Nation and Neighbourhood, Jews and Englishmen: Location and Theatrical Ideology in Victorian London

Abstract

Fascination with the representation of place, of location, is an obvious feature of nineteenth-century theatre, and one that requires contextualizing. Audiences of this era delighted not merely in spectacle but in a highly particular realization of their world on stage; their theatre displays a visceral sense of the domestic and the local. The beginnings of this trend are evident if we look to the enormous success of the dramatic adaptations of Pierce Egan’s Life in London, better known as Tom and Jerry, following its serial publication in 1820—1. Egan builds on works such as John Gay’s Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) and the anonymous Midnight Spy...or London from 10 in the Evening until 5 in the Morning, Exhibiting a Great Variety of Scenes of High Life and Low Life (1766), which provided surveys that organized city life. Life in London would inspire and inform the later urban dramas of the nineteenth century, plays that relied heavily on the mise-en-scène to define character and shape plot. Egan’s work had an enormous impact on the stage, setting off a vogue for a comprehensive urban realism that would endure through the century. By the end of 1821, several dramatic adaptations had appeared, the most notable being William Moncrieff’s at the Adelphi Theatre. Other versions were staged in London at Sadler’s Wells, Astley’s Amphitheatre, Covent Garden, the Olympic, the Royalty, and the Coburg. The characters’ travels take them to the Burlington Arcade, Tattersall’s, Almack’s Assembly Rooms, the Temple Bar by Moonlight, a Watch House, a ‘fashionable Hell’ (a gambling room in the West End), the ‘Back Slums of the Holy Land’ (lodgings in St Giles), a gin house in the East End, Fleet Prison, and a grand masquerade in Leicester Square.