Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Charlene McKenna, David Wilmot, David Dawson, Josh O’ Connor, Louise Brealey, Ian McElhinney, Haydn Gwynne, Martin Compston, Peter McDonald, Emily Taaffe, Leanne Best, Anna Burnett, Danial Cerqueira, Enda Kilroy, Bradley Hall, Maeve O’ Mahony, Brendan Morrissey.
The issue of abortion is still one that causes heated debates, within wider society and also within the prospective family unit; it is a debate where the parameters change the closer it hits to home.
In Victorian Britain the discussions were perhaps a little less heated but they were nonetheless at the forefront of political thought as those with the supposed moral fibre of the country at heart raged against the free thinking belief that if the woman’s life was in danger or the child was a result of unwanted origin then the greater harm was allowing that child to live. With the emerging thought of eugenics and the way forward was to sterilise the poor and arguably feckless, the potent mix was explosive to believe that it would always be a man choice, a man’s world; this was something that was finally seen and exploited to its maximum in the penultimate episode of series three of Ripper Street, Live Free, Live True.
As with the right to die campaign that has divided the nation’s conscious of late, the question of abortion, especially during the Victorian era, was one in which alienated the mind and body, who owned what; was it the state who governed what a woman could do with her body or was it the woman herself who was the ultimate decider of such an important question?
Where the episode really went out on a political stance was with the question of what it actually meant to be a man or a woman in the politically charged times in which Detective Inspector Reid fought the fight on the Whitechapel streets. The course of binary gender, of a woman’s body being subjected to the whims of both desire and ignorance, of assured damnation by some, all of these discussions seem not to have moved on a single jot since the 1890s. It is a damning indication that society still sees women in many ways as nothing more than mere playthings and a gender to be seen as nothing more than able to raise children.
With a superb guest appearances by Haydn Gwynne and Louise Brealey as Dr. Amelia Frayn, the question of a woman’s worth to the state was more than amply argued during the 60 minutes of television, a piece of accomplished television writing by Rachel Bennette. Ripper Street continues to scratch the scabs of an era that really should not be lauded in the same exulted glowing terms that it is.
Ian D. Hall