The Plays of Charles Dickens

This groundbreaking book offers the first complete scholarly edition of Dickens's dramatic works. It challenges the previous neglect of these plays, recognising that his fascination with theatre, his playwrighting, and stage management of lavish amateur productions all had a formative impact on his professional identity and literary imagination. This pioneering critical edition of seven plays, single- and co-authored by Dickens, places his theatrical writing centre stage to encourage further critical work and interest in Dickens the dramatist and, perhaps, new productions of the plays.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction Suggested Further Reading The Plays The Strange Gentleman The Village Coquettes Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular The Lamplighter Mr Nightingale’s Diary The Frozen Deep No Thoroughfare Appendices I. O’Thello II. The Patrician’s Daughter (Prologue) III. The Elder Brother (Prologue) IV. Closing scene to Animal Magnetism V. The Lighthouse (Prologue) VI. The Housekeeper (Prologue) References

About the Author :
Joanna Hofer-Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the English and Comparative Literary Studies department at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include Dickens and Demolition (2018) and Sensation Drama, 1860—1880: An Anthology (2019, co-edited with Beth Palmer), as well as articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century drama and Dickens studies. Pete Orford is Course Director of the MA in Charles Dickens Studies at the University of Buckingham, and Academic Advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. His recent publications include The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens (2023) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (2018).

Review :
Dickens was one of the most theatrical of novelists, as the editors of this splendid edition make clear, and yet his plays have been relatively disregarded. With this publication we can now, at last, give full attention to Dickens the playwright, his scripts and their textual variants, accompanied by a fresh, incisive and substantial scholarly introduction and a selection of contemporary illustrations. The editors should be rewarded in their hopes that this publication will promote new efforts to stage productions of some of these zestful plays. Passionate and charismatic, Dickens was well suited to the nineteenth century theatre. A skilled actor and playwright, drama informed his work and steered his life choices. In this expertly annotated volume, Hofer-Robinson and Orford bring together Dickens’s dramas for the very first time, from his youthful comedies to his sensational collaborations with Wilkie Collins. This volume fills a huge gap in Dickens scholarship, simultaneously shedding light on him as both writer and performer. This expertly edited and handsomely produced volume, the first serious attempt to explore Dickens’s plays, allows us to understand the signal importance of theatre to his development as a novelist, and why these experiments (not always successful) in playwrighting were central to his emergence as a genius in prose.