What shocking secret did teenage Jane learn on her wedding day! cried out the back of the Scholastic paperback on sale at school when I was 11, which got me to pony up the ninety-five cents to buy Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and find out. What merciless revenge did Heathcliff wreak on his in-laws! got another ninety-five cents out of me to buy Emily’s Wuthering Heights when I was 15. But it wasn’t until I was 19 when a sketch on Monty Python proclaimed Arthur Huntingdon’s shameless conduct against his wife that I was stoked to read Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It was worth the wait, I was finally old enough to appreciate it. The guy was scum.
From season 3, episode 9 (starting at 2:38) of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the Housing Development Sketch*:
A modern construction site where various fictional characters from 19th century English literature are at work: a saucy dairymaid from Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon mixes cement; a crinolined lady from Trollope’s Barchester Towers carries a shovel; the beadle from Dickens’s Oliver Twist pushes a wheelbarrow; farmers from Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles lay bricks.
Voice Over (Michael Palin): This new housing development in Bristol is one of the most interesting in the country. It’s using a variety of new techniques: shockproof curtain walling, a central high voltage, self-generated electricity source, and extruded acrylic fiberglass fitments. It’s also the first major housing project in Britain to be built entirely by characters from 19th century English literature!
In a half-finished concrete shell, a little girl in a shabby dress is working on top of a ladder.
VO: Here, Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop fits new nylon syphons into the asbestos-lined ceilings— (shot of electrical wiring) But here’s the electrical system which has attracted the most attention! (cut to Arthur Huntingdon in blue safety helmet studying blueprint) Arthur Huntingdon, who Helen Graham married as a young girl, and whose shameless conduct eventually drove her back to her brother Lawrence in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, describes why it’s unique.
Huntingdon (Eric Idle): Because sir, it is self-generating. Because we have harnessed here in this box the very forces of life itself. The very forces that will send Helen running back to beg forgiveness!
*Postwar council-housing building scandals were a major issue in England in the 60s-70s. Check out the seminal BBC series, Our Friends In the North.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 