17 - Melodrama

Summary

For a century, melodrama was virtually ignored by literary criticism. What makes this silence particularly strange is that melodrama was the most popular kind of theatrical entertainment for much of the nineteenth century, and ‘more people went to the theatre during the nineteenth century than at any time in history’. Dickens was one of those people; indeed, he watched, wrote and acted in stage melodramas. In his journalism, popular drama was a recurrent concern and formed the centrepiece of his journalistic articulation of his social and cultural vision. His seminal two-part essay, ‘The Amusements of the People’, opens with the assertion that ‘nothing will ever root out from among the common people an innate love they have for dramatic entertainment’. Dickens sees popular drama as enabling cultural inclusion, and melodrama in particular as offering a common language through which all strata of society can communicate. As Dickens explains in the same essay, melodrama, like ‘the Italian Opera’, speaks through ‘conventional passion’: ‘So do extremes meet’, Dickens writes, ‘and so there is some hopeful congeniality between what will excite mr whelks, and what will rouse a Duchess’. In his novels, Dickens appropriates melodramatic aesthetics to facilitate cultural inclusivity.

Melodrama evolved with an uneducated audience in mind, thus offering Dickens an ideal aesthetic template through which to reach an audience often excluded from serious literature. The word itself, literally meaning ‘music-drama’ or ‘song-drama’, derives from Greek, but reached Britain by way of French.