British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick (review)

Brander Matthews called Eugène Scribe’s characters “silhouettes,” or mere “profiles,” an impression of nineteenth-century playwriting that the book under review in no way counters. The criterion here is instead action—not individuality or agency that accounts for that action—accumulating into a teleology of the emergent, articulate laboring classes. Focusing on the Georgian period, but drawing on prodigious learning about antecedents in English and German sources since the early modern period, Frederick Burwick filters the output of countless dramatists into a thematic taxonomy: the Industrial Revolution’s major endeavors of mining, cloth weaving, and ore smelting; machine-breakers who reacted to automation’s displacement of labor; and illegal and suppressed expressions of popular resistance to poverty, taxation, and labor organization (vagrancy, smuggling, poaching, and anti-unionization). Burwick establishes these as recurrent themes discernable through two important filters. Students of dramatic theory will not be surprised to find that historical and geographic distance repeatedly flummoxed censors, but not the general public. Additionally, because comedy stages conflict arising from the unsuitability of marriage matches and social contacts, Burwick finds no generic impediments to addressing targets of social reform via serious or light, earnest or satiric forms of dramatic writing. Provided that living persons were not recognizable—the counter-case elaborated on here is William Farren’s depiction of Prince Talleyrand in The Minister and the Mercer (1834), about the unemployment crisis in the textile industry—even insurrection could be thematically central.

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution draws extensively on a single secondary source for its understanding of the causes of laborers’ unrest: E. P. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class (1968). Additional debts to Michael Booth’s work on stage repertoire, Jane Moody’s study of London’s minor theatres, and Kate Newey’s essays on melodrama are marked. Burwick is to be commended for scouring provincial playbills for instances when London repertoire was produced in regional theatres, particularly in proximity to areas sensitive to agrarian or industrial issues, and for identifying work written expressly for a provincial theatre, such as The Man of Ross and Catherine of Audley, both produced at Ledbury (Herefordshire). Yet, there must be more to say about staging a charity benefit for the local workhouse (even in a town with ancient benevolent institutions), given the prevailing critique of the workhouse system. Readers get no hint of whether Ledbury’s poor relief differed from the pointless drudgery imposed on inmates of such institutions, the bitterness that arose from the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children, or the population’s dread of these human warehouses from which too few re-emerged. Such lack of follow-through is matched by a tendency toward the doctrinaire, pressing hard on definitive facts, such as “attention to the laboring class as the subject of dramatic representation began with George Lillo’s The London Merchant” in 1731 (6). Arguably, Gammer Gurton labored too, and the eponymous needle shows the value of this tool to seamstresses everywhere long before Thomas Saint fixed a needle into the first sewing machine in 1790.

Because Burwick’s objective is to reset our understanding of the theatre’s engagement with British domestic politics, a more capacious historiography could have transposed it from an assemblage of thematic plot summaries to more instances of specifically localized and nuanced readings of reception among particular audiences, signifying practices of interpretation, and functions within the entertainment system. This is squarely within the book’s remit to locate performance in place, time, and the multiplicity of social positions and political allegiances present in auditoria and the communities from which theatres drew. Despite the contributions the book makes to bringing forward many plays for systematic attention, analyses could have been more sophisticated had the author glanced at Heidi Holder’s work on East End and Jewish melodrama, Jim Davis’s research on comedic acting, and Jacky Bratton’s deft reading of playbills. Surprisingly, neither George Taylor’s book on British stagings of...