In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens ed. by Jacky Bratton, and: Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens ed. by Jim Davis
  • Joel J. Brattin
Jacky Bratton, ed., Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens. Vol. 1 Oxford: OUP, 2017. Pp. xxxv + 438.
Jim Davis, ed., Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens. Vol. 2 Oxford: OUP, 2017. Pp. xl + 323.

These two volumes reproduce 16 plays, each originally produced between 1837 and 1878, based on or inspired by Dickens’s fiction. A few of these Dickensian dramas are previously unpublished; most of the others are hard to find. The quality of the plays varies considerably; the historical or literary interest of them will depend largely on the reader’s own taste.

In her introduction to the first volume, Jacky Bratton directly acknowledges that “most twentieth-century critics” display “wincing distaste” for the “links between Dickens and the popular stage in his own lifetime” (xiv), and then goes on to advance her thesis for the importance of these plays. Essentially, she argues that Dickens was himself a dramatist – a particularly interesting claim, given that she excludes from consideration plays Dickens himself actually penned: The Strange Gentleman, The Village Coquettes, Is She His Wife?, The Lamplighter, and Mr. Nightingale’s Diary appear nowhere in these pages. Instead, Bratton argues that Dickens wrote for the stage indirectly; his fiction is “imbricated with performance” (xvi). Bratton sees the stage writers who adapted Dickens’s works as collaborators, because Dickens was not “willing openly to write his own plays” (xxxiii); he is thus a “dramatist at one remove” (xxi).

This position is interesting and argumentative, but not convincingly supported. Bratton’s colorful diction is sometimes amusing, but often unhelpful: rare words like “mediatized” (xiv) and “outwith” (xvi) ring of jargon, and she seems to have invented “heroicization” (xxv). There are also a few typographical eccentricities, including the misspelling of illustrator George Cruikshank’s last name; this error appears throughout the volume.

Bratton describes her textual policy only briefly and vaguely, stating that “The copy text preferred in most cases is the manuscript […] collated with printed early versions where they exist” (xxxv). Bratton admits to much regularization and standardization, though she says that the texts retain “some individual peculiarities” (xxxv); she provides no record of her textual [End Page 373] policies, or indeed of her emendations.

Sam Weller, or the Pickwickians, by W. T. Moncrieff, dates from 12 June 1837; though Bratton does not mention it, only the first 14 installments of Dickens’s novel had been published by this date, which accounts for Pickwick being imprisoned for debt in only the 17th of this adaptation’s 18 scenes. Moncrieff’s drama offers about 35 “Wellerisms,” several of them original, and includes many innovations in the plot: Jingle marries Mrs. Bardell, for example. Bratton would like to see Moncrieff as a collaborator with Dickens, but Dickens’s harsh words for Moncrieff’s work complicate this position. In her introduction to the volume, Bratton quotes nearly accurately Dickens’s [7 September 1837] letter to Forster: Dickens writes “if the Pickwick has been the means of putting a few shillings in the vermin-eaten pockets of so miserable a creature, and has saved him from [a] workhouse or a jail, let him empty out his little pot of filth and welcome” (xviii).

Nicholas Nickleby, by Edward Stirling, was produced after only eight installments of the novel were published. The play emphasizes Squeers (once identified as “Whackford”), Mantalini, Smike (once identified as “Tom Smike”), and Noggs. Mary Ann Keeley enacted the key role of Smike. The play provides a happy ending, with Nicholas rescuing Kate from the predatory advances of Mantalini, and Smike inheriting riches unscrupulously withheld from him by Ralph. Keeley recalled Dickens’s presence in rehearsal, objecting to Stirling’s addition of sentimental material about “little robins in the field”: Dickens purportedly said “D––mn the robins; cut them out” (p. xxiv). The “pretty harmless robins” appear in Bratton’s text (123), though they are not, evidently, in the manuscript (which is, presumably, her copy text). The text here includes weak punctuation and grammar, and many errors in diction and spelling: it’s difficult to determine...

pdf

Share