Dickensian Dramas, Volume 2 Plays from Charles Dickens

Dickens loved the stage--he enjoyed thousands of evenings in the theatre, and longed to write for it and to perform himself, an ambition he eventually satisfied by touring alone with his Readings. Victorian prejudice and his need to preserve his personal image kept him from openly becoming a stage professional earlier in his career, but all his work was informed by his dramatic imagination. He found ways of circumventing these taboos by seeking closer and closer contact over the staging of his work with dramatic writers, admired actors, and trusted theatre managements. In the later stages of his career these tacit collaborations continued (as with Celine Celeste's staging of A Tale of Two Cities), although the 1860s and, subsequent to Dickens's death, the 1870s also saw a number of more independent adaptations, often celebrated for the quality of acting they inspired. This book presents, for the first time, fully edited texts of some of these later plays, ranging from Dion Boucicault's Dot (a version of The Cricket on the Hearth) to J. P. Burnett's adaptation of Bleak House (entitled Jo), as well as Jingle, a one-act farce adapted from James Albery's dramatization of The Pickwick Papers.

Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.