East End Melodrama

Both historically and critically, in one important area our view of Victorian drama and theatre closely parallels that of the Victorian theatre historian and critic. We tend to regard that history as fully expressed by the cumulative record of the middle-class West End theatre and the middle-class West End drama. Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the St. James's, the Haymarket, the Princess's, the Strand, the Lyceum—these are the theatres that always appear in our books and articles; and Taylor, Buckstone, Boucicault, Robertson, Maddison Morton, and Pinero the dramatists we always write about. The representative Victorian commentator upon the theatre, drama critic or historian, did the same. In 1866 Henry Morley stated categorically: “In our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the eight or nine theatres in or near the West end of London, of which I hold the performances to be worth serious attention.” And in Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, a selection of his dramatic criticism from 1851 to 1866, there is no evidence that Morley paid serious attention, or any attention at all, to theatres outside this magic circle.