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Melodrama: Metropolis: Modernity Reid, Margaret. 2011. Melodrama: Metropolis: Modernity. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/6541/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] Melodrama: Metropolis: Modernity Margaret Patricia Reid Goldsmiths, University of London Submitted for the Degree of PhD 2011 1 The work presented in this thesis is the candidate’s own. Margaret Patricia Reid 2 Abstract The principal aim of this thesis is to extend current understandings of the dynamics of stage melodrama, as it was practised on the stages of the minor theatres in London during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, specifically by exploring the ways in which the genre represented, mediated, inflected, processed and systematised the experience of life in the new metropolis. A critical methodology has been employed in this study that is best described as hybrid, combining elements of cultural materialist analysis with a more performance-oriented mode of textual analysis. Where appropriate, reference is made to surviving publicity surrounding original productions such as playbills and reviews and, in order to locate the work within a concrete culture of production and consumption, to available data on the minor theatres in which it was performed. The theoretical underpinning of this study draws on a range of existing arguments surrounding the relationship between melodrama and modernity, but also on the work of urban theorists and cultural historians who have identified the metropolis as a significant catalyst in the formation of modernity. After outlining the conceptual framework and reviewing existing literature in the field, chapters continue with discussions of the emergence of proletarian protagonists in melodrama and their relationship with developing notions of metropolitan class consciousness; melodramatic representations of metropolitan space and the dynamics of movement through that space; nostalgic stagings of the rural past; melodrama’s relationship to Simmelian notions of metropolitan ‘mental life’; and the synergies between melodrama, the spectacular, and metropolitan culture. The overall aim is to add to current understanding of how melodrama interpreted the shifting physical forms and subjective and social experience of the early nineteenth-century city, but also how the city itself shaped, limited and enabled the forms of expression adopted by melodramatists. 3 Contents 1. Introduction: Melodrama, Modernity, Metropolis 5 2. Making Sense of Metropolitan Spaces 34 3. Re-Imagining Melodrama in Simmel’s Metropolis 58 4. Dark Utopia: Nostalgia in Village Melodrama 84 5. Enter the Proletariat 109 6. Accelerated Plotting and Happy Endings 134 7. Minor Characters and Metropolitan Agency 158 8. Visuality and Spectatorship in the Melodramatic Metropolis 179 9. Conclusion 201 Bibliography 213 4 1 Introduction Melodrama, Metropolis, Modernity The aim of this thesis is to consider the operations of a number of early Victorian melodramas by exploring the ways in which they mediated, reflected, processed and systematised the experience of life in the new metropolis. This connection between melodrama and the city is foregrounded throughout the study. The arguments here are underwritten by the assumption that melodrama, as a particular type of popular stage practice, and the metropolis, as a form of new social organisation, are of real and lasting cultural significance and deeply bound up with the processes of modernity. The performance culture of nineteenth-century London was extremely rich and diverse. As Tracy Davis and Peter Holland’s 2007 collection The Performing Century demonstrates, for example, a large number of forms, including burlesque, farce, circus, music hall, ballet, comic opera and circus, coexisted happily, or jostled for ascendancy at a wide range of performance venues across the city throughout the greater part of the century.1 Audiences were similarly large, diverse and fluid. Consequently, while conscious of the need to understand melodrama as one thread in a rich tapestry, this study does not attempt to capture theatre practice in the period in anything like its entirety, or even to capture melodrama across the range of its manifestations. The field of study is simply too large. Instead the more modest aim is to shed light on the ways in which a number of popular plays interpreted the shifting physical forms and the subjective and social experience of late Georgian and early Victorian London, roughly speaking between 1825 and 1850. The plays in question, which include John Baldwin Buckstone’s Luke the Labourer 1 Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland, eds., The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 5 (Adelphi 1826), Douglas Jerrold’s Martha Willis the Servant Maid (Pavilion 1831), John Thomas Haines Jonathan Bradford (Surrey 1832), Edward Lancaster’s Ruth, The Lass that Loved a Sailor (Royal Standard 1841), William Moncrieff’s The Scamps of London (Sadler’s Wells 1843) and Thomas Taylor’s The Bottle (City of London 1847), were originally produced at minor theatres and have been selected as part of a deliberate strategy to shift focus away from the patent houses, and largely away from the West End, in the hope of capturing a clearer sense of how melodrama engaged with metropolitan sensibilities and anxieties for the mass of the people of the city, especially the working poor and the artisan classes. While a number of theatres like the Adelphi, the Surrey, the Pavilion and the Britannia receive particular attention in this thesis, the growing importance and influence of the minors was increasingly apparent across London in this period. Their rising reputation and commercial appeal brought the iniquities of the Patent system increasingly under scrutiny and in certain quarters public opinion began to shift in their favour: We hope that the law respecting public amusements will soon be brought under the notice of the legislature. The attempt to crush the Minor Theatres will end, like most persecutions, in a Reformation. The merits of the question between the majors and the minors are easily understood. Take a practical view of it – go to the Adelphi, the Olympic – or, if you don’t dislike travelling the Surrey, and see clever pieces admirably acted in all their parts, nothing neglected, nothing slurred, and each performer seeming to feel an ambition to give the best effect to the character allotted to him, - go to Covent garden or Drury lane, - and go to sleep.2 As well as the theatres, the plays under discussion in this thesis have been chosen because of their relatively immediate socio-political relevance for metropolitan audiences of the period. They tend therefore not to feature the haunted castles, humble peasantry or roving banditry of foreign lands of Gothic and Romantic melodramas, and largely, but not exclusively, have contemporary settings. All were originally produced in London. Finally, although some mention is made of the Lord Chamberlain’s manuscript copies of individual plays, each play under discussion in this thesis exists elsewhere in print, and thus can be assumed to have some kind of afterlife in performance beyond the dates of original production. It is worth remembering, 2 Theatrical Examiner, ‘Majors and Minors’, The Examiner, 1 January 1832, p. 5. 6 after all, that countless plays of this period were never printed, and it seems safe to assume that those that were had some kind of particular resonance for audiences that made them popular, and therefore worth re-staging. All of the plays selected can be loosely labelled ‘domestic melodrama’, following the definition developed by Michael R. Booth in his 1965 study English Melodrama.3 In Booth’s definition the ‘domestic’ is a relatively broad term used to describe melodramas characterised both by native setting, and a focus on contemporary social problems. Such plays invariably focused on the trials and tribulations of the poor and dispossessed, and often on families torn apart by circumstances outside their control. Melodramas in this category shared a number of characteristic tropes and, as Marvin Carlson has observed, many had class conflict at their centre, played out: … in variations of the paradigmatic situation of a virtuous but poor young woman, loved by a virtuous but poor young man but pursued by a corrupt and ruthless aristocrat, landed gent, factory owner, etc. who uses his superior power, wealth and social position to advance his own suit.4 As a specific manifestation of melodramatic practice, the domestic rose to prominence in London theatres in the middle decades of the century at a time of rapid expansion in the city’s population and significant political and cultural upheaval. It is possible therefore to interpret domestic melodrama, as Martha Vicinus has argued, as: … the working out in popular culture of the conflict between the family and its values and the economic and social assault of industrialization …5 The speed of industrialisation described by Vicinus was accompanied, of course,
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