Victorian Undead: Reanimating the Zombies of Nineteenth-Century London

The graphic novel Victorian Undead. Sherlock Holmes vs Zombies! (2010), written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by Davide Fabbri, is set in Victorian London, a city that has always been the paradigm for multifaceted issues. This graphic novel is a typical example of neo-Victorian cultural and historical ‘deviance’: in an alternative late nineteenth-century London (the story is set in 1898) a horde of ravenous zombies guided by none other than Sherlock Holmes’s arch-enemy Professor Moriarty threatens to tear to pieces and literally devour its institutions and civilisation. However, despite the fact that Victorian Undead depicts an “alternate history” that disrupts Victorian chronology, the depiction of zombies as social outcaust and racial aliens basically replicates Conan Doyle’s own retracing of crimes as originating from the (social and colonial) perifery of imperial England. At the same time, the image of late-Victorian zombies ravaging London streets in Edginton’s and Fabbri’s text reflects the impact that contemporary perceptions of urban violence and civic unrest have on the re-creation and re-visioning of the Victorian age. In this respect, Victorian Undead does not simply dramatise a return of the (Victorian) past but, more disquitingly, a ‘return of the present’. This is one of the reasons why the story recounted in Victorian Undead could have occurred nowhere but in late-Victorian London, a city that was acquiring the status of cosmopolitan symbol of capitalistic and consumerist economy, and was becoming the epitome of the contradictions of modernity.