Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

Of all the fallen women on the Victorian stage, Nancy in adaptations of Dickens’ Oliver Twist is the lowest. Specifically deemed a ‘prostitute’ by the author, she is also the abused mistress of a thuggish burglar who murders her. In the innumerable dramatisations of the novel, Nancy might seem appealing as an opportunity for character acting, but presents a hurdle to actresses chary of risking their hard-won reputations. How could such a debased woman be made palatable to the admirers of respectable leading ladies? So an offstage marriage ceremony took place in which she became ‘Nancy Sykes’ (the name usually misspelt). This essay will examine how the interpretation of Nancy and her profession were ameliorated and bowdlerised to suit changes in social attitudes and how these alterations were accommodated in playwriting, staging, and publicity. It will place her within the dramatic conventions of melodrama's fallen woman, demonstrating where she fits on the scale of the courtesan and the ‘woman with a past’.

In this article the authors propose a new reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British circus history. The historical literature on British circus is patchy, surprisingly so since it is the country unequivocally recognised as the birthplace of the modern circus. Two seminal books, Hippisley Coxe's A Seat at the Circus (1951/1980) and Speaight's History of the Circus (1980) promulgate both an ideal of circus ‘purity’ and an anti-theatrical bias. In establishing circus as a discrete field of study, it is perhaps inevitable that what makes circus different from other theatrical activities is more attractive than what is similar. Coxe's statement that circus is an art of actuality, while theatre is an art of illusion, creates a neat distinction that distorts the evidence about the malleability and mutability of circus and its producers. Examining the contexts of its origins, mid-century programming, and venues for circus, the authors re-examine the history of the British circus.

Of Dickensian adaptations, Bratton observes, ‘no one feels excluded from having a go’ (2017, p. xiv). A humorous reference to films like The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), this comment is nevertheless striking, since it took until 2019 for disabled child performer Lenny Rush to portray Tiny Tim in a major UK screen production, having debuted in the role onstage at The Old Vic in 2017. Now productions regularly cast disabled children as Tim, this article situates the casting of disabled adult performer Zak Ford-Williams in Mark Gatiss’ ensemble-focussed adaptation, A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story (2021–22), alongside the approach to disability in Charles Webb's Old Scrooge (1844), to interrogate Tim's enduring representational symbolism since 1843. Combining theatre, performance, literary and disability studies with industrial and employment relations, its analysis examines how changing approaches to dramatisation, and to disability representation and casting, impact disabled performers’ ‘working realities’ (Dean, 2008, p. 8).

This article explores how Walter Crane and fellow Arts and Crafts artists turned to theatre as a space for artistic and ideological experimentation. Focusing on the 1899 masque Beauty's Awakening and Crane's costume designs for The Snowman, it examines how performance became a medium to stage allegories of craft, politics, and aesthetic renewal. Blurring boundaries between design and drama, these productions placed the artisan at the heart of the spectacle. Through archival research and printed material such as The Studio, the article traces the performances’ visual language and their printed afterlife.