So, after last week’s happy-go-lucky tale of nice girls with the memory capacity of a goldfish, we get into the gritty reality of what life was like for the ladies of the 1850s. (Answer: sucky.) Behold, The Girl!

Note: There are Cooksons worse than this, but few Cooksons duller. We will be skipping over large portions of repetitive, depressing malarkey. The point Cookson is trying to make: sucks to be a lady in the 1850s who had to make a good marriage Or Else. Point we take away from it: sucks double to be a lady whose only options are your rapey husband or that dude down the street who gets drunk and insults you. (Also, you fall in love with the second guy, which means in this scenario you probably have a concussion. I’m sorry to hear that.)

Era: 1850
Heroine: Hannah Boyle, the young illegitimate daughter of gentleman Mr. Thornton. OR IS SHE?
Siblings that require looking-after: She has three half-siblings who mostly suck, but in case she’s the one that requires looking after, because oh my lord, girl gets beat on.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Hannah. Sort of. Whatever.
Asshole Father?: Uh, not to Hannah, but uh, wow.
Romantic interest(s): Ned. Fred, who marries Hannah, is not a romantic interest. It gets gross. *shudders*
Bairnsketballs: Hannah gets one, though technically it’s legitimate since she’s married. Even though it’s not her husband’s. It’s all very Jerry Springer.
Fistfights: Yep. And caning. And bear traps! And they burn someone’s finger off.
Assaults: Innumerable; we see one, and one other that’s interrupted by one of the best conversations the world has ever known.

“You’re trouble!”
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Gillian Kearney was in The Tide of Life, and I liked her because:

1) She is a sweetie, and
2) She has leftover goodwill from being in The Forsyte Saga, where she was repeatedly whacked with the short end of the stick.

But she should just be lucky that she made very few bad decisions in that miniseries, which made her the only one.

When I saw The Forsyte Saga back in 2004, I wrote it up for Defenestration, because I was amazed that you could yell, “What a terrible plan!” at EVERY character you saw EVERY time ANYONE did something and it would ALWAYS be right. I saw it again last year, and seriously, it’s like a How Not To Do This of bad decision-making.

(Disclaimer: At the end of Forsyte Saga: To Let, I cried so hard I basically bruised a lung. So don’t think that just because I’m snarking means the miniseries isn’t good. It’s good; Damian Lewis and Amanda Root carry even the dull parts of the original series, and Damian Lewis pulls the entire second series basically by himself, and his performance is good. It’s really good. It’s so good it bruises your lungs when you sob like a nerd through the end credits.)

So, there are two or three more really dismal installments of The Catherine Cookson Experience coming up, and I thought that before I hit all the marital rape and spouse-slapping, everyone could use one that’s pleasantly absurd. Behold, The Tide of Life!

Here’s the thing about this miniseries; Gillian Kearney is a really good actress. She worked her ass off in The Forsyte Saga, and I really love the sort-of-documentary biopic she did on BBC, and – she’s not the poor soul who played Cissie Brodie, is what I’m saying. She has genuine charisma, and you root for her.

The problem with The Tide of Life is that while she seems perfectly sweet and capable of making normal-person decisions, she agrees to go steady with any dude who enters the frame, so you end up wondering if she has a concussion. Also a problem: the title sounds like a tampon ad. (Not Cookson’s fault; just saying.)

Era: early 1900s
Heroine: Emily Kennedy, housekeeper and concussion victim
Siblings that require looking-after: One sister, also a concussion victim
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Shockingly, all the major characters are legit.
Asshole Father?: Nary a dad in sight.
Romantic interest(s): Sep, her first employer; Larry, her second employer; Nick, who wanders into frame in the last twenty minutes.
Bairnsketballs: One for our heroine, one from an extra, plus a tumor everyone thinks is a bairnsketball. (Nobody in this movie is very bright, come to think of it.)
Fistfights: Hell yes. Also, murder, pistol-whipping, chasing someone into the ocean, and lighting a houseful of stuff on fire.
Assaults: Two (attempted)

“That’s what you are – NOWT!”
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I have to admit that, after thinking about it a little, I was hard on Isabelle Fischel from The Dwelling Place. Sure, she was nuts, but let’s just review:

Wearing this dress meant slapping this thing on every day:

I KNOW, RIGHT?

First of all, this thing went on after you put on your shift (or chemise, in my tortured parlance), and beneath the waistband you can see the corset, which your internal organs probably just LOVED.

(ETA: I seriously cannot tell if this is a corded corset with the petticoat on top and some unholy undersleeves attached, or if this is a corded bodice with sleeves that went under the petticoat, and had a corset on top. I’m hoping it’s the corset with the busk and then the petticoat waistband going over, because heaven bless that woman if she had something laced up OVER this shit.)

Now then! The horizontal lines in the skirt are pieces of rope shoved through channels sewn into the petticoat. Later, these would turn into hoops, which is nice for ladies, since I can only imagine what it feels like to drag, oh, fifty yards of rope with you wherever you go? Maybe more; the circumference of the skirt is probably five to six feet, and there are how many channels in that thing? (Uh, P.S., how hilarious was it that people claimed women were the weaker sex? Just saying.)

Below left, a close up of the the UFO sleeves, which are wired for horizontal support, since you had another yard of fabric in each dress sleeve. (Seriously, the 1830s just could not have been uglier. I’m not fan of the 1860s superhoops or anything, but at least by then they had stopped sticking hot air balloons on their shoulders.)

Below right, the busk! At this point in history they were made of wood, bone, or ivory, and you basically shoved it into your corset as a front spine to keep you from collapsing under the weight of your own clothes. Have fun!

Heaven knows the clothing of the 1830s would drive me up the wall. If I had to wear it, I too would be riding around the countryside with my rifle shooting anyone who looked remotely comfortable in their clothes. So, you know, point to Isabelle.

This week, I tackle the seemingly endless and screamingly worst of all the Cookson adaptations I have seen, The Dwelling Place.

Brief note about the Experience: I don’t think I’ll be recapping each one. Some of these are deadly dull stuff. However, I’m starting out with some of the really terrible ones to build appreciation for the ones that aren’t so bad. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome involving overwrought, cheaply-made period dramas of the 90s. By the time I hit The Wingless Bird, you’ll think I’m screencapping Citizen Kane.

So, The Dwelling Place is about the fiercely beautiful and clever Cissie Brodie, who marries her rapist.

I’d like to say this is an unusual screencap, but it’s not. We just sort of have to take the movie’s word for it that she’s smart and pretty, since she spends most of the movie staring blankly into space and marrying rapists.

Anyway, after her parents’ death, Cissie packs up her passel of brothers and sisters and moves them all into a cave to prevent them having to go into the workhouse. Life sucks, and then it sucks more when the lord’s son rapes her and she comes down with a case of bairnsketball. It’s a searing commentary about the plight of the poor! Also, Cissie marries her rapist.

Era: 1830s
Heroine: Cissie Brodie, hardscrabble young lady who marries her rapist.
Siblings that require looking-after: Innumerable downtrodden siblings played by varyingly-talented child actors.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Her bairnsketball.
Asshole Father?: Check!
Romantic interest(s): Matthew Turnbull, the local carpenter; Clive Fischel, rapist.
Bairnsketballs: Oh, is there ever.
Fistfights: Does it count as a fistfight if you shoot your own sister?
Assaults: One rape, by a man she MARRIES LATER. OH MY GOD.

“Maybe if our Joe hadn’t set a trap for the rabbit…”
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