Amateur Theatricals

Charles Dickens’s involvement with amateur theatricals might seem, at first glance, to be rife with paradox. After considering (but ultimately not pursuing) a professional career on the stage when he was twenty, he carefully preserved his status as an amateur actor for the rest of his life, positioning his famous public readings as distinct from professional acting. Despite his enthusiastic management of theatricals in makeshift and public venues throughout his life, Dickens offers nothing but caricatures of bad amateurs in his fiction, as ‘Mrs Joseph Porter’ (1834) and ‘Private Theatres’ (1836) from Sketches by Boz (1833–6) and Mr Wopsle in Great Expectations (1860–1861) demonstrate. This chapter makes sense of these complications by introducing the concept of the deliberate amateur: a person who believes in the superiority of the amateur to the professional. Nuanced consideration of Dickens’s perspective on class and theatre helps us to understand his relationship to amateur theatricals and his impact on the perception of the practice in the Victorian period.