Sarah Sophia Banks’s Private Theatricals: Ephemera, Sociability, and the Archiving of Fashionable Life

Collections of printed theatre-related ephemera—playbills, newspaper cuttings, tickets, and engravings—constitute a major source of information about the Georgian theatre. This article considers the importance of one such collection, held in the British Library and recently digitized, that documents the fashion for private theatricals in Britain and its empire during the Georgian period. The collector of this archive was Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), whose role in its making has been occluded. I explore Banks’s archiving of private theatricals in the context of her documentation of fashionable sociability as a whole. Banks’s archive reveals the imbrication of theatre, sociability, public and private spaces, and print media in the Georgian period.