Staging the Novel: The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Adaptation

This dissertation argues that the way Victorian novels were written and consumed was influenced by the production of stage dramatizations that accompanied the publication of nearly every major novel of the period. The theaters' transformation of novelistic material into performance, I argue, reveals a desire on the part of both novelists and novel-readers for embodied encounter that is provoked but not fulfilled by the novel as text. The authors I consider---Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon---viewed these dramatizations with a combination of curiosity and anxiety evoked by the theater's potential to extend the circulation of their works while making visible a segment of their otherwise faceless mass readership. By drawing out the novels' social relevance, encouraging audiences to make connections between works, and offering a physical incarnation of fictional characters, stage dramatizations made possible new interpretations of their sources and offered audiences a way to negotiate the relationship between the fictional world and their own.;This dissertation recovers a sense of the ubiquity of stage dramatizations in Victorian London and in doing so addresses a critical blind spot in recent accounts of the relationship between the novel and the theater. My study of the history of adaptation complicates the prevailing critical narrative that the rise of the novel involved a corollary fall of the drama. Instead, I argue that from its inception the novel developed along with a dramatic counterpart. Deposed by the novel, the theater is seen to retreat into an elusive theatricality operating throughout society or to become an abstract figure against which novelists defined their own generic claims. This dissertation argues that Victorian theater was neither abstract nor insignificant in the history of the novel. My analysis of specific performances restores an understanding of the tangible role theaters played in shaping the cultural dissemination of novels. Although these productions often failed to satisfy audiences' demands, Victorians retained an irrepressible desire to see favorite characters brought to life on stage. It was in the movement back and forth between text and performance that the Victorian novel achieved its full impact.