While scholars have provided some insight into Penny Dreadful, no one has addressed the relationship of the piece’s overall design to the writer’s vision. Indeed, Penny Dreadful is offered as a warning of a darker age to come. Accordingly, writer John Logan sets his series in a late Victorian, Gothicized London that serves as a microcosm for a contemporary Western world experiencing a psychological and spiritual disintegration that touches the individual and the larger culture. Logan calls attention to the anxieties generated by this disintegration by incorporating into his series characters from late Victorian Gothic fiction: Frankenstein and his creature, Dracula, the Wolf Man, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll. The individual and cultural anxieties suggested by these characters’ “monstrous” behaviors have their basis not only in their sexual dysfunctions but in their despair over God’s absence. This crisis is centered in sexually adventurous Vanessa Ives, whose attempts to return to the Christ Who has rejected her hold the series together. In the series’ final episode, just before her death, Vanessa has a vision of Jesus. In response to Vanessa’s death, most of the remaining characters are seized by an ennui that has its counterpart in our own culture. The suggestion is that Logan uses Vanessa Ives as a symbolic representation of a dying world view, which, somewhat ironically, provided for her remaining friends a hope that sustained them.
THE VULNERABILITY OF BALSAM FIR TO SPRUCE BUDWORM ATTACK IN NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AGE OF THE TREE