Vernon, Sally. “Trouble Up at t’Mill: The Rise
and Decline of the Factory Play in the 1830s and 1840s,” Victorian Studies
Vol. XX, No. 2 (Winter 1977): 117-139.
Vernon declares that Kingsley found objectionable the popular dramatists
who catered to working class tastes and abhorred, as he reveals in Alton
Locke, such popular theaters as the Victoria Theatre. However,
many of these playwrights in their melodramas wrote about such working
class problems as poverty, social discord, industrial conflict, appalling
factory conditions, themes dealt with by Kingsley himself in his novels.
“The result during the 1830s and 1840s was a small but significant body
of plays dealing explicitly with factory conditions, and in some cases
delineating those conditions with a stark realism that compares well with
and complements the rather different approach of the industrial novelists
of the 1840s” (118).
Alton
Locke;
Social
and Political Views;
Factory
Play. |
