Dramatic Disappearances: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Staging of Theatrical Character

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Burridge Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Dramatic Adaptations ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

Finding themselves with more money and more time in which to spend it, the middle classes began in the 1860s to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, and to theater in particular. Recording and rendering visible this process of cultural change are the popular sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, and the numerous dramatic adaptations of her work. Braddon shares with Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott the distinction of being one of the novelists whose work was most frequently adapted for the stage. Unlike Dickens, however, she often responded favorably to the efforts of her adapters. This congenial relationship resulted, no doubt, from the three years she spent performing on the provincial stage in the late 1850s. Her continuing interest in the theater and theater people is reflected in their frequent appearance in her novels.

Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Specific Influence

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

The Promise of the Suburbs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Bilston
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Professional Work ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Beginnings

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life.

THE PERSONAL ACCOUNT BOOKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam McKinstry ◽  
Marie Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Accounting Education ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Financial Arrangements

This study examines the personal account books of Sir Walter Scott, the world-renowned Scottish author, a topic not explored before by Scott scholars or accounting historians. It sets the account books in the context of Scott's accounting education and experience, which took place at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, an 18th century movement which saw a great flowering of writings on accountancy in Scotland as well as considerable progress in the arts and sciences. The style, layout and content of the account books is also studied from the point of view of elucidating Scott's domestic financial arrangements and expenditure patterns. These are seen as confirming the insights of Vickery [1998], who posits a liberated role for women such as Mrs Scott in ‘genteel’ households, which Scott's undoubtedly was. The study also establishes that Scott's personal expenditures, and indeed his accounting practices, otherwise conformed to the general patriarchal pattern identified by Davidoff and Hall [1987]. The final part of the article uses what has been discovered about Scott's personal accounting to revisit the question of his financial imprudence (or otherwise) in business. It concludes that Scott's risk-taking in business was not unreasonable, and was informed by his bookkeeping knowledge and practices.

Aurora Floyd

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

abstract ‘With Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of ‘sensation novelists’. Aurora Floyd (1862–3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward’s introduction evaluates the novel’s leading place among ‘bigamy-novels’ and Braddon’s treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

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