Abstract
For men in the nineteenth century, work for money was usually a given; for women, work for money needed to be disguised as something else. Yet — perhaps because of this — women’s writing was often concerned with money, to the extent that Ellen Moers traces a tradition of ‘feminine realism’ in women novelists’ concern with the material facts of money, attributing their fascination with ‘the Reaľ to their denial of access to it.1 Although I argue that women routinely worked as playwrights, this was always done in an often painful dialectic with social and cultural proscriptions on their participation. In previous chapters, I have explored the consequences of casting women playwrights as exceptional, encouraging women playwrights only at moments of crisis in the theatre, but barring them from its permanent ranks, and requiring that they display a level of precocity and excellence to excuse their public prominence. In this chapter, I want to move from these rescuing angels to discuss the work of women who worked within the commercial theatre as it was constituted in various forms across the nineteenth century — that is, women playwrights who routinely worked for money, in theatres where the house takings were as important as aesthetic achievement or legitimacy.
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Notes
Outside my scope here is the movement of women into the early film industry in Britain. See my ‘Women, Theatre and Film: Finding a Screen of Her Own,’ in Sarah Street and Linda Fitzsimmons (eds), Moving Performance (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000).
John Russell Stephens, The Profession of the Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.
See Douglas Jerrold’s evidence in House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee appointed to Inquire into the Laws Affecting Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence, 1831–32, vii, Edward Fitzball’s Thirty-Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life (London: T. C Newby, 1859),
and G. H. Lewes’ novel, Ranthorpe (London: Chapman & Hall, 1847). Stephens, Profession of the Playwright, Chapter 2, ‘A Devil of a Trade,’ offers an overview.
Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present (London: Polity Press, 1989), 16.
Stephens discusses the ‘bohemianism’ of dramatic authorship and makes a survey of the professions from which (male) playwrights entered the theatre, and to which they usually needed to resort when faced with lack of success or meagre performance fees, Profession of the Playwright, 10, 13–19. See also John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995), for a quantitative analysis showing that of a sample of 878 Victorian novelists only just over 10 per cent of male writers did not have a prior or alternative activity, whereas only 10.3 per cent of women did, 163.
Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ The Historical Journal, 36: 2 (1993), 383–414, provides an overview of the scholarship and an argument for care in the use of these concepts.
Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, London Theatre-going, 1840–1890 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 167.
This is a brief summary of the situation up to the 1843 Theatres Regulation act; for more detailed discussions of the legal and economic issues around the regulation and development of theatre in London, see Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, particularly Chapter 1, ‘Monopoly and free trade,’ Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, and Dewey Ganzel, ‘Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Drama and Law in the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association (1961, Lxxvi). For overviews of the situation in the theatres to 1843 see Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
Watson Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (1906; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966),
and George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 1792–191: A Survey (1956; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
See Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce (com), Drama by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers (London: Mansell, 1992),
and David Mann and Susan Garland Mann with Camille Gamier, Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1660–1823 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) on the preponderance of women playwrights from theatrical families.
Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, argues that acting in America was also ‘a familial business,’ 12. For a preliminary discussion of historiographical implications of this pattern, see Tracy C. Davis, ‘Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History,’ in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (eds), Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 70–1.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12, her emphasis.
See Jim Davis, John Liston, Comedian (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1985), 59–60 for an account of the success of the 1825 season.
Maria Lovell, The Beginning and the End, a Domestic Drama in Four Acts (London: G. H. Davidson, [1855]), 4.
James Robinson Planché, Recollections and Reflections, A Professional Autobiography (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), Vol. 2, 20.
Frances Fleetwood, Conquest: The Story of a Theatre Family (London: W. H. Allen, 1953), 88, 104. Fleetwood lists the third generation of Conquests who were the main constituents of George Conquest’s company at the Surrey from 1881 until 1901, 171.
Mary Ebsworth, The Two Brothers of Pisa (Edinburgh: Joseph Ebsworth and S. G. Fairbrother, 1828), 6.
For a more detailed discussion of this play, see my ‘Women and the Theatre,’ in Joanne Shattock (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 198–9.
‘Theatricals. Royal Kent Theatre,’ Athenaeum, 27 September 1834, 716. For further information about this theatre, see Errol Sherson, London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (London: Bodley Head, 1925), 320.
Reprinted in Richard W. Schoch (ed.), Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 53–94.
For records of the plays’ performances, see Playbills and Programmes from London Theatres 1801–1900 in the Theatre Museum, London (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1983). See Frederick Wilton’s use of the plays to fill out the Britannia’s bills, Jim Davis (ed.), The Britannia Diaries; for the performance history of East Lynne, see Katherine Newey and Veronica Kelly (eds and intro.) Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (St Lucia, Qld: Australasian Drama Studies Association, 1994).
For an index of early film versions, see Denis Gifford, Books and Plays in Films, 1896–1915: Literary, Theatrical and Artistic Sources of the First Twenty Years of Motion Pictures (London and New York: Mansell, 1991). The most recent adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret, adapted by Douglas Hounam, was broadcast in the United Kingdom on ITV, 17 May 2000.
Robert Lee Wolff, ‘Devoted Disciple: The Letters of Mary Elizabeth Braddon to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1862–1873,’ Harvard Library Bulletin, XXII: 1 (January 1974), 12.
Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer, ed. and intro. Michael R. Booth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), 244.
See Lyn Pyketťs discussion of the class-based reception of The Doctor’s Wife, ‘Introduction,’ Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Oxford World’s Classics), xx–xxi.
Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 143.
Robert Lee Wolff, ‘Devoted Disciple: The Letters of Mary Elizabeth Braddon to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1862–1873,’ Harvard Library Bulletin, XXII: 1 (January, 1974), 15.
Anne Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 50–1.
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 276.
Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 64.
Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845–83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 195–6, Lilian Nayder, ‘Rebellious Sepoys and Bigamous Wives: The Indian Mutiny and Marriage Law Reform in Lady Audley’s Secret,’ in Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie (eds), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 32, and Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 80–81.
See also Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 123.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 53.
Lynne Hapgood, ‘Transforming the Victorian,’ in Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 23.
For a discussion of the theoretical foundations of the association of mass culture with women, see Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 47–53. For an account of the contemporary debates over the feminization of fin de siècle culture, see Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Chapter 7, ‘The New Woman, Modernism and Mass Culture.’
G. H. Lewes, ‘Shakespeare in France,’ Cornhill Magazine, 11 (1865), 35.
Henry Arthur Jones, The Renascence of the English Drama (London: Macmillan, 1895), vii.
See Regenia Gagnier on Arnold’s ‘aesthetic of evaluation,’ which, she argues, was ‘historically linked with the idea of national cultures and races,’ in ‘Productive Bodies, Pleasured Bodies: On Victorian Aesthetics,’ in Talia Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades (eds), Women and Pritish Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 273.
See also Thomas Postlewait, ‘From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama,’ in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (ed.), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (London: Macmillan, 1996), 50.
Clement Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and Today, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1899), Vol. 1, 471.
William Archer, The Old Drama and the New (London: William Heinemann, 1923), 338.
William Archer, English Dramatists of To-Day (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882), 7.
George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable and Co., 1948), Vol. 3, 58.
Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (1963; New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), 72.
See William B. Todd, ‘Dehan’s Dop Doctor: A Forgotten Bestseller,’ The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, VII: 3 (Summer 1963), 17–26.
For a brief discussion of the international dimension of the popular theatre, and a demonstration of the way mixed nationality could make women playwrights disappear, see my ‘When is an Australian Playwright Not an Australian Playwright? The Case of May Holt,’ in Susan Bradley Smith and Elizabeth Schafer (eds), Playing Australia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 93–107.
For further discussion of the transnational dimension of the popular entertainment industry at turn of the century, see Veronica Kelly, ‘Hybridity and Performance in Colonial Australian Theatre: The Currency Lass,’ in Helen Gilbert (ed.) (Post) Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Performance (Hebden Bridge: Dangaroo Press, 1999), 40–54.
Katharine Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players, 1911–1925 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 80.
Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago Press, 1981), 24–7.
See also Marysa Demoor on literary hostesses’ ‘At Homes’ as important links in female professional networks, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 27, and Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 146.
Johnston Forbes-Robertson, A Player Under Three Reigns (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925), 204–5. Mice and Men (London: Samuel French, 1903).
Kathy Mezei, ‘Contextualising Feminist Narratology,’ in Mezei (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1.
Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 14, 22. At the time of writing, membership of the Garrick Club is still open only to men.
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 66–70,
and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago Press, 1992), 50–2.
See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 7, Fraser, Green and Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical,
and Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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© 2005 Katherine Newey
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Newey, K. (2005). Money. In: Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554900_4
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