This article argues that the double engagement of audiences in the series with acts of virtual slumming and the multiplatform consumption of the Victorians, in ways that directly impinge on questions of perception and representation, is responsible for the critical success of this text as a neo-Victorian adaptation. The Crimson Petal and the White (2011, BBC Two) is one such adaptation belonging to a larger group of recent British TV series which gaze, episode after episode, at the poverty of the historical and social other. In ways that directly implicate audiences in practices of consumption, an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel set in the late-Victorian London East End, whose main character is a prostitute, dovetails the idea of city streets as places of consumption with the neo-Victorian interest in sexploitation.
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