Lewis Carroll, E. L. Blanchard and Frank W. Green

Abstract

Best known as the author of the Alice books, Lewis Carroll was an ardent theatre-goer throughout his adult life.¹ His extraordinary gifts — story-teller, mathematician, cleric, don and photographer — notwithstanding, Carroll’s theatrical tastes were fairly typical of his social class at the time and he readily embraced that quintessentially Victorian entertainment the pantomime, though with some clear boundaries, principally those of respectability and decency, which he would not overstep. This led him to virtually confine his attendance at pantomimes to those by E. L. Blanchard and Frank W. Green, whom he trusted to avoid coarseness and at least resist and moderate the intrusion of music hall elements. In Blanchard’s case his long association with Drury Lane entered a different phase under the management of Augustus Harris in the 1880s and Carroll ceased to attend. By then Blanchard’s association with the Adelphi Theatre had ended and Frank W. Green was dead at the age of forty-eight.² For these reasons Carroll’s pantomime-going was concentrated in a period of around a dozen years between 1874 and 1885, but brief though it was this might well be regarded as the golden age of pantomime for which happily Lewis Carroll can act as our guide.