Dramatic Dickens

Front Matter....Pages i-xv
‘Before the Curtain’: Entrances to the Dickens Theatre....Pages 1-10
Performance, Roles, and the Nature of the Self in Dickens....Pages 11-26
Dickens’s Theatre of Self-Knowledge....Pages 27-44
Pecksniff and Pratfalls....Pages 45-51
The Initiation of David Copperfield the Younger: A Ritual Passage in Three Acts....Pages 52-67
Lady Dedlock Prostrate: Drama, Melodrama, and Expressionism in Dickens’s Floor Scenes....Pages 68-80
Dickens and Acting Women....Pages 81-86
‘The Mimic Life of the Theatre’: The 1838 Adaptation of Oliver Twist....Pages 87-95
Melodrama and the Working Class....Pages 96-109
Little Dorrit as ‘Poor Theatre’: Dickens through Grotowski....Pages 110-124
Action, Character, and Language: Dickens, His Contemporaries, and the Lure of the Stage....Pages 125-138
Thackeray and Dickens on the Boards....Pages 139-151
The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Charles Dickens and Dion Boucicault....Pages 152-167
Dickens and the Early Modern Theatre....Pages 168-183
Postscript: Theatricality and Dickens’s End Strategies....Pages 184-193
Back Matter....Pages 194-201