Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular TheatreDickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this book, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction, and nonfiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Dickens' time: voices of noted actors and actresses and of popular theatrical characters. She uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and reconstructs the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received. |
Contents
performance and the English | 56 |
Patter and the politics of standard speech in Victorian | 93 |
Charles Mathews Charles Dickens and the comic female | 129 |
odd women | 159 |
Conclusion | 190 |
215 | |
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actors actresses acts assumptions audience Bleak House bourgeois century chapter characters Charles Dickens Charles Mathews Charlotte Brontë Clennam comic course criticism Crummles Cypher D. A. Miller described dialogue Dickensian discourse disruption dramatic voices eccentric eighteenth English example fact Felix Holt female fiction Flora Finching genre Henry Mayhew Hogarth Ibid idiom imaginary texts imagination interesting kind language linguistic literary Little Dorrit London Labour Macready madness meaning melodrama middle-class Miss moral narrative Nicholas Nickleby nineteenth nineteenth-century novelists odd women Old Maid opera performance play politics popular culture popular entertainments prose reading redundant women resonance rhythms Ruddigore scene semiotic sexual signifying slang social song sort speak speech spinster patter stage standard stereotypes stories street patter structures subversive suggests theatre of voices theatrical tion tropes truth typical University Press verbal Victorian literature Victorian novels Victorian popular Victorian readers Victorian theatre vocal widows woman words writing