Victorian Pantomime on Twentieth-century Film

Abstract

This essay should be read as one long footnote. In contrast to previous chapters in this volume which offer further insights into the methods and personalities and venues of Victorian pantomime, this chapter points neither to fresh understandings nor to re-interpretations. My colleagues’ valuable chapters necessarily draw directly on available, traditional, and orthodox means of research: libretti (i.e., the ‘books of songs and choruses’ for individual pantomimes sold in theatres as combination programmes and souvenirs), reviews, props, costumes, theatre records, architectural evidence, memoirs, anecdotes, audience data, and a miscellany of iconography. In contrast, this afterpiece turns in a different direction and, as its purpose, introduces hitherto unused, perhaps unexpected, research tools. Unapologetically, I point to archival materials¹ largely unknown to theatre historians and to the certainty of further discoveries to be made by exploring these very sources.