, and yet you won’t find even a single reference to the world’s oldest profession in any of his 20 novels. Michael Faber’s 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White sought to redress this balance with its gritty depiction of the rampant prostitution of Victorian London and the character of Sugar – a beautiful 19-year-old bawd who is both streetwise and literary, and a kind of feminine rebuke to the puritanism of Dickens and his contemporaries.

 

Faber’s bestseller has been made into a four-part BBC miniseries that resembles your typical Victorian costume drama as much as a garden party resembles the London riots. In the pilot episode, Sugar (Romola Garai), highly sought-after piece of totty and aspiring author, discovers that another prostitute, her close friend, has been savagely beaten to death by two clients; she swears vengeance upon men and the world that has made such atrocity commonplace. 

Her chance to scale the ladder of society arrives in the form of William Rackham (Bridesmaids’ Chris O’Dowd), a john who falls in love with Sugar and pays off her avaricious madam (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson) so that he may have exclusive access to her charms. William is a failed writer and a reluctant businessman whose wife, Agnes (Amanda Hale), is frigid, anxious to the point of insanity and reluctant to leave her bedroom. His erotic obsession with Sugar will have a profound impact on his marriage and expose the faultlines of sexuality in the Victorian era. 

 

This fast-moving adaptation is engrossingly lusty viewing, a melodrama with an intriguing heroine. Played with calculated erotic charm by Garai (who starred in François Ozon’s film about a social climbing novelist, Angel), Sugar is a like a superhero in a corset: beauty and guile enable her to prosper in an age where most women were oppressed under either the boot-heel of marriage or the crushing despair of inescapable squalor.