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  • Chapter 6 - Theatre in the 1850s

  • Edited by Gail Marshall, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025, pp 136-157

  • Summary

    In ‘Theatre in the 1850s’, Kate Newey writes about the ‘mapping of London as an international entertainment centre’ and looks at the ways in which theatre began to create a new collective national identity, based in the act of spectatorship, and in what was seen on stage, even when that included the Irish Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of a French melodrama. Newey reminds us of the persistent popularity of melodrama, and of the use of the theatre as a site for discussion of contemporary events, and gives an extended reading of Charles Kean’s work with Boucicault on his drama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which went on to become one of the most popular plays of the century. The chapter also considers the links between the stage and realist and sensation fiction, the internalisation of British theatre culture, and how nineteenth-century theatre became part of an international, commercial, cultural matrix.