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The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia, 1863–74

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Jim Davis
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Abstract

We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 28 , November 1991 , pp. 369 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes and References

1. The diaries of F. C. Wilton, which cover the years 1865–1875 of his time at the Britannia Theatre, are deposited in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (MS.1181). The best extant collection of Britannia playbills is to be found in the Hackney Archives Department, Rose Lipman Library; the Theatre Museum possesses a smaller number of bills, but fills some of the gaps in the Hackney Collection. A large collection of annotated prompt copies in manuscript of Britannia melodramas is to be found in the Frank Pettingell Collection in the Library of the University of Kent at Canterbury.

2. James, Louis, Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850: a Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England, (Oxford, 1963), p. 146–50.Google Scholar

3. Dalziel, Margaret, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: an Unexplored Tract of Literary History (London, 1957), p. 52Google Scholar, referring to a pamphlet written by Fanny Mayne entitled The Perilous Nature of the Penny Periodical Press.

4. Dalziel, op. cit., p. 22, cites Collins's, Wilkie evidence, published in Household Words, XVIII (21 08 1858), p. 221Google Scholar. Collins does not specify The London journal, but Dalziel assumes this must be the periodical to which he is referring.

5. Era, 14 September 1873.

6. Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, New Jersey, 1983), p. 121Google Scholar.

7. Era, 12 April 1863. For an account of how the Ghost worked, see Speaight, George, ‘Professor Pepper's Ghost’, Theatre Notebook, XLIII, 1 (1989), p. 16–24Google Scholar.

8. Unidentified clipping, 12 July 1864, Theatre Cuttings, British Library.

9. ‘East End Melodrama’, Theatre Survey, XVII, 1 (1976), p. 57–67.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Ibid., p. 65.

12. Sybil (London, 1845), Book II, Chapter 5.

13. A History of the London Stage (London, 1904), p. 379.

14. Unidentified clipping, 26 July 1863, Theatre Cuttings, British Library.

15. Such sentiments had been voiced thirty years before, in Jerrold's, DouglasThe Rent Day. Yet, in 1869Google Scholar, James Greenwood, in The Seven Curses of London (reprinted Oxford, 1981), p. 290–3, argues still that emigration is by far the best remedy for poverty.

16. Other plays in which this issue is raised include The Gorilla Hunt, Lashed to the Helm, and Left-Handed Liberty.

17. Hollingshead, John, Ragged London in 1861 (London, 1861), p. 67–84Google Scholar, confirms the poverty, shortage of employment, and low wages endemic to the area, which was in easy walking distance of the Britannia Theatre.

18. These lines are cut in the prompt copy, probably to shorten the play rather than because the sentiments seem excessive.

19. Thompson, E. P. and Yeo, Eileen, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50 (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 144Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., p. 177.

21. 22 March 1863. The Curtain Road was within walking distance of the Britannia Theatre. See also Shoreditch Observer, 6 February 1864, and Shoreditch Advertiser, 21 March 1863.

22. Quoted in Greenwood, James, The Seven Curses of London, p. 206Google Scholar. The comment was originally made in The Westminister Review, LIII (1850), p. 504.

23. Ellen's, problem is more than a mere plot device. According to The Westminster Review, LIII (1850), p. 475Google Scholar: ‘Most of the higher classes of brothels are supplied by means of regularly employed and highly paid procuresses, whose occupation it is to entice to their houses female servants and governesses applying in answer to advertisements, and young women – frequently young ladies – who come up to London for employment, and do not know where to fix their lodgings. Sometimes by cajolery, sometimes by force, sometimes by drugs, they are kept close prisoners till their ruin is effected; when they are handed over to the brothel keepers.…'

24. The Unknown Mayhew, p. 207.

25. For a fuller treatment of this topic, see Davis, Jim, ‘A Night in a Workhouse, or The Poor Laws as Sensation Drama’, Essays in Theatre, VII, No. 2 (05 1989), p. 111–26.Google Scholar

26. The Censorship of English Drama (Cambridge, 1980), p. 69.

27. The Wilds of London (London, 1874), p. 172.

28. F. C. Wilton, Diaries.

29. Playbill, Rose Lipman Library.

30. Ibid.

31. I am indebted to Tracy C. Davis and her searches of local census returns for this information.

32. ‘Two Views of a Cheap Theatre’, All the Year Round, 25 February 1860.

33. ‘The Audiences of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton’, Theatre Quarterly, IX, No. 34 (Summer 1979), p. 31.

34. Ibid., p. 31–9.

35. Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861, p. 67–97.