In a direct nod to Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, Charlotte takes on the role of the farm manager, stating: ‘From this moment on, I am going to be farm manager I am not that experienced, as many of you have kindly pointed out.
Choking on the strength of some local cider brandy – ‘It’s strong,’ warns Nathan, ‘So am I,’ Charlotte laughs – The Living and the Dead demonstrates from the offset that she is no passive, weak-willed Victorian wife, but a driving force in the Appleby’s relationship and the world around her.
Clear eyed with cascading red hair, Charlotte represents the Pre-Raphaelite beauty of the nineteenth century’s earlier decades whilst embodying the powerful iconography of the New Woman.Ī woman with no experience of living somewhere as pastoral and superstitious as Shepzoy, Charlotte rolls up her sleeves to adjust to rural life. Sensible, headstrong Charlotte, sharing a Christian name with the Bronte sister who wrote the enduring words ‘I am no bird and no net ensnares me I am a free human being with an independent will’, it is made clear that the new Mrs Appleby is a force to be reckoned with. In this post, I intend to focus upon Charlotte Appleby. It is an excellent programme, and I recommend taking the time to watch it if you have not had the chance to do so already. In this series of blog posts, I will be exploring different components of the programme, and these will include many spoilers. For a more general overview of the series, Melissa Dickson’s and Alison Moulds’ reviews are both great. Arriving from the nation’s busy, cultivated capital, Shepzoy is a culture shock for New Woman Charlotte and a frightening return to the past for Nathan, whose family has long run the community’s farm.Īs his mother ails, the couple must adjust to the old world of rural Somerset, a setting straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. The narrative of the BBC’s recent series The Living and the Dead exists within this creative environment, following the story of Nathan Appleby and his wife, Charlotte, as they move to rural Shepzoy in Somerset in the year 1894. Haunted landscapes characterise the worlds within the medium of folk horror, creating fictional spaces in which pagan tradition collides with Christian demonology.
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