Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson

© Richard Pearson 2015

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vii

Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgements x

Chronology xi

Introduction: legitimacy and playwriting 1The Theatres Royal 10The National Standard and the theatre debates 13

Part I Comedy and Tragedy, Before the Theatres Act of 1843

1 Farce, family and the minor theatres: Dickens as a legitimate playwright 23The Tottenham-street Theatre 28The St. James’s Theatre 33Dickens’ plays 36The Lamplighter 43Nicholas Nickleby 46

2 Text and Performance: Robert Browning and the struggle of the dramatic author 57The published playwright 58The production of Strafford 63Literary contexts for Strafford 69Strafford and the playwright 71Staging A Blot in the ’Scutcheon 74Reading the Blot 79The benefit of Colombe’s Birthday 83

Part II Collaborations at Mid-Century, 1845–1868

3 The novelist at the stage door: Dickens’ and Thackeray’s dialogue with the theatre 91Popular drama and fiction: Dickens’ A Tale of Two

Cities and Great Expectations 91Domestic dramas: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair 105The playwright and The Virginians 112



viii Contents

4 Dramatic collaboration: Dickens’ and Collins’ melodramas 124The Frozen Deep 125No Thoroughfare 137

Part III Dramatic Identities, 1870–1883

5 Adapting to the stage: Wilkie Collins and the double text 149The Woman in White 149Twin sisters: Man and Wife and The New Magdalen 161Adaptation: Miss Gwilt and The Moonstone 167

6 Cometh the hero? Alfred Lord Tennyson as the nation’s playwright 172Other people stage Tennyson 174Filling in the gap(s) of Shakespeare 178The Promise of Queen Mary 179Staying on the page: Harold and Becket 186Exquisite stages: The Falcon and The Cup 189Lear as melodrama: The Promise of May 197

Notes 207

Select Bibliography 232

Index 239



1

Introduction: legitimacy and playwriting

The field of Victorian drama does not immediately suggest a catalogue of literary names. English literary criticism is hard pressed to invent even one canonical playwright from the 1830s to the 1880s, and most dramatists have been forgotten to all but performance specialists and theatre historians. For literary studies, the final decade of the nine-teenth century, which saw the linguistic games of Wilde, the political comedy of Shaw, the psychological intensity of Ibsen and Elizabeth Robins, the subtle social dismantling by Pinero, and the symbolist poet-ics of Yeats and Maeterlinck, saw also the re-emergence of a celebrity playwright to rival that of the celebrity novelist or poet. Before this, all is silence: generic popular forms, such as melodrama, burletta and farce, that are seen not to constitute valuable literature, and an industry of anonymous, or, at best, second-rate, authors.

But this narrative of decline and rescue is based both on hindsight and on the story of their theatre that the higher-minded literary mid-Victorians told to themselves. In fact, the nineteenth century was a long period of self-scrutiny, characterized by Victorian theatre’s uncertainty about itself. Should it be acting Shakespeare or Tom Taylor? Richard Brinsley Sheridan or John Maddison Morton? T.H. Lacy’s popular Acting Edition of Victorian Plays (1848–73) included both. Should sophisti-cated playgoers be attending the ‘legitimate’ patent theatres of Covent Garden or Drury Lane, or could they risk attending the Minor venues of the St. James’s, the Olympic, or the Adelphi? Could writers be taken seriously if they were not part of the traditional patent parentage: that long eighteenth-century nobility of reputation enjoyed by the Royal Theatres of Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket, created by the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737? What sort of impact would be felt on a writer’s career and reputation if they were suddenly to stage a



2 Victorian Writers and the Stage

drama using the advanced technological special effects associated with Minor unlicensed, illegitimate theatres like the Adelphi? The Victorians were worried about their own theatre, but their reactions were varied. In broad terms, the Victorians resolved themselves into two camps: not ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’, but those who believed absolutely in the primacy of the patent theatres, and those who believed in a more democratic and collective enterprise. Moreover, the attitudes of the well-known writers of the period, from Dickens to Tennyson, suggest that they held a fascination for the ‘illegitimate’ theatre and their own theatre-going was by no means restricted. It appears that, whilst the Victorians worried about their drama, they went to see it in droves, and perhaps worried as much about their own attraction to the popular.

While today most literary critics choose to study the novels of Dickens, Thackeray or Collins, or the poetry of Browning and Tennyson, those very same writers were markedly concerned about the Victorian stage. Push a finger into the nineteenth-century dramatic pie for a minute and the results can be a little surprising. Charles Dickens had six plays per-formed professionally; Robert Browning had three; Wilkie Collins had eleven; Alfred Tennyson had five in his lifetime. And all of these writers left further unperformed playscripts in manuscript or privately printed copies or as published ‘closet dramas’. These numbers do not count the many adaptations of their works written by other people. Peel back the pastry and search wider. Thomas Hardy wrote adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd (Globe Theatre, 29 April 1882) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891, dramatized 1894–95, but never performed), before working with the amateur Hardy Players in the 1920s on several adap-tations. Anthony Trollope wrote two plays, The Noble Jilt (1850) and Did He Steal it? (1869), neither of which made it to the boards. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote one play, The Wolves and the Lamb (1854), rejected by two theatres but eventually to become a fictional story, Lovel the Widower (1860). George Eliot began a play project for the actress Helen Faucit which metamorphosed into the five-act The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Robert Louis Stevenson published three plays with W.E. Henley in 1892, Deacon Brodie (Bradford, 21 December 1882), Beau Austin (Haymarket Theatre, 3 November 1890), and Admiral Guinea, the first two of which enjoyed modest productions. Henry James received little enthusiasm for Guy Domville (St. James’s Theatre, 5 January 1895) and had a number of other plays rejected which he published as collections.

If we have forgotten the significance of the mid-Victorian theatre, those writers who we study had certainly not. But why, then, do we have no major Victorian dramatists; why have we forgotten all of those



Introduction 3

names? This book aims to reconsider the question of Victorian dramatic authorship from the perspective of the major writers who tried to write for a literary form that they had substantial experience of in their daily lives. The Victorians did not sit around the fireside reading novels and periodicals every evening; the expansion of the theatre industry in London during the nineteenth century tells a completely different story.

This book will focus on the professional plays of four mid-century writers: Dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson, as well as the fictional engagements with the theatre in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray. The four main authors are chosen because at some stage in their careers they emerged as professional playwrights and yet this aspect of their canon has been largely forgotten or marginalized, and their success is now judged in terms of other literary forms (fiction or poetry). The works of Thackeray are included because of his journalistic writings on the theatre and his fictional representation of a playwright in The Virginians (1857–59).

The library archives of acting editions of Victorian plays that survive, and the vast array of playscripts in the Lord Chamberlain’s collection at the British Museum, present us with a mass of literary material by forgotten authors whose names are no longer part of our history of the literary culture of the nineteenth century. However, amongst this gath-ering of invisible playwrights there are a number of major canonical writers of the period, whose forays into the theatrical world have been absorbed into this dark morass. The challenge for this book is to contest the obscurity of the dramatic texts of all Victorian playwrights, and to suggest that pre-eminently behind their disappearance is the difficulty of forming a coherent authorial identity. In approaching the plays of well-known writers from the perspective of the author, I want to ask the question of why the play-on-the-page fails to find a coherent location within the corpus of an author’s work. What problems did these writers encounter that prevented their plays from becoming part of their liter-ary fame? By taking their plays seriously, can we deduce anything about the status of the playwright in the Victorian period? The play belongs to what might be termed a liminal space between the author and the stage. Approaching the play from the perspective of the stage, seeing the theatrical writer as part of a group of people essential for the whole experience of the performance, and the text as an ever-changing ‘pro-duction’, transforms the text into context and refuses its assimilation in a stable body of literary production. As Jeffrey Masten has remarked of Early Modern playwrights: ‘dramatic authorship emerges from the




publishing house and only indirectly from the theatre and… authorship in its emergence is as much about marketing as about true attribution.’1

In the nineteenth century, whether to conceive of a play as a literary text or a theatrical performance turned the newspaper advertisement and theatrical playbill into contested spaces. As literary authorship emerged as a professional occupation, the importance of literary iden-tity, celebrity, and branding developed as commercial necessities. The new mass print culture of the 1830s and 1840s debated integrally the appropriateness of anonymity versus identity, and writers like Boz, Titmarsh, Currer Bell, George Eliot, adopted personae to turn anonym-ity into a branded commodity. Robert Patten argues in his analysis of the emergence of Dickens as ‘Boz’ in the 1830s, that Dickens was ‘the first to discover and exploit those Victorian developments that conduced to the creation of an identity as author centred in and manufactured by a writer.’2 Dickens’ green wrappers, Thackeray’s yellow wrappers, Browning’s Bells and Pomegranates (1841–46), were all creations of the marketing strategies of the day, to pull disparate works together into identifiable series or brands. Dickens, and others, invested in the crea-tion of a Foucauldian ‘author-function’ around which to coalesce their literary identity.3 In a saturated marketplace, authors embraced this new way of doing business, generating loyalty in readers, associating with particular magazines (Punch, Household Words), and identifying with communities of readers who behaved almost tribally towards their favourite producers.

Against this background, theatrical authorship was more problematic. While synergies might be supposed to exist between the literary periodi-cal and the theatre bill-of-fare, in that both offer variety, miscellany, a simultaneous coherence and separateness, in fact the writer struggled to be taken into account in the motivation for audience attendance at an evening’s entertainment. So although a number of journalists were also considerable theatrical writers, it was only through the collection of periodical volumes that writers could attempt authorial coherence, and not through the ephemeral and discarded playbill. The cultural stand-ing of the author of plays – the writer in the process to performance – was ambiguous and insubstantial. Symptomatic of this is our access to archived texts today: the Lord Chamberlain’s collection plays no part in the establishment of authorial identity; such play scripts were never public or in circulation. As we note from the newspaper reviews of plays, for the most part, the performed event was the ‘text’. Published plays of the period mostly exist in the volumes of acting editions by publishers such as Thomas Hailes Lacy, Benjamin Webster, and Samuel



Introduction 5

French; these are principally, though not exclusively, for amateur, home and provincial acting companies, and their editorial material consists of stage directions and information on costume and scenery. These prac-tices form a key element in our understanding of the reasons behind many Victorian (and Modern) perceptions of a ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century. Some argued that more sophisticated and theatre-wise authors were required to ‘improve’ the drama, and that the economics of writing for the stage (the poor pay), was undoubt-edly a deterrant. However, I will argue here that the main concern was the ‘invisibility’ of the author that saw the playwright simultaneously striving to gain control over the artefact, sensitive to its reception, but ‘decentred’ from the process of production, and often even excluded from the public gaze.

When Foucault writes of ‘What is an Author?’ he tends to look at the reader or critic’s formulation of an homogeneous entity, the author-function, out of the miscellaneous texts published by that figure. This figure, however, has been problematized by ‘theorists and historians of authorship [who] have attended to its multiple and changing represen-tations in historically specific sites and articulations.’4 One such site and specificity describes the location of authorship within the nineteenth-century theatre and its representation in the culture of the period. Critics of seventeenth-century literature tend to consider the establish-ment of the modern concept of the author as emerging in their period.5 Ben Jonson’s Works (1616), the canonisation of William Shakespeare in the First Folio of 1623 (in which Jonson was also involved), and the publication of John Milton’s Poems (1645) are usually cited as the first attempts to establish the homogeneous author. The fact that two of these writers were playwrights is not without significance. The play-wright stares into that gulf between a published text of a play and its interpretive or evolving performance. Do we base our definition of the author only on published texts, or on something more nebulous that might include input from theatrical managers, actors, scenographers? Is theatre collaborative, or the realisation of one person’s vision? Can it be both? What if there is no published text, but only prompt copies and privately printed copies? There would seem to be a unique set of problems related to the establishment of authorial identity in relation to playwriting than to writers of novels, poems, or even journalism. A novel or poem is always a published text that reflects precisely the text as it left the author’s hand. A play is not quite the same and its main locus of economic production lies in the theatre industry more than the publishing house. An author’s claim on his play as text is always




in opposition to the act of performance on the stage. And that is with-out getting into the slough of adaptations, translations, and piracy. Essential to this problem is the modern association of an author’s canon with print.

The writer of plays at the beginning of Victoria’s reign would have been surprised by the utopian world promised in Marysa Demoor’s comment that ‘the importance of authorship grew in the course of the nineteenth century until, at the end of that century and the beginning of the twentieth, its importance even preceded the text… the name of the author and the identity of the author attached to that name had become the foremost marketing strategy by 1900.’6 Yet Demoor’s sum-mary identifies the transformation in the fortune of the playwright that would characterize the nineteenth century. The Victorian writer of plays, unless they already had celebrity from another field, could struggle even to be acknowledged publicly as an author. The playbill and the newspaper advertisement often promulgate this exclusion. Pick any date from The Times and consider the entertainment column. Let’s go mid-century and take 1 July 1850, which was a Monday. Beneath the clock – The Times’ distinctive visual symbol for the entertainments listings – are advertisements for eight theatres, showing some two ope-ras, three ballets, and sixteen plays, an astonishing variety. Regarding the first five, we have only Vincenzo Bellini’s name associated with his opera, I Capuletti e I Montecchi (1830); Giacomo Meyerbeer is not listed for Roberto Il Diavolo (1831); La Esmeralda (1844) is given no choreogra-pher (Jules Perrot) or composer (Cesare Pugni); Les Metamorphoses (1850) is given only the name of the principal dancer, M[arie] P[aul] Taglioni, and not her choreographer and father, Paul Taglioni; a ‘petite ballet’, Love in the Highlands, is also unacknowledged (possibly, The Fairies’ Revels; or, Love in the Highlands (1802), choreographer, John Fawcett, and composer, Samuel Arnold). Of the plays, not a single one is given an author. In the block advertising above the clock, Domenico Cimarosa, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppi Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, and Fromental Halévy are acknowledged for forthcoming operas, but the only author to be listed for a play is ‘Mr. Sheridan Knowles’ who gave his ‘kind permission’ for a performance of The Hunchback (Covent Garden, 5 April 1832) for Miss Woolgar’s Benefit at the Adelphi.7 An absence of the writer contrasts with the presence of many of the lead actors, actresses, and dancers in the main productions.

Such anonymity is not entirely true of the playbills, by and large. Although there were plays included without authors, several were credited with their work. In the Templeman Library at Kent University,



Introduction 7

for example, playbills for the Haymarket Theatre (1833–69), Lyceum Theatre (1839–1939), and Globe Theatre (1869–74) acknowledge some authorship. Examples from the Olympic Theatre (1853–75), are equivo-cal: 1 January to 1 February 1854, we have The First Night (anon.), The Bengal Tiger (Charles Dance), The Wandering Minstrel (anon. [actually, Henry Mayhew]); for 3 December 1866, we have No (anon.), The Frozen Deep (Wilkie Collins), Faust and Marguerite (John Halford).8 However, the playbill was always ephemeral; it could tell theatre audiences what to expect, and was visible on the streets (though probably not to some-one passing in a carriage), and, given that the bill of fare changed so frequently, one can imagine it was not placed very far from the theatre to which it related – on the theatre walls, and on nearby billboards, thus associating writer with place. Dickens provides an example of the physical exertion required to consume a playbill:

On that eventful day, when new pantomimes are played for the first time at the two great theatres, and at twenty or thirty of the little ones, we still gloat as formerly upon the bills which set forth tempt-ing descriptions of the scenery in staring red and black letters, and still fall down upon our knees, with other men and boys, upon the pavement by shop-doors, to read them down to the very last line.9

Jacky Bratton’s argument for seeing the playbill as central to under-standing an ‘intertheatrical’ reading of a ‘single night in the theatre’ and emphasising the symbolic nature of the playbill as signifying ‘meaning only as part of a system of relationships’, provides a useful way of con-ceptualising the network of texts in which a writer’s work was situated. For Bratton, the playbill provides access to ‘the expectations and dispo-sition of the audience, their personal experience of theatre.’10

However, one needs to qualify this. The playbill might be an inclusive artefact, in that it announces titles, managers, actors and companies, and sometimes authors, but it seems to me that the playbill’s principal function is as a means of creating identities. Combined with magazine and newspaper advertising, it ‘manages visibility’, in the sense of deter-mining what in the production process should be visible and where. Most conspicuous are the titles of the plays, and so the playbill (as its name suggests) establishes primarily a versatility, richness, profusion, even an excess, of play ‘texts’. The New Strand Theatre for 1 July 1850 offered four plays: King Rene’s Daughter, Secret Service, An Unprotected Female, and Friend Waggles – a diversity of fare that indicates a linguistic exuberance in the creative invention of suggestive titles. Patriarchy in




one; a mysterious title in two, possibly about servants/service/social class; the sexual intimidation of three; the comic farce and maleness of four. The titles could suggest a management of audience, to attract them to a general fare – of farce, comedy, drama, melodrama – that might just as easily have a different set of similar titles. The linguistic games that the reader participates in when perusing the playbills will be matched by the verbal wit and comic punning on the stage. The wordplay of bill and stage suggests a ubiquitous textuality – a reading and listening culture – concomitant with a print culture. Yet it is a culture that favours audience participation and consumption, and not creative production, originality or authorship.

One might also see a connection here with Martin Meisel’s arguments on the ‘readerly’ practices inherent in narrative art of the period.11 I think it wrong to see the Victorian period as projecting entirely a cul-ture of spectacle; the Victorians did like to do big things – whether it be the Great Exhibition, representations of the eruptions of Vesuvius, or horses and train crashes on stage. But these were much the exception, and people crowded to them and remembered them for their novelty. The general run of Victorian culture was more participatory, with an audience engaged as Meisel suggests rather than one that merely observed. The jokes, puns, and allusions come thick and fast on the Victorian stage, and an audience has to be alert, but also, as with some sit-coms today, can stand seeing plays two or three times to catch and mimic the badinage. It is no coincidence that Dickens used the theatri-cal catch-phrase so repeatedly to make his characters memorable, or that he used street-slang expressions as names for his characters.

The newspaper and the playbill, then, manifest different practices in their representation of author’s names. They invoke questions of the permanent and the ephemeral. The newspaper offered the possibility of some kind of permanent record, but gave no names. It would be present in the home and the club, might be talked over, and would more likely be the vehicle for planning an evening out at the theatre. Hence, for dramatic authors, your name might be on the street posters, but not in The Times. But posters would pass away quickly. There was a need to maintain a steady stream of new plays; unless you had a play on the stage, your name would be invisible. This was not the case for actors and certainly not for stage managers, who were present both in the newspapers and on the playbills from week to week. It is for this reason that many writers of plays published the acting editions of their work, and emphasized numerous others works for which they were responsi-ble, on the title pages. For example, John Maddison Morton’s farce, The



Introduction 9

Little Savage (1858), has on its title page a list of forty-seven of his other plays ‘& c. & c. & c.’12 The play text’s presence in the market-place as a published commodity stabilized authorship more assuredly than when it was translated to the stage. The Dramatic Authors’ Society established in 1833 helped to publish playtexts to enable writers both to claim own-ership of and to gain visibility from their productions.

These practices also demonstrate the pressure placed upon the celebrity author moving into a sphere not associated with high status writing. When Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson placed their works on the stage, their name carried with it that caché looked for by the theatre managers to promote their theatre and performance. Their names are conspicuously present, and, as writers, suddenly they can stand or fall by the success of a production. The narrative of dramatic decline that dominated the higher periodicals and newspapers of the day, fuelled the desire in some quarters for an authorial ‘hero’ to rescue the maligned drama; Tennyson found that by writing a play he had sad-dled himself with the responsibility for the future of the theatre. In the Illustrated London News for 15 April 1876, the build up to the first night of Tennyson’s first play, Queen Mary (1876), was characterized thus: ‘The placing of such a drama on our national stage ought to be signalised [sic] as a great national event.’13 A week later, following the opening of the production, a lengthy review of the play proclaimed: ‘The success of Queen Mary decides for the present the eligibility for true and pure poetry for the stage… From the night of the production of this tragedy we ought to be able to date a new era for the poetic drama.’14 No pres-sure, then.

The nineteenth-century play could not establish an author’s identity in a manner that helped to coalesce their work around a stable and coherent formation. All of the writers I am looking at here had the desire to write for the stage, since all tried to do so. But only Collins and Tennyson succeeded, with only Collins writing plays throughout his life and integrating them completely with his whole output of fic-tion. Ironically, the critical establishment has ignored his plays more than any other major Victorian writer’s. This instability in authorial identity had further roots in the practices of translation and revision that were continuous throughout the period. Work was continually ‘adapted’, transforming a French story into a French play, translating this into a literal English, reworking and changing elements of the story, developing alternative versions to replicate the success at other theatres, and pirating these in the provinces and overseas. The industry built up networks of translators, adapters, and copyists, using shorthand




in productions or buying up original texts, to feed the proliferation of drama. This description of the drama of the period provides a summary too of the reasons for the critical dismissal of the quality of the stage. As Bratton notes: ‘worth and value and cultural significance were said to have disappeared from a theatre that was thriving, multiplying and serving ever-increasing numbers of spectators.’15 Such cultural diffusion propagates two key debates in the establishment of legitimate autho-rial identity: the status of the published dramatic text and the status of the Major or Minor theatre in which it appeared. The association of the Minor theatre with moral and cultural illegitimacy raised ques-tions for the aspiring author about producing a form of writing held in some quarters as morally degenerate. The battle for the acceptance of the Minor theatre as a legitimate literary sphere is intimately connected with the fortunes of dramatic literary producers.

The Theatres Royal

Criticism of Victorian theatre has often been characterized by the perception that it is unsophisticated, vulgar, lower-class and artisan. Moreover, it is a target for ridicule due to a perceived amateurish and coarse popularity. Dickens describes such an attitude in the Boz sketch, ‘Private Theatres’, Evening Chronicle, 11 August 1835, where he targets specifically the practice of small theatres renting out their stages to ama-teur or self-paying actors. But the actual picture of the early nineteenth-century theatre was much more complicated, not least because the Majors, the patent theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, found it expedient to produce popular melodramas and spectacles in order to fill their auditoria. For the writer, there was limited opportunity to contrib-ute new plays to these large establishments, and the alternative world of the illegitimates implicitly undermined the position of the author by absorbing them into an industrialized process that was seen to vulgarize art as much as the periodical press with its penny-a-liners.

Nevertheless, the market for a popular but respectable theatre was growing. Chapter 1 considers Dickens’ relationship with two theatres in particular in his early working life that provide a geopolitical context to the development of his playwriting and cast a new light on both the genesis of ‘Dickens’ and the cultural identity of the playwright-author in the evolving world of nineteenth-century theatre. Where critics like Anthony Jenkins see the Victorian theatre as travelling a path from despair to salvation with the arrival of Henrik Ibsen and the late Victorian ‘intellectual’ writers, I would temper this by considering that



Introduction 11

the process was a redefining of the role and status of the author in a transition from an exclusive form of theatre to a more democratic one, albeit one that also experiences the hardening of separate, exclusive aesthetics. Katherine Newey identifies the origins of the narrative of dramatic decline to arise from the Romantic period’s ambivalence over the relationship between art and commerce.16 In addition, the roman-tic narrative that the theatre needed to be ‘saved’ by a great author is quixotic; instead, writers and stages alike had to discover a rebalancing of tradition and modernity. That the borderlines between high and popular were crumbling from the beginning of the 1830s can be seen through the eyes, or Journal, of one of the most exclusive figures in the period, Queen Victoria. Her development as a consumer maps onto that of Dickens, Thackeray and Browning and provides an insightful context.

Victoria was born in 1819 and was seven years younger than Dickens and Browning and ten years younger than Tennyson. Her interest in the theatre stems from about 1833, when she was 14 years old but begins in earnest at the age of 16 and she began to attend the theatre regularly from 1835. Dickens had earlier experience of the stage from recalling how his family lived next door to the Sheerness theatre and could hear what was happening in the auditorium through the partition wall.17 But like Victoria, from the age of about 16 Dickens became a regular mem-ber of the theatrical audience, and no doubt knew the theatre with the precosity of the ‘Theatrical Young Gentleman’ he describes in Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838). His first plays appeared in 1836 and Browning’s in 1837. Victoria’s journal coincides with this period and from what she observes, the concerns she focuses upon, the anxieties that gradually emerge, we can see just how ambiguous was the position and status of the illegitimate theatre these writers entered.

The theatres Victoria attended, the Victoria, the Adelphi, and the Lyceum, she defined through their primitive respectability, and, par-ticularly, their ‘cleanliness’. The Victoria is ‘a very clean and pretty little theatre, and the box we were in was very comfortable’ (28 November 1833) while the Lyceum was ‘a very pretty clean little theatre’ (10 July 1835).18 At these establishments, along with Drury Lane, she attended opera, pantomime and music recitals. However, in February 1836, she attended Lucia Elizabeth Vestris’ Olympic Theatre to see a ‘burletta’, One Hour; or, The Carnival Ball, featuring Charles Mathews. In so doing, she was stepping firmly into the realm of the illegitimate theatre, and her implicit defence, if largely to herself, was again focused on the accept-ability of the venue: ‘I had never been there before; it is a very small




but pretty, clean little theatre’ (29 February 1836). In addition, she was taken with Mathews’ acting, and described it as transcending the ‘vulgar’. Two weeks later, she attended the St. James’s Theatre, which was the venue for Dickens’s early plays a few months later. I shall dis-cuss the St. James’s below, but here it is worth noting Victoria’s descrip-tion of it, observing, on 10 March 1836:

[the] St. James’ Theatre (Mr. Braham’s)… which was built in little more than two months, and was only opened this Winter. It is a beautiful theatre; the whole is done in the style of Louis XV and is extremely elegant; it is a good deal larger than the Olympic.

Victoria was not, however, impressed by the fare, seeing Fra Diavolo and Brother Jacques: ‘the Olympic is so gay, and so amusing, and this was very dull and heavy I must say.’ The newness of the place also eventu-ally defeated her sensibilities: ‘it was so close, the smell of mortar was so strong, and we were tired.’

Victoria’s journal indicates how hard the contemporary theatres were working to attract a good class of audience in the mid-1830s and to ensure their challenge to the patents was not going to fall on the basis of their cleanliness and respectability. The mortar may be damp still, but it was beginning to strengthen the battlements. Through 1836 and 1837, Victoria attended several times at the Olympic to see such plays as Riquet with the Tuft, The Barrack Room, and He Would Be an Actor, and continually gossips about Mathews, Madame Vestris, John Liston and others. Always chaper-oned, of course, Victoria developed an excited passion for this national theatrical entertainment: ‘The Olympic’, she declares, ‘is certainly the best and far most amusing English theatre’ (6 April 1837).

However, on attaining the Crown, everything changes. The young 16 year old was forced to abdicate the illegitimate theatres and constrain herself within the walls of the patents. The best she could expect of this world was the Opera Buffa at the Lyceum and private visits to see William Macready perform at Drury Lane. Through 1838 and 1839, her passion for the theatre remains evident from the discussions she records with senior politicians and statesmen about the theatre. But the subtext of its moral unacceptability remains throughout. One controversial royal, the Duchess of Cambridge, becomes the defining line between respectability and shame, and clearly a figure of some fascination for the young Queen. On 27 February 1839, Victoria had a discussion with Lord Melbourne ‘of the Duchess of Cambridge’s going to the small



Introduction 13

theatres on Wednesdays and Fridays, which he thought didn’t signify for her; “It wouldn’t do for you”, he said. Talked of my not wishing the opera to begin yet, as I was so fond of going to the play; he said, with tears in his eyes: “I’d go again in State before the end of the season”, which I said I certainly would.’ The distress on Melbourne’s part for the stifling of the Queen’s love of the theatre is prominent in her retelling of the conversation. In April 1839, the Duchess was still the subject of interest. ‘Lord Melborne said that she [the Duchess] said to Lady Ashley that I had so little amusement; that if she was me, she would have Proverbs of an evening; that she knew I couldn’t go to the Olympic, but that she would have Charles Mathews and Mme Vestris to act here! Lord Melbourne said, Lady Ashley said: “I never thought her a foolish woman till she said this, but the idea of the Queen’s having Charles Mathews and Mme Vestris to act here!” & c.’ (15 April 1839). The debate about the suitability of the Minor theatres for aristocratic patronage was being debated at the highest level. But the divide was one of age, too. Victoria was part of the young generation, the new urban dwellers who looked for novel popular amusements, and the melodrama, burletta and farce were their forms. By the 1850s, theatre had grown into a new maturity and, although the popular forms of melodrama, farce and comedy con-tinued to hold centre stage, the audience had changed. The Queen was able to have her actors to Windsor Castle for theatrical entertainments from December 1848,19 and by 1854, Victoria was again a regular at the Minor theatres, frequently visiting the Olympic and Adelphi – at least until the death of Prince Albert in 1861. This new patronage marks a rise in the status of the author, and the interest in writing for the theatre by authors such as Wilkie Collins, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot. Dickens, too, returned to the stage in 1851 with Mr. Nightingale’s Diary and began supporting Wilkie Collins’ career from 1855.

The National Standard and the theatre debates

Although he did not write frequently about the drama, W.M. Thackeray wrote drama reviews for his first magazine, the National Standard, which he bought in 1833. Precisely which reviews were from Thackeray’s pen are difficult to determine, but biographers have generally been of the opinion that Thackeray and his sub-editor, James Hume, ‘seem to have been responsible for most of the paper’s contents, particularly in its later months.’20 Philip Firmin’s experiences in The Adventures of Philip (1861–62), much of which are based on Thackeray’s career as a foreign




correspondent, hint at the probable situation of Thackeray himself when:

… [i]n his capacity of sub-editor the good fellow had the privilege of taking and giving away countless theatre orders, and panorama and diorama tickets: the Pall Mall Gazette was not above accepting such little bribes in those days, and Mrs. Mugford’s familiarity with the names of opera-singers, and splendid appearance in an opera-box, was quite remarkable. Friend Philip would bear away a heap of these cards of admission, delighted to carry off our young folks to one exhibition or another.21

During Thackeray’s ownership, the National Standard engaged in a sus-tained attack on Alfred Bunn, the proprietor at the time of both of the patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Thackeray took over the magazine from 4 May 1833, and reviewed Taglioni in Flore et Zéphire (1796) for this number.22 A month later, 1 June 1833, a few days before the passing of the Dramatic Literary Property Act on 10 June, he included a woodcut of Bunn holding a pair of candlesticks labelled ‘Schroeder’ and ‘Malibran’, two well-known female European opera singers, to indicate that Bunn’s preference was for overseas opera stars rather than home-grown theatre.23 As the ‘National’ standard, the magazine was highly critical of Bunn’s neglect of English writers and performers in both ‘legitimate’ houses.

Thackeray’s editorship brought more of a critical focus to bear on the management of the patent theatres, but the magazine had set out its stall regarding the state of contemporary theatre from its first numbers under F.W.N. Bayley.24 In the second number, 12 January 1833, under the heading ‘Dramatic Free Trade’, the magazine commented on the extension of the ‘legitimate’ drama patent to the Haymarket and the English Opera House for eight months that had recently been agreed. ‘The Haymarket,’ it declared, ‘under liberal and intelligent management, might be made greatly instrumental to the revival of the drama.’25 Its strategy for development, the writer believed, should incorporate a commitment to national actors, including talent in the provinces, and a policy to better remunerate dramatists. David Morris, the new manager, had indicated he could not pay high salaries to authors; ‘he seems to share in the delusion common to his class, that a dramatist ought not to expect to earn a dinner a-day from the exercise of his profession.’26 The article also noted that, the extension granted, ‘the Adelphi and Olympic will petition, with equal right, for the like advantages, and thus, in a brief time, rescue our national drama from the hands of men



Introduction 15

whose whole energies are employed, not to foster and do honour to the cause of dramatic letters, but to circumvent and defeat one another in the engagement of a Parisian danseuse or a German cantatrice!’27 It is significant that a key focus of this piece is the ‘cause of dramatic letters’, the authorship of plays; the National Standard included contributions from at least one dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, who contributed a prose story to this same number. However, the paper was not so naïve as to believe that the fault lay entirely with the managers. A joke that fol-lows the above article was critical of the state of dramatic writing and its tendency to advocate spectacle. The squib is a conversation with a ‘prolific paste-and-scissors author’, intriguingly called ‘Mr. T.’ After his latest success, the author is asked:

“What kind of drama is it?”“Oh, quite legitimate – perfectly legitimate!”“Well, T., and how did it go off?”“Why, it would have gone tremendously, only the d—ed monkey forgot to fire the blunder-buss!”28

The National Standard published its own ‘manifesto’ on theatre, in ‘Drury Lane’, 25 May 1833, announcing that this had been prepared two weeks earlier, which was the date of Thackeray’s first number as editor. The magazine complained of the empty theatres: ‘Now, as tragedy and comedy differ from spectacle in this, that it is necessary that the actors in them should be audible, and not merely visible, like specks in the horizon, no wonder they do not attract. It is clear that the Brobdingnag edifices of Covent Garden and Drury Lane are utterly unfit for their representation.’29 In a public letter outlining his aims for the theatres dated 27 May 1833 (which the National Standard labelled ‘King Bunn’s Proclamation’ and ridiculed directly on 15 June 1833), Bunn announced the merging of the two theatre companies in a direct attempt to reduce performers’ salaries. He depicted this in terms of the current decline of the patents due to escalating actors’ wages and falling box office receipts. His changes were necessary ‘in order that the public may once more witness the legitimate drama properly represented’ and ‘to restore the prosperity of that long-neglected but rational source of amusement – the national drama.’30 However, the National Standard was critical of manage-ment: the sheer size of the buildings developed more for spectacle than drama, and the lack of investment in new plays and British performers.

In Bunn’s 1840 autobiographical account of his time as manager of the two patents, he defended several decisions – for example, to intro-duce equestrian performances at the theatre – on the basis that he was




only supplying what the public demanded: ‘It is perfectly true that I have resorted to quadruped performances, owing to the total want of attraction in biped ones.’31 He blames the lack of taste in society and the failure of audiences to appreciate more traditional forms of play: ‘the principal cause of the failure of the two National Theatres is attribut-able rather to a want of patronage on the part of the public, than to any want of ability, or spirit, on the part of those who had the management of them.’32 The contemporary debate raged on both sides of the pen and all were blamed by someone. Bunn declared, ‘… we are an untheatri-cal people, and consequently when we support those establishments [Drury Lane and Covent Garden], it is not through any love of the art or profession practised within them, but from extraneous excitement held out to us as a temptation to enter them. We contribute nothing towards the advancement of drama, beyond the occasional price of admission to one or other of its arenas…’33 What Bunn meant by ‘untheatrical people’ were people who did not like productions that upheld an assumed value for pre-industrial modes, such as five-act tragedies; for the majority of the new lower-middle class audience – Dickens’ audience – the cannonading monkey was always going to be more of a draw and Bunn had to cater for such. In the nineteenth century, more theatres were built and more people attended than ever before, but managers and writers alike found it useful to appropriate the narrative of a dra-matic decline in order to propagate their political interests or defend their activities.

The National Standard was critical of Bunn’s arguments during the 1833–34 season: ‘The public… are not quite so ignorant and stupid as they are represented to be. But our intelligent and tasteful managers, while they think nothing of spending two thousand pounds upon a silly piece of spectacle, would shudder at paying the same sum for four legitimate plays, and deem themselves utterly ruined by such extrava-gance. The fault, we say, is in the management, not in the people.’34 Bunn was adamant though that contemporary authorial talent was not pervasive. ‘Of some hundreds of pieces sent promiscuously by unknown writers to the manager, during my appearance in that capac-ity, there was but one deemed fit for representation; and amongst those submitted by men of note, many were found fraught with danger, and dismissed accordingly,’ he wrote.35 The tension between authors and theatre managers would continue throughout the nineteenth century; many in the literary world felt that prospective talented playwrights were not given the opportunities they needed, while theatre manag-ers preferred to consolidate their audiences with proven successes.



Introduction 17

Macready’s contemporary patronage of Browning and John Westland Marston, discussed in Chapter 2, can be seen as a challenge to Bunn’s decisions to produce opera and spectacle. Bunn’s argument about the lack of public support for a national drama will echo later calls in the country for the establishment of a national theatre funded by govern-ment and public sponsorship. The solution in 1833 for Thackeray’s National Standard, however, was to develop the Minor theatres, and the magazine aligned itself behind what would become Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s campaign to abolish the patents’ monopoly over ‘legitimate’ drama. The patents had already sacrificed their right to this privilege:

… the legitimate drama is banished from the patent houses, and we sincerely hope for ever. We trust it will never return to those catacombs where it has been so long entombed. Make them hip-podromes, opera-houses, what you please, but never let the regular drama be murdered within their walls again. We must have other theatres better adapted to the purpose… we trust that the abused patents will speedily be rescinded.36

In August and September 1833, arguments raged between Bulwer, Knowles and the campaign for reform, and Bunn and the patents, over monopoly. The conflict crystallized around the loss of employment for actors due to the merger of the companies, a process partly responsi-ble for the development of the Tottenham-street Theatre discussed in Chapter 1. Furious, Bunn wrote to the King: ‘as NINETEEN THEATRES have lately been kept open on the same evening, any attempt on the part of the actors to establish what they call a third theatre would, in the event of their procuring a licence, patent, or charter, in this undra-matic city, finally complete the ruin of all parties holding theatrical property.’37 On Thackeray’s return from Paris, his magazine recom-menced its satirical attacks in a mock-review of an invented ‘publica-tion’, The National Drama; or, The Histrionic War of the Majors and Minors. He attacked the misconception, put forward by the patents, that they were being undermined by the rising numbers of Minor theatres. For Thackeray, the issue was more about the resistance to competition by Drury Lane and Covent Garden. His review is presented as a meeting between stakeholders in the patents: ‘“It is a very unfair thing”, says one Bobbins, “that any theatre should be suffered to remain open but Rural Lane and Common Garden; they should all be closed, because they injure us. I only wish I had the knocking of ’em down. The large theatres are going because the small ones are not gone.”’38




Many authors’ interests in the theatre, then, went beyond the mere attendance at plays and the superficial enjoyment of popular theatre as entertainment. Thackeray, Dickens, and Browning participated in the debates being held in the early 1830s about the direction of the London theatres. From a writer’s point of view, if the patent theatres, the only ones permitted to stage ‘legitimate’ drama, were not doing so, then the Minors had to be given the opportunity to prevent the leaking away of national playwriting talent. In the years immediately following 1833, Bulwer, Knowles and Browning, amongst others, showed that

Figure 0.1 ‘Flore Déplore L’Absence de Zephyr’, from ‘Theophile Wagstaff’ [W.M. Thackeray] (1836) Flore et Zephyr, Ballet Mythologique (London: Paris [printed])



Introduction 19

the patents could stage home-grown plays; Dickens largely turned to the Minors. But Thackeray was not a playwright, and his engagement with the theatre industry was sustained through his prose and fiction, as Chapter 3 will demonstrate. Thackeray’s attitude to the theatre expresses itself in that Protestant middle-class anxiety about the moral-ity of theatre-going and the ‘temptations’ of its worldly and unworthy performances. His 1836 caricatures of Flore et Zephyr present morally dubious reasons for the (male) audience’s presence at the ballet: here, the attraction of the dancer’s sexual self-exposure in the absence of her lover (see fig. 0.1).39 His satirical cartoon, Britannia Protecting the Drama (1840), criticizes Victoria’s support of foreign animal acts at Drury Lane and shows a lioness urinating on a bust of Shakespeare.40

Respectability, integrity, decline, and fallenness were terms emanating from fundamental attitudes towards the Victorian theatre, all of which impacted to entangle the author in a netting of doubtful legitimacy. The practices of the theatre engendered authorship as both a singular creative practice, and a collaborative enterprise, operating through playwriting collaborations, as between Dickens and Collins in Chapter 4, or through dramatic adaptations of literary texts, as explored in Collins’ adaptations of his own novels in Chapter 5. The curious paradox of this study is that it is essentially a book about dramatic authorship based on a number of writers who have no reputation as dramatists. Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, did all write plays. Indeed, throughout the Victorian period it was almost as if they were expected to write plays; the periodical critics, drama critics, fellow writers, supporters of the Dramatic Authors’ Society, were all hoping that one of the acknowledged ‘major’ writers of the day would suddenly break into the theatre and save it from some feared literary mire. They would make the ‘Minors’ major:

If by the revival of drama is meant an efflorescence of dramatic art which shall be epochal, somebody must invent a new kind of play. It is not a National Theatre that we want, but a man of genius, who shall seize upon the stage as an organ for the embodiment of fresh artistic aims.41

This commentator in the New Quarterly Magazine in January 1880 reflects a theme present in the periodicals throughout the century: that the theatre was not a place for intellectual audiences, and that it suf-fered from too much translation, adaptation, and popular formulae to be anything other than ephemeral. Literary criticism in the twentieth




century has enacted this narrative by elevating Ibsen as the saviour of the drama (though usually omitting his ironic arrival through adaptation and translation: Pillars of Society – translated as Quicksands by William Archer and produced by W.H. Vernon – premièred at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on 15 December 1880).42 ‘By the time [Queen Victoria] died,’ Anthony Jenkins writes, ‘the theatre itself had grown respectable and a drama of ideas, adapted (more or less) to middle-class taste, had its place in that respectability.’43 Allardyce Nicoll’s view in the 1940s highlighted this paradigmatic shift: ‘Within the half-century cov-ered by this survey [1850–1900] the modern drama, with all its essential conditions and conventions, was born… the theatre of the nineties – and that not only in matter of time – appears to be part of ourselves.’44

Is this view wholly correct? Chapter 6 explores the prospect of an earlier Messianic arrival in Tennyson’s plays of the 1870s and 80s. A metanarrative of dramatic salvation, a rags to riches story, paradoxi-cally reinforces that hierarchy of ‘respectability’ over ‘illegitimacy’ and aligns modern critical sensibility with the views of the Victorian literary establishment. For many critics, the common-or-garden nineteenth-century drama is only good for rejecting, or for finding the occasional writer who, in their primitive and unsophisticated way, prepare some mortar for a rebuilding. As Michael Booth says of T.W. Robertson: ‘much English comedy developed in the direction of rather ordinary middle-class domestic reality after Robertson, and this may be his most significant dramatic legacy…’, though he then adds: ‘there were, how-ever, firm indications of this direction before Society [1865].’45 Direction, growth, birth – for many literary critics and theatre historians the trajec-tory is away from the mid-Victorian drama.

My interest in this book, however, is in what the mid-nineteenth-century drama can tell us about the writers of the period and what they can tell us about the drama. I want to think about processes of transformation, engagement, innovation, and creativity, and above all I want to consider the perceptions of the role of playwriting within the shaping of models of authorship. A synchronic reading of certain points in the period, reading across the networks of a moment can open up new ideas about the integration of literature and drama, and a more symbiotic relationship between them. Nevertheless, the essential characteristic of nineteenth-century theatre was metamorphosis; for the managers, actors and the writers, the hierarchy of cultural identities sur-rounding the production of plays was to change considerably through the Victorian era.



239

Index

A’Beckett, Gilbert AbbottAgnes Sorrel 34A Clear Case 34The French Company 34Man-Fred 34The Revolt of the Workhouse 30The Tradesman’s Ball 99

A’Beckett, Mary Anne 34Abime, L’ (French translation of

Collins, No Thoroughfare) 144Acting Edition of Victorian Plays

(Lacy) 1, 4, 59–60, 63adaptation 25–8, 57–8, 92–4,

149–51, 160Adelphi Theatre 1–2, 6, 11, 13–14,

25, 28, 33, 39, 50, 55–6, 125, 136, 138–9, 141, 144, 152, 163, 169–70, 177, 189, 198, 200, 217, 218, 220

Ainsworth, William HarrisonJack Sheppard 33, 223

Albery, JamesForgiven 177

Alexander, George 170, 190All the Year Round 32, 96, 126, 137,

140, 155Almack’s (Willis’s Rooms) 33Anderson, James 84Anson, George 170Archer, Frank 165, 170Archer, William

Quicksands (translation of Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of Society) 20, 208

Arnold, Samuel 6Arrangement in Black, No. 3: Sir

Henry Irving as Philip II of Spain (Whistler) 183–4

Ashley, Lady (Emily Ashley-Cooper, Countess of Shaftsbury) 13

Athenaeum 32, 93, 137, 141, 143Austin, Henry 38Balfe, Michael William

The Bohemian Girl 118‘Come into the Garden,

Maud’ 178The Rose of Castille 118Satanella 118

Bancroft, Marie Effie (Wilton) 31–2, 153, 165

Bancroft, Squire 31–2, 153, 161, 165

Barnett, John 44Barnett, Morris 39, 211

Monsieur Jacques 34, 44, 99–100Barrett, Wilson 170Barrie, James Matthew 205Barry, Spranger 121Bateman, Kate 205Bateman, Sidney Frances 174,

178, 187Bayley, Frederick William N. 14Bayly, Thomas Haynes

The Barrack Room 12One Hour; or, The Carnival Ball 11

Beaumont, Francis 86Beethoven, Ludwig van

Fidelio 111Bellew, Rev. J.M. 178Bellini, Vincenzo

I Capuletti e I Montecchi 6Bell’s British Theatre 120, 221Bennett, G. 64Bennett, William Sterndale 175Bentley, Richard 40, 165Bentley’s Miscellany 40, 47Berkeley, Hon. (Francis) Henry

Fitzhardinge, M.P. 115Bernard-Beere, Fanny 199Beverly, William 50Beverly, William Roxby 50Bishop, Henry

Clari; or, The Maid of Milan 39Boccaccio, Giovanni 192

Decameron 192Bond, Acton 187



240 Index

Boucicault, Dion 149, 224The Colleen Bawn 152, 178The Corsican Brothers 95, 119,

133–4, 136, 189Kerry; or, Night and Morning 208The Poor of New York 218Used Up 103–4

‘Boz’ (see Charles Dickens)Braham, Charles 178Braham, John 12, 34–6, 38–9, 41–3,

99, 112–13, 178, 219Brontë, Charlotte (‘Currer Bell’) 4Browne, Hablot Knight (‘Phiz’) 48, 100Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 59, 81, 87Browning, Robert 17, 57–88, 172,

180, 204Bells and Pomegranates 4, 58, 62–3,

79, 86–8A Blot in the ’Scutcheon 49, 61–3,

70, 74–83, 172, 201‘Caliban upon Setebos’ 81Colombe’s Birthday 62–3, 79, 83–8Dramatic Lyrics 62, 87Dramatic Romances and Lyrics 62‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 87King Victor and King Charles 62Luria 62, 86‘My Last Duchess’ 87, 217Paracelsus 61–2, 68Pauline 61–2, 73Pippa Passes 62, 86The Return of the Druses 62–3, 74,

83Sordello 62A Soul’s Tragedy 62, 86–7Strafford 58–9, 61–74, 77–9, 82–6,

88Buchanan, Robert

Alone in London (with Harriet Jay) 171

Lady Clare 170Buckstone, John Baldwin 83,

112–13, 115The Christening 25–7Uncle John 132

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 17–18, 47, 58, 61, 69, 115

The Duchess de la Vallière 67The Lady of Lyons 61, 69, 77

Not So Bad As We Seem 126Richlieu 179

Bunn, Alfred 14–17, 33, 106Burdett, Henry 38burlesque 28, 93, 107burletta 1, 13, 24–5, 28–9, 39–40,

66–7, 210Burnand, Francis Cowley 205

The Corsican Brothers and Co. (Ltd.) (with H.P. Stephens) 208

Jeames, a New and Original Comedy 93

A Musical Box 208Burnett, John Pringle

Jo 205Byron, George Gordon Lord 178

Manfred 34, 199Sardanapalus 196Werner 77

Byron, Henry J. 205–6Our Boys 205

Cambridge, Duchess of (Princess Augusta of Hesse) 12–13

Cameron, Juliet Margaret 174, 176–7, 188

Carlyle, Jane Welsh 174–5Carlyle, Thomas 175Carr, Joseph William Comyns (see

Hardy, Thomas)Cassell’s Magazine 161Cavendish, Ada 165, 170, 177, 205Cellier, Albert 205Chapman, George 86Chapman, John Kemble 29, 31Chatterton, Frederick Balsir 196Chaucer, Geoffrey 88Cimarosa, Domenico 6Collins, Wilkie 9, 13, 102–4, 114,

124–45, 149–71, 205Armadale (novel) 130, 153, 167Armadale (play) 153, 162Basil 126–7Black and White 165, 169The Dead Secret 126‘Dramatic Grub Street’ 128The Evil Genius (novel) 171The Evil Genius (play) 170–1‘The Four-Post Bed’ 178



Index 241

The Frozen Deep (play) 7, 94, 102, 125–36, 143, 152, 169, 211, 221

Jezebel’s Daughter 152Lazy Tour of Two Idle

Apprentices 125The Lighthouse 112, 128–9, 136Man and Wife (novel) 161Man and Wife (play) 31, 153–4,

160–67Memoirs of the Life of William

Collins 135Miss Gwilt 156, 163, 165, 167–9,

171, 179, 199, 206The Moonstone (novel) 126, 152–3,

167–8The Moonstone (play) 152, 155,

163, 167–9The New Magdalen (novel) 165–6The New Magdalen (play) 80, 152,

154, 160–1, 163, 165–7, 171, 177No Name (novel) 126No Name (play) 153, 161No Thoroughfare (fiction) 137–8,

140–4, 167No Thoroughfare (play) 125, 128,

137–45, 152, 155, 160, 165, 167–8

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners 125

Rank and Riches 160, 169–70, 198The Red Vial 112, 128, 136, 152,

156, 169The Woman in White (novel)

126–7, 153, 155–6, 158The Woman in White (play)

153–61, 163, 165–7, 169Collins, William 135Colman, George, the Elder

The Clandestine Marriage 64Colman, George, the Younger 128Congreve, William 119

Love for Love 76–7The Way of the World 77

Cooke, Thomas Simpson 77Cooke, Thomas Potter 115Cooper, Frederick Fox

A Tale of Two Cities (play) 96–7copyright 26, 55, 93, 151, 161,

170, 178

Cornhill Magazine 130Court Theatre 171, 205Covent Garden Theatre 1, 10, 14–17,

29–31, 33, 43–5, 57, 59, 63–4, 66–7, 113–14, 116–22, 208, 212, 219

Coyne, Joseph StirlingThe Home Wreck 177, 187Latest from New York 119Railway Bubbles 93An Unprotected Female 7

Crockford’s exhibition rooms 33

Daily News 186, 199Dale, Charles L. 65, 84Daly, Augustin 161, 164, 187, 198

Leah, the Forsaken 161Man and Wife 161, 164, 226

Daly’s Theatre 189, 204, 226Dalziel Brothers (engravers) 192Dance, Charles 210

The Bengal Tiger 7Darwin, Charles 201–2Dekker, Thomas 86de Marguerite, Julie

Enoch Arden (play) 177De Witt’s Plays 139–40, 178Dibdin, Charles, the younger

Harlequin and the Alchemist; or, The Philosopher’s Stone 45

Dibdin, Thomas 149, 224Dickens, Catherine (neé

Hogarth) 36–9, 42, 104, 210Dickens, Charles 4, 7–8, 10–13,

16, 19, 23–56, 91–105, 115–16, 124–45, 149, 152, 155, 162, 175, 198, 204

Bleak House 94, 127‘The Bloomsbury

Christening’ 25–7, 83The Cricket on the Hearth 217David Copperfi eld 80Dombey and Son 80, 152The Frozen Deep (play), see Collins,

WilkieGreat Expectations 51, 55–6, 94–5,

100–5, 121‘The Great Winglebury Duel’ 26Hard Times 94



242 Index

Dickens, Charles – continued‘Horatio Sparkins’ 26Is She his Wife? 23–4, 36, 38–9,

42–3, 46–7, 59, 145The Lamplighter 43–6, 212Little Dorrit 95, 100Martin Chuzzlewit 56Master Humphrey’s Clock 58Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi 26,

44–5, 56Mr. Nightingale’s Diary 13, 37, 103,

126The Mystery of Edwin Drood 144Nicholas Nickleby 27–8, 36–7,

46–56, 78, 91, 93–4, 189No Thoroughfare (fiction), see

Collins, WilkieNo Thoroughfare (play), see Collins,

WilkieO’Thello 39, 46, 211Oliver Twist 27, 46–7, 81, 91, 94,

104, 217Pickwick Papers 23, 40–2, 46, 56, 59‘Private Theatres’ 10, 50Sketches by Boz 23, 26Sketches of Young Gentlemen 11‘The Steam Excursion’ 26The Strange Gentleman 23–6,

34–43, 46, 99A Tale of Two Cities 94–100, 104The Village Coquettes 23–4, 26,

35–6, 38–43, 46, 198, 211Dickens, Fanny 36, 38Dickens, Letitia 38Dicks’ Standard Plays 59Donizetti, Gaetano 6Douglas, John, 9th Marquess of

Queensberry 199–200, 202Dramatic Authors’ Society 9, 19, 151Dramatic Literary Property Act

(1833) 151Drury Lane Theatre 1, 10–12, 14–17,

19, 29–31, 33, 44, 46, 57, 66, 74, 76–8, 88, 107, 114, 116–22, 196, 216, 219, 222

Dumas-fi ls, Alexandre 114

Edinburgh Review 71Egg, Augustus 103, 126

Eliot, George 4, 13, 59The Spanish Gypsy 2

Eliot, Thomas Stearns 131–2Elliston, Robert William 135, 222Elton, Edward 64–5English Opera House 14, 66Era 163, 166, 169, 170, 184–5,

191, 225Etcher 193–4Evening Chronicle 10Every Saturday (Boston) 138Exeter Hall, London 178

farce 1, 8, 13, 24–6, 28–9, 33, 35, 42, 53, 56, 94, 104, 107

Farren, Percy 30The Field of Forty Footsteps 32

Faucit, Helen 2, 64, 71, 75, 78, 83–5, 210, 217

Fawcett, John 6Fechter, Charles 130, 143–5, 165Fielding, Henry 116Fitzball, Edward 32, 59, 64–5, 68

Walter Tyrrell 64The Wood Devil 32

Fitzgerald, Edward 173Fletcher, John 86, 173, 181, 183

The Elder Brother (with Philip Massinger) 102

King Henry VIII (with William Shakespeare) 64, 107, 173, 179, 181, 183

Forster, John 41, 46–7, 59, 83, 126, 176, 218

Foster, Birket 192Foucault, Michel 5, 144, 149French, Samuel 4–5,

59, 140Furnivall, Frederick James 174

Gaiety Theatre 20, 93, 177, 208Gallery of Illustration, Regent

Street 102Garrick, David 116–22Gaskell, Elizabeth

Ruth 81Gay, John

Acis and Galatea (with Handel, George Frideric) 77



Index 243

Gilbert, William Schwenck 59, 198, 205

Engaged 225Iolanthe (with Arthur Sullivan) 170Patience (with Arthur Sullivan) 189

Globe Theatre 7, 152, 170, 177, 179, 189, 198–200, 204–5

Globe Theatre (Shakespeare’s) 183Godfrey, G.W.

The Queen’s Shilling 189Godwin, Edward William 230Gordon, G.L.

The Rustic Maiden 198Gore, Catherine

A Good Night’s Rest; or, Two O’Clock in the Morning 102, 219

Graphic 158Grieve, Thomas 141Griffin, Gerald 152Grose, Francis 211Grundy, Sydney 205Guild of Literature and Art 126

Halévy, Fromental 6Halford, John

Faust and Marguerite 7Halliday, Andrew

Dombey and Son 152Nicholas Nickleby (play) 189

Handel, George Frideric (see Gay, John)Hardy, Thomas 2, 197–8

Far from the Madding Crowd (novel) 197

Far from the Madding Crowd (play, with J. Comyns Carr) 2, 197–9

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (play) 2Harley, John Pritt 35, 39, 41, 44–6,

99, 210, 219Harraden, Ethel and Herbert 205Harrison, William 118Haymarket Theatre 1, 7, 14,

29, 66, 77, 83, 93, 111, 112, 189, 219

Hazlewood, Colin 149, 224Henley, William Ernest 2Heywood, Thomas 86Hill, Isabel 208Hogarth, Mary 36, 39, 210, 211

Home, John 119–20Douglas 120

‘Home Sweet Home’ (music Sir Henry Bishop, lyric John Howard Payne) 211

Hood, Thomas 178Horne, Richard Hengist 77, 126Horton, Priscilla 100Household Words 4, 126–7, 129, 178Hullah, John 39–40Hunt, William Holman 175

Ibsen, Henrik 1, 10, 20, 199, 208Illustrated London News 9, 76, 93, 143,

159, 164, 170, 178, 188, 195–6Illustrated Times 158Inchbald, Elizabeth 46, 61, 212, 219

Animal Magnetism 132International Review 186–7Irish Times 166–7Irving, Henry 74, 133, 170–1, 172–3,

178, 183–4, 186, 188–9, 193, 195–7, 199, 204–5

James, Henry 2, 172–3, 185, 193Guy Domville 2

Jerrold, Douglas 15, 102, 126, 178Johnson, Samuel 116

Tragedy of Irene 121, 128Johnstone, John Beer 150, 224Jones, Henry Arthur 198

The Silver King 170Jonson, Ben 5, 45, 57–8, 86, 88

The Alchemist 45, 78Every Man in his Humour 38,

88, 182

Kean, Charles 61, 83, 95, 115, 119, 134, 173–4, 196

Kean, Edmund 45, 110Kean, Ellen (Mrs. Charles) 61Kemble, Charles 30–1, 212Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny) 190,

212Kendal, Madge 190–1, 193–4, 199,

204Kendal, William Hunter 190–1, 204Kennedy, H.A. 205Kingdom, John M. 178–9



244 Index

Knowles, James Sheridan 6, 17–18, 58, 68

Brian Boroihme 64, 68The Hunchback 6Virginus 77

Lacy, Michael RophinoFra Diavolo; or, the Inn of

Terracina 12, 34, 42, 112Lacy, Thomas Hailes 4, 63, 149–50,

214Acting Edition of Victorian Plays 1,

59–61The Heart of Midlothian (play) 149,

224Landor, Walter Savage 86Lee, George Alexander 29, 31Lee, Jennie 205Leicester Chronicle 200Lemon, Mark 102, 103, 126Lequel, Louis

Identity; or, No Thoroughfare 140Lewes, George Henry 134Lewis, Leopold

The Bells 170Lingard, Alice 170, 226Liston, John 12London Journal 154, 157London Review 137–9Lord Chamberlain 24, 40, 151Lord Chamberlain’s Collection,

British Library 3–4, 61, 63Lovell, George

The Wife’s Secret 61Lyceum Theatre 7, 11–12, 28, 66,

78, 94, 170–1, 182, 186–7, 189, 195–6, 199, 204–5

Macfarren, George 31Maclise, Daniel 36, 176Macready, William 12, 17, 43–7, 49,

58–9, 61–5, 67–79, 81–4, 86, 88, 107, 115, 119, 173

Maeterlinck, Maurice 1Maginn, William 121Malibran, Maria 14Marston, John Westland 17, 59, 126,

180The Patrician’s Daughter 61, 75–7

Martin, Theodore 83Marylebone Theatre 218Mask 144Massinger, Philip (see Fletcher, John)Mathews, Charles 11–13, 103

He Would Be an Actor 12Mayhew, Henry

The Wandering Minstrel 7Maynard, Walter 191Medea (Sandys) 195Melbourne, Lord (William Lamb, 2nd

Viscount Melbourne) 12–13Mellon, Mrs. Alfred (see Woolgar,

Sarah Jane)melodrama 1, 8, 10, 13, 28–9, 47,

91, 94–5, 98, 102–7, 109, 111–12, 114, 120–2, 124–45, 160

Melrose, Thomas 29–31Merle, Jean-Toussaint (and Antoine-

Nicolas Béraud)Le Monstre et le Magicien 57

Meyerbeer, Giacomo 6Roberto Il Diavolo 6

Millais, John Everett 175Milner, Henry M.

Frankenstein (play) 57–8Hamlet 58

Milton, John 5, 176, 201Paradise Lost 201

Mirror of Parliament 30Miss Kelly’s Theatre, Soho 102Moncrieff, William Thomas 55

Nicholas Nickleby (play) 47, 55Monthly Magazine 25–6, 30Moore, Thomas 220Morning Advertiser 26Morning Chronicle 30, 210Morris, David 14Morris, William 190Morton, John Maddison 1, 8–9

Betsy Baker 170, 210Friend Waggles 7The Little Savage 8–9

Morton, ThomasA Roland for an Oliver 102,

212, 219Moxon, Edward 62, 86, 88,

175–6, 192Mulready, William 175



Index 245

Murray, Alexander 196Murray, William Henry 149Musical Gazette 115

Nathan’s costume house 125National Standard 13–17, 32,

112–13, 118Neville, Henry 61, 170, 177, 205, 223New Holborn Theatre Royal 60New Quarterly Magazine 19New Strand Theatre 7, 55, 205, 219New York Times 177, 199, 226Norfolk Street (Dickens’ resi-

dence) 29, 212

O’Callaghan, P.P.The Married Bachelor; or, Master and

Man 39Olympic Theatre 1, 7, 11–14, 28, 33,

44–5, 93, 112, 125, 129–30, 151, 153, 155, 171, 177, 198, 222

Opera Comique 199Orchestra 141, 145Osbaldiston, David Webster 64, 67

Pall Mall Gazette 14, 200pantomime 7, 28, 94, 101, 104, 115,

121Parker, Louis Napoleon 205Parry, John

The Sham Prince 99Parry, John Orlando 35, 39, 99,

218–19Parry, Tom

The First Night 7Paul, Howard

Locked Out 189Peake, Richard Brinsley

Amateurs and Actors 39The Climbing Boy; or, The Little

Sweep 91Perrot, Jules 6Perry, John 30Perry, Kate 114Pettitt, Henry 205Phelps, Samuel 75, 78, 84, 115, 216Phillips, Watts 61, 130

Barnaby Rudge (with George Vining) 130

Camilla’s Husband 60–1The Dead Heart 95–7, 217The Pic-Nic Papers 45

Pinero, Arthur Wing 1, 59, 163, 166, 170–1, 190, 198–9, 205

Daisy’s Escape 189The Magistrate 171Mayfair 171The Second Mrs. Tanqueray 166The Squire 197

Planché, James Robinson 28, 44, 59

Charles the Twelfth 44Riquet with the Tuft (with Charles

Dance) 12Secret Service 7

plays, with author unidentified or uncertain,

Artaxerxes 35Camille (La Dame Aux

Camélias) 170Der Freischütz; or, Zamiel,

the Spirit of the Forest and the Seventh Bullet 50

The Gipsy’s Prophecy 30The Happy Village 208Harmony Hall 35Jeames, the Railway Footman of

Berkeley Square 92–3King Rene’s Daughter 7Little Red Riding Hood 118The London Lady 216Love in the Highlands 6The Miniature 35Nature and Philosophy 179, 228No 7Robin Hood 119The Scapegoat 216The Tobacconist 45

Pocahontas 120, 122Poole, John

Deaf as a Post 38, 102, 219Delicate Attentions 36

Praed, Winthrop Mackworth 178Prince of Wales’s Theatre 31–2, 153,

161, 163Princess’s Theatre 92–3, 119, 130,

170, 189, 217, 218



246 Index

Procter, Adelaide 192Procter, Bryan Waller (‘Barry

Cornwall’) 86, 192‘The Falcon’ 192–3Mirandola 86

Procter, Mrs. Bryan Waller (Anne Skepper) 107, 114

Public Advertiser 116Pugni, Cesare 6

La Esmeralda 6Punch 4, 92–3Pyne, Louisa 118

Queen’s Theatre 31(see also Tottenham-street Theatre)

Rae, Charles MarshamA Fair Encounter 189

Raleigh, Cecil 205Reade, Charles

The Courier of Lyons 95–6Dora 177, 187, 198, 200Drink (L’Assommoir) 189

Reeve, Wybert 161Reeves, Sims 178Rich, John 118–22Richardson, Samuel 116Robertson, Thomas William 20, 31,

153, 198, 206Caste 153–4Dreams 177School 32Society 20

Robins, Elizabeth 1Robson, Frederick 112–13Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 81, 175, 195Rossini, Gioachino 6Rowe, Nicholas

Jane Shore 77Royal English Opera Company 118Royal General Theatrical Fund 32,

114–15, 117Royal Literary Fund 79

Sadler’s Wells 45, 214, 216St. George, Julia 94St. James’s Theatre 1, 12, 29–30,

33–7, 41–4, 46–7, 56, 59, 99, 113, 171, 189–91, 197, 199, 204, 219

Sandys, Frederick 195Sardou, Victorien 171Saturday Review 196Savoy Theatre 170–1, 189Schroeder-Devrient, Wilhelmine

14, 111Scott, Walter 149–50Scott, William Bell 65–6Scribe, Eugène 149Shakespeare, William 1, 5,

19, 45, 52–3, 56–8, 78, 86, 102, 107, 119–20, 128, 172–4, 179, 181–3, 185, 197, 203, 216

Antony and Cleopatra 196As You Like It 77Cymbeline 77Hamlet 53, 55, 58, 77, 100–1, 119Henry V 107King Henry VIII (with John

Fletcher) 64, 107, 173, 179, 181, 183

King John 76–7, 173King Lear 201–3Macbeth 56, 64, 68, 70, 77–8, 107,

118–19The Merchant of Venice 110–11,

119, 189The Merry Wives of Windsor

102, 107Much Ado about Nothing 78, 119,

189Othello 56, 77–8, 195Romeo and Juliet 49, 52, 56, 78,

80–2, 172, 201, 212The Winter’s Tale 217

Shaw, George Bernard 1, 185, 199Sheerness Theatre 11, 49Sheil, Richard Lalor 39, 211Shelley, Mary 57–8Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 1

The Duenna 39, 211The Rivals 107, 128, 170

Simpson, John Palgrave 205A Scrap of Paper 205

Sims, George 198, 205Smith, William Henry 137Smyth-Pigott, Edward 191Social Democratic Federation 198



Index 247

Solomon, Edward 205Spectator 186Spicer, Henry

Cousin Cherry 179Stanfield, Clarkson Frederick 175Sterne, Laurence 53Stevenson, Robert Louis 2

Admiral Guinea 2Beau Austin 2Deacon Brodie 2

Stirling, Edward 50, 55, 218Nicholas Nickleby (play) 50, 55The Railway King 93

Stoker, Bram 187Stone, Marcus 191Strand Theatre (see New Strand

Theatre)Sullivan, Arthur 198

(see also Gilbert, William Schwenck and Tennyson, Alfred Lord)

Sullivan, Barry 83The Sun 26

Surrey Theatre 78, 177

tableau 61, 96–8, 100, 105, 109, 136, 159, 177, 185, 188, 196

Taglioni, Marie Paul 6, 14Taglioni, Paul 6

Les Metamorphoses (ballet) 6Talfourd, Francis

King Thrushbeard, The Little Pet and the Great Passion 94

Talfourd, Thomas Noon 47, 55, 58, 62, 79, 86

Ion 64, 68–70Tavistock House 49, 103, 125,

129–30Taylor, Henry

Philip van Artevelde 62Taylor, Tom 1, 59, 153, 177, 179–83,

190, 206, 218Anne Boleyn 180Historical Dramas 180Our American Cousin 228Still Waters Run Deep 190A Tale of Two Cities (play) 95–8The Ticket-of-Leave Man 153‘Twixt Axe and Crown 179–83,

203–4, 206

Tegg, Thomas 55Temple Bar 165Templeman Library, Kent

University 6Tenniel, John 192Tennyson, Alfred Lord 9, 20, 59, 62,

74, 81, 170, 172–206Becket 172–3, 186–9, 195, 204Becket, a Tragedy 188–9‘The Charge of the Light

Brigade’ 177The Cup 133, 177, 185, 186–7,

189, 193–7, 199, 204‘Dora’ 177, 198, 200Enoch Arden 176–8, 192The Falcon 86, 176–7, 185,

186–7, 189–97, 199, 204The Foresters 172–3, 187, 189, 198,

204The Foresters: Robin Hood and Maid

Marian 187Harold 172–3, 177, 186–8Idylls of the King 175–7, 196–7‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’ 177Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,

Etc,. 186Locksley Hall 1886 and The Promise

of May 201Maud 175, 178‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of

Wellington’ 175‘Ode Sung at the Opening of the

International Exhibition’ 175, 178

The Princess 176The Promise of May 170, 176–7,

186–7, 197–204Queen Mary 9, 167, 172–4, 177,

178–87, 190, 193, 195, 199, 201–6

‘The Sisters’ 198, 200–1Tiresias and Other Poems 187The Window; or, The Songs

of the Wrens (with Arthur Sullivan) 198

Works by Alfred Tennyson (Macmillan) 186–7

Tennyson, Frederick 174Tennyson, Hallam 190–2



248 Index

Tenterden, Lord (John Henry Abbott, 2nd Baron) 115

Ternan, Ellen 56, 94Terriss, William 205Terry, Ellen 171, 189, 195–6Terry, Daniel

Guy Mannering 31Terry, Kate 95, 177Thackeray, Isabella (Shawe) 120Thackeray, William

Makepeace 13–19, 91–3, 105–23, 199

The Adventures of Philip 13–14Britannia Protecting the Drama

(drawing) 19The Diary of C. Jeames de la

Pluche 92–3, 113English Humorists of the Eighteenth

Century 119Flore et Zephyr 18–19Lovel the Widower 2The National Drama; or, The

Histrionic War of the Majors and Minors 17

The Newcomes 112–13Pendennis 105, 108, 113Vanity Fair 55, 105–13The Virginians 3, 105, 108, 112–23The Wolves and the Lamb 2, 112–15(see also National Standard)

Theatre Licensing Act (1737) 1, 30Theatre Royal Birmingham 102Theatres Act (1843) 56, 67, 75, 85theatre ticket prices 63, 214Theatrical Journal 107–8Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of

the Play 66–8, 210The Times 6, 8, 30–1, 34–6, 55, 75,

78–9, 81, 99, 102, 115, 118, 145, 152, 159–60, 175–6, 178, 186, 188, 189, 199, 206

Torr, A.C. 205Tottenham-Street Theatre 17, 28–33,

45, 49–50, 55, 219Townley, James

High Life Below Stairs 102, 219Tree, Anne 30Tree, Herbert Beerbohm

Hypatia 189

Trollope, Anthony 13Did He Steal It? (play) 2The Noble Jilt (play) 2

True Sun 30Tylor, Edward 202

Vanbrugh, Violet 187Vandenhoff, John 64, 68, 84Vaudeville Theatre 170, 205Verdi, Giuseppi 6Vernon, Webster H. 20Vertpré, Madame Jenny 35, 219Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth

(Madame) 11–13, 30, 44, 77Vicar of Wakefi eld (Goldsmith) 171Victoria, Queen 11–13, 20, 188, 221Vincent, W.T. 205Vining, George 130Vining, William 30

Wallace, William VincentMaritana 118

Wallack, James William 115Wallack, Lester 223Wallack’s Theatre, New York 218Ward, Wilfred 173Waylett, Harriet 30–1Webster, Benjamin 4, 56, 67, 115,

139, 218Mrs. Sarah Gamp’s Tea and

Turnout 56Webster’s National Drama 59Webster, John 86

The White Devil 216West London Theatre (see Tottenham-

street Theatre)Wheatley, Charles 223Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 183Wigan, Alfred 112, 134Wild, George 32Wilde, Oscar 1, 170, 185, 199,

201, 205Lady Windermere’s Fan 166,

190, 205Vera; or, The Nihilists 198A Woman of No Importance 199

William IV, King 33–4Williams, Thomas J.

My Turn Next! 60



Index 249

Wills, William GormanCharles I 179Jane Eyre (play) 199Olivia 171

Wills, William Henry 126, 129

Windsor Castle theatricals 13Woffington, Margaret 121

Women’s Liberal Federation 198Woolgar, Sarah Jane (Mrs. Alfred

Mellon) 139Wright, Edward R. 56

Yates, Edmund 116–17, 220Yates, Frederick 220Yeats, William Butler 1



Documents

Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson