This innovative work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of nineteenth-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840, immediately prior to the deregulation of that city's theatres, to 1880, when the Metropolitan Board of Works assumed responsibility for their licensing. In a further attempt to manage their material, they concentrate chapter by chapter on seven representative theatres from four areas: the Surrey Theatre and the Royal Victoria to the south, the Whitechapel Pavilion and the Britannia Theatre to the east, Sadler's Wells and the Queen's (later the Prince of Wales's) to the north, and Drury Lane to the west. Davis and Emeljanow thoroughly examine the composition of these theatres' audiences, their behavior, and their attendance patterns by looking at topography, social demography, police reports, playbills, autobiographies and diaries, newspaper accounts, economic and social factors as seen in census returns, maps and transportation data, and the managerial policies of each theatre.

In the two centuries between the first performance of The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the outbreak of the First World War, the stage provided an accurate mirror of the changing mores of English society. "High comedy," Newell W. Sawyer writes, "views man as a social animal in the midst of his fellows, with customs, conventions, and traditions of his own devising, and prods him gently or mockingly, as he stands confounded by that which he has made." The comedy of manners became, from its prototype, a dramatic category reflecting the life, thought, and manners of upper-class society, faithful to its traditions and philosophy, and as such offers an ideal medium for such a study as Professor Sawyer has here undertaken. The result is a book that is at once entertaining and serious, a study of two centuries of the British stage,

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Excerpt from A Jubilee of Playgoing This little work, which was originally written for private circulation, has passed through two editions. At the wish of many who did not obtain copies I have issued a Third Edition, carefully revised and corrected, and written up to date. I have endeavoured as far as possible (almost entirely from memory) to enumerate the various performances I have seen during fifty years. There were but few theatres at the west end of London when I first began to visit them, so that the playgoer of that time had not the advantage of much variety, but this was counterbalanced by the fact that the casts of the pieces were much stronger, as all the good actors were associated together. This was especially the case at Drury Lane and Govent Garden Theatres. I venture to hope that the book may prove interesting to the public, or at least to the playgoing portion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.