The Victorian Era

What Was Victorian Melodrama?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian melodrama was the dominant dramatic form of the early and mid-Victorian period, a development of the late-eighteenth-century French mélodrame that adapted the genre to the social anxieties, the stage machinery, and the audience of the new theatres of London and the provinces. It was characterised by sensational incident, simplified morality, scored music, and theatrical spectacle, and it shaped the Victorian stage from the 1830s to the 1870s, when it began to give way to the well-made play. The wider history of the Victorian stage is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama, and the context of the period is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

Origins

The melodrama was a Continental invention of the 1790s. The French mélodrame was developed by the playwrights René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, the author of Coelina, ou l’Enfant du mystère (1800), Le Souterrain, ou le Celte (1801), Tékéli, ou le Siège de Montgatz (1803), and Le Solitaire (1820); by the theatre of the Boulevard du Temple, the Boulevard du Crime, the Gaîté, the Ambigu-Comique, and the Porte-Saint-Martin; and by the German Schauerroman, the “shudder-novel” of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, the author of Sturm und Drang (1777), and of the Sturm und Drang dramatists. The English melodrama of the early nineteenth century was adapted from the French by the actor-playwrights Thomas Holcroft, the author of A Tale of Mystery (1802), the first English melodrama, and by the manager-playwrights of the minor theatres.

The Victorian melodrama was a development of these earlier forms, with the addition of contemporary settings, contemporary characters, contemporary themes, and a contemporary morality that the audiences of the new suburban and provincial theatres could recognise as their own. The principal Victorian melodramatists were Douglas Jerrold, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dion Boucicault, Tom Taylor, and Watts Phillips, and the form was carried by the principal actor-managers of the minor theatres, including Thomas Potter Cooke, the actor-manager of the Surrey Theatre, and Benjamin Webster, who managed the Haymarket and the Adelphi.

The Characteristics of the Melodrama

The Victorian melodrama was characterised by a number of distinctive features. The first was the use of stock characters: the virtuous heroine, the moustache-twirling villain, the faithful servant, the comic servant, the aged parent, the wise friend, the orphan, the waif, the foundling, the soldier, the sailor, the spy, and the traitor. The second was the use of stock situations: the rescue, the pursuit, the chase, the escape, the imprisonment, the release, the confession, the accusation, the trial, the conviction, the execution, the reprieve, the reconciliation, the reunion, the marriage, the death, the murder, the suicide, the accident, the illness, the inheritance, the lost will, the lost letter, the lost document, and the lost identity.

The third was the use of scored music, with the orchestra of the minor theatre accompanying the action, building to the climax of the piece, and providing the cues for the actors. The melodrama was originally a mélodrame, a drame with mélodie, a drama with music, and the music was an essential element of the form. The fourth was the use of stock settings, and the fifth was the use of stock scenery, with the painted flats, the painted wings, the painted backdrops, the practical traps, the flying machines, the cut-cloth houses, the gauzes, the transparencies, the limelights, the gas jets, the footlights, the wing-lights, and the border-lights of the minor theatre providing the spectacular effects that the form required.

The most famous single convention of the melodrama was the “scaffold scene”, in which the condemned hero, wrongly convicted, was saved at the last possible moment by the production of a reprieve, a pardon, or a piece of evidence, while the orchestra swelled to a climax. The scaffold scene was a fixture of the form from the 1820s to the 1890s.

The Major Melodramas of the Victorian Period

The principal melodramatists of the period were Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857), the author of Black-Ey’d Susan (1829), The Rent Day (1832), The Pride of the Market (1836), and Time Works Wonders (1845); Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), the author of The Duchess de la Vallière (1837), The Lady of Lyons (1838), Richelieu (1839), and Money (1840); Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), the author of London Assurance (1841), The Vampire (1852), The Corsican Brothers (1852), The Octoroon (1859), The Colleen Bawn (1860), The Lily of Killarney (1862), and Rip Van Winkle (1865); Tom Taylor (1817-1880), the author of Our American Cousin (1858), The Overland Mail (1860), The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), and The Fool’s Revenge (1869); and Watts Phillips (1825-1874), the author of The Dead Heart (1859), A Woman in Mauve (1864), and Lost in London (1867).

The leading actor-managers of the melodrama were Thomas Potter Cooke, the actor-manager of the Surrey Theatre, who played the principal villains of the 1830s and 1840s; Charles Kean, who managed the Princess’s Theatre from 1851 to 1859 and who mounted a series of carefully researched historical melodramas; and Samuel Phelps, who managed Sadler’s Wells from 1844 to 1862 and who preferred a Shakespearean repertoire but mounted melodramas in the off-season. The Victorian actor-managers of the late century, including Henry Irving at the Lyceum and Herbert Beerbohm Tree at Her Majesty’s, continued to mount melodramas in the spectacular mode, but the form was in decline, and the well-made play of Pinero, Jones, and Wilde was the dominant mode of the late-century stage. The history of the actor-manager is examined in Who was the most popular Victorian actor?.

The Melodrama and the Novel

The melodrama was the dramatic form of the nineteenth century’s social anxieties, and the form that gave the nineteenth-century novel much of its characteristic plotting. The seduced wife, the orphaned heir, the concealed identity, the slow revenge, the body under the floor, the forged will, the lost letter, the inheritance plot, the trial scene, the scaffold scene, the last-minute rescue, and the marriage plot were all conventions that the novel took from the melodrama, and the Victorian novel of the 1830s to the 1890s — from Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House to Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins’s The Woman in White, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles — is in large part melodrama in prose. The history of the novel of the period is examined in The Victorian Novel.

The Decline of the Melodrama

The melodrama began to give way to the well-made play in the 1870s, and by the 1890s the form had largely disappeared from the principal London and provincial stages. The reasons were the development of the realistic box set, which made the painted flat of the melodrama look absurd; the rise of the well-made play of T. W. Robertson, Tom Pinero, and Henry Arthur Jones; the professionalisation of the press, which made the broader effects of the melodrama look crude; and the rise of the New Drama, in the work of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Barrie, and George Bernard Shaw, which offered the audience a more demanding kind of theatrical experience. The form did not disappear altogether: the late-Victorian East End theatres, the touring companies, and the popular melodramas of the period continued to mount melodramas in the old form well into the twentieth century. The wider history of the late-Victorian stage is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama.