Fiction, Theatre, and Early Cinema

A chapter such as this can provide only a partial account of the web of connections among popular modes in the nineteenth century, and their subsequent remediation. I have focused here on some strands of this web – tales of the city, melodrama, sensation, and spectacle – at the expense of others that were equally significant: burlesque, slapstick, and other comic modes, minstrelsy, and empire narratives, to name only a few. It would also be possible to trace the way in which individual careers (e.g. those of William Le Queux, Elinor Glyn) straddle the late Victorian literary world and that of the cinema. Moreover, an account such as this foregrounds text (or play, or film), at the expense of performance. Victorian music hall, and in the U.S., vaudeville, provided alternative, working-class dominated public spheres n which evolved routines, characters, and physical styles that migrated to Hollywood through the careers of such figures as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. But I hope that even an account as partial as this suggests the high levels of continuity between nineteenth-century popular culture and that of the early twentieth century, while also signaling some of the breaks.