The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays

The Plays in this volume were all successful in their time. Edward Fitzball (1792-1873) was a prolific writer of melodramas, and The Inchcape Bell (1828) contains the Gothic and nautical elements then popular on the stage. Joseph Stirling Coyne (1803-68), who wrote Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell? (1846), was principally an author of farces, and the play is typical of the kind of farce with a humble domestic setting and characters to match, popular in the 1840s. George Henry Lewes (1817-78) wrote relatively few plays, but The Game of Speculation (1851) is a cutting comic satire upon greed and duplicity, softened by the usual Victorian sentimental ending. George Sims (1847-1922), the author of seventy plays, specialized, like Fitzball, in melodrama, but melodrama on a much larger social and urban scale. The Lights o' London (1881), which has never been printed, is the most famous of Sims's plays, with a stage history that stretched into the 1930s. The Middleman (1889), a play about capitalist exploitation and how the tables are turned, is a good example of the way in which the older melodrama became that staple of the late Victorian theatre, the 'drama'. Its author, Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929), soon came to be ranked with Pinero and other important dramatists of the 1890s.