Dickens Novel Reading Victorian Popular Theatre Deborah… Hardcover 9780521640848

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular TheatreAuthor(s): Deborah Vlock\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521640848, 978-0521640848\nSynopsis\nDickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this 1998 study, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel-readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Di.