TV REVIEWS : Dickensian ‘Velvet Gown’ on PBS

The first three minutes of “The Black Velvet Gown” (on “Masterpiece Theatre,” Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24; Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50) hook you with the foul breath of northern rural England in the 1830s.

A determined, working-class widow and her three children, forced out of their home, pick up their raggedy bundles and resolutely march out of a grimy mining town into a harsh, Dickensian world and the class prejudices of their age.

But this is not a Dickens novel. It is the compelling adaptation of a Catherine Cookson novel, a highly popular, knighted British writer, now in her 80s, whose fictional atmosphere echoes some of Thomas Hardy and Samuel Richardson. In fact, this movie (in two episodes, with Part 2 airing April 11) enjoys much of the period texture that illuminated Richardson’s 18th-Century “Clarissa” on “Masterpiece Theatre” a year ago.

In short, this is pure Anglophile theater, redolent of the leather-bound volumes that grace the show’s logo. Part 1 develops the story of the desperate mother (the resolute Janet McTeer) and her new-found life as a housekeeper with a reclusive, pedophiliac landowner (a complex, affecting performance by Bob Peck).

Part 2 is largely the saga of the mother’s now grown daughter (the angelic-looking but gritty Geraldine Somerville), who is forced to leave her mother and take up lodging as a laundress in the haughty household of an imperious family run by a withering grand dame (wonderfully played by Jean Anderson).

A moving score by Carl Davis, played by the Munich Symphony, tremulously underscores events. But time and again, what makes the story come alive, under Norman Stone’s direction and Gordon Hann’s adaptation, are the vivid faces and the sense of place.