Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Dickens’ 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 study, 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 non-fiction 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.

• Sheds important new light on Dickens’ novels through the influence of Victorian popular theatre • Uncovers previously unknown sources for some of Dickens’ characters and plots • Explores huge range of fascinating theatrical and cultural material, much of it unpublished and previously unexamined by scholars

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Dickens and the ‘imaginary text’; 3. Theatrical attitudes: performance and the English imagination; 4. Patter and the politics of standard speech in Victorian England; 5. Charles Mathews, Charles Dickens, and the comic female voice; 6. Patter and the problem of redundancy: odd women and Little Dorrit; 7. Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.