Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- 1 The life and times of Charles Dickens
- 2 From Sketches to Nickleby
- 3 The middle novels
- 4 Moments of decision in Bleak House
- 5 Novels of the 1850s
- 6 The late novels
- 7 Fictions of childhood
- 8 Fictions of the city
- 9 Gender, family, and domestic ideology
- 10 Dickens and language
- 11 Dickens and the form of the novel
- 12 Dickens and illustration
- 13 Dickens and theatre
- 14 Dickens and film
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- Series list
13 - Dickens and theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- 1 The life and times of Charles Dickens
- 2 From Sketches to Nickleby
- 3 The middle novels
- 4 Moments of decision in Bleak House
- 5 Novels of the 1850s
- 6 The late novels
- 7 Fictions of childhood
- 8 Fictions of the city
- 9 Gender, family, and domestic ideology
- 10 Dickens and language
- 11 Dickens and the form of the novel
- 12 Dickens and illustration
- 13 Dickens and theatre
- 14 Dickens and film
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- Series list
Summary
Dickens and theatre? It comes down to what you might mean by “and.” If you mean something like: could Dickens come into the theater as a participant, I'd say, certainly not. Oh yes, he tried. But early on he found he couln't. And thereafter he didn't.
That may seem surprising. Dickens is by every standard account the most theatrical of Victorian novelists. This Companion would be thought considerably less companionable if it lacked a chapter on Dickens and theatre (though perhaps not this chapter on Dickens and theatre). All his life Dickens paid fierce, unremitting attention to other people’s plays and to other people’s performances. What he saw he regularly purloined, and then transformed into fiction. He probably knew as much about the practical work of theaters as anyone working on a nineteenth-century stage. (Here I should point out that, following the practice in theatre studies, I am spelling as theatre anything like a playhouse, particularly a professional playhouse, and as theater, the practice or theory of performance.) Acting obsessed him. He supported actors experiencing financial hard times and even dreamed of the great actor Macready as his desirable double. His novels were quickly adapted to the stage, not just as they appeared, but, through the vagaries of serial publication, often even before they appeared (in book form).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens , pp. 189 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001