Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires
Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform

Examining activist performance techniques, this book shows how women and men could deeply influence public life in the nineteenth century.

Tracy C. Davis (Author)

9781009297530, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 June 2023

352 pages
23.7 x 16.1 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

'Tracy Davis' timely and urgent study of the history of liberal campaigning in the Nineteenth Century insists on returning the question of performance to the history of activism. Drawing on the performance frames of mises en scene, repertoire and dramaturgy, Davis's excellent book reveals the performance tactics that activists deployed to make their case. This is Performance Studies at its best, revealing the theatre as a vital resource for the campaigning tactics underpinning Victorian repertoires of protest and persuasion that are still being used by activists today.' Aoife Monks, Queen Mary University of London

This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods – including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations' insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what 'dramaturgy' can teach us about 'history'.

Introduction: History as Performance History
1. Forms and Increments of Performance
2. Change Making: Incrementalism
3. Bildung: Leveraging Critique to Propel the Precarious into Political Life
4. Combative Pens
5. Experiments in Becoming.

Subject Areas: Population & demography [JHBD], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Theatre studies [AN]