Print and Performance in the 1820s
Improvisation, Speculation, Identity

Illuminates Britain's literary field during the 1820s as a decade of improvisation, speculation and rapid cultural change.

Angela Esterhammer (Author)

9781108493956, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2020

280 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

'Angela Esterhammer's latest monograph presents a vividly detailed, panoramic view of a decade that was long disregarded as a disappointing lull between the heights of Romanticism and Victoria's ascension … The study's greatest contribution to literary studies may be to foster many such additional readings with its fresh understanding of the 1820s as an exuberant era of risk-taking experimentation in performance and print. Reading it is an immersive experience that provides a clear and convincing take on a fascinating decade.' Sarah Zimmerman, The Wordsworth Circle

During the 1820s, British society saw transformations in technology, mobility, and consumerism that accelerated the spread of information. This timely study reveals how bestselling literature, popular theatre, and periodical journalism self-consciously experimented with new media. It presents an age preoccupied with improvisation and speculation – a mode of behaviour that dominated financial and literary markets, generating reflections on risk, agency, and the importance of public opinion. Print and Performance in the 1820s interprets a rich constellation of fictional texts and theatrical productions that gained popularity among middle-class metropolitan audiences through experiments with intersecting fantasy worlds and acutely described real worlds. Providing new contexts for figures such as Byron and Scott, and recovering the work of lesser-known contemporaries including Charles Mathews' character impersonations and the performances of celebrity improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, Angela Esterhammer explores the era's influential representations of the way identity is constructed, performed, and perceived.

List of illustrations
1. Introduction: being there, circa 1824
2. Periodical performances: Blackwood's, Knight's, and The Bachelor's Wife
3. Mediating improvisation and improvising mediation: Tommaso Sgricci and periodical culture
4. Personal identity, impersonation, and Charles Mathews: who is he when he's at home?
5. Theodore Hook's Sayings and Doings on the page and the stage: 'a curious matter of speculation'
6. Speculating on property: to and from the village with Galt, Mitford, and Scott
7. Scottish fictions of 1824: permutations of identity
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]