Peaky Blinders : Inequalities in the Roaring Twenties

To rise up in the 1920’s society : The Peaky Blinders series (2014- )

The streets of Birmingham are full of filth and dirt, violence and despair. A year after the end of the war, the communists and the IRA are fighting to take over in a period of instability.

An atmosphere of revolution is in the air. The Peaky Blinders are ruling over the slums of Birmingham. They are a gang which “arts the tong of the ones who talk and blind the ones who see”. And yet we really want them to climb the ladder of this crackling society.

There is a huge gap between the high parts of the city-museums, theaters, clean streets, white buildings and Small Heath. The city lives on industry and in the streets, we see men coming from the factory, covered with dirt and surrounded by grey smoke going to the pub. This is a world gangrened by poverty, violence, corruption, inequalities. And a deep injustice: these men fought in France, served their country and were never rewarded.

In this context, groups are fighting political or criminal ones. None of them was preserved from war, and the trauma is mixed with their personal ambition. Tommy Shelby, head of the Blinders, tries not to see his trauma by never stopping to act, by having an endless ambition. And although he rises steps by step the high society, he understands that he will never be accepted as “one of them”.  He will always be this little gipsy gangster from Birmingham.

Many subjects are approached in the series: the classes, communism, the after-war, the crisis, the IRA, feminism, the White and Red Russians, politic in general. A lot of them deal with inequality matters.

We usually criticized series because it is time –consuming. However, this series give us a realistic view of the after war period by adding real and historical events to its plot. Thanks to it we easily understand the issue of social inequality at that time.

Anne-Gabrielle Marquet, Elodie Ochem, Blanche Larcher