Changes in Writer Stratifications across Media in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the social and cultural stratifications of writers within and across media and the status of theatrical writing, which had been affected significantly by copyright laws. It finds that theatre’s status as a primarily adapting rather than original domain of writing had been indirectly determined by lax copyright laws, which led to producers favouring adaptations over original writing. The chapter further ponders adaptation’s effects on theatrical aesthetic theory, as well as the cultural and social position of the English theatre and the dramatic writer. Creating dialogues between prose writers and dramatic adapters such as Charles Dickens and William Thomas Moncrieff and studying other prose writers’ attempts to dramatise their own work, including Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, this chapter finds that the hierarchical values attached to different forms of writing and media were very much shaped by adaptation and in turn shaped attitudes towards adaptation and authorship. These dynamics only started to abate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when copyright laws governing adaptation tightened, resulting in more original theatrical writing and higher esteem for cross-media writing.

[I]t appears manifest that an Author at present is subjected to indefensible hardship and injustice.

—1832 Report by the Select Committee on the Dramatic Arts (5)

While public fascination with writers was considerable throughout the nineteenth century,¹ literary authorship was not officially recognised as a profession until the 1861 Census and, even then, authors were grouped with journalists, editors, artists, actors, and musicians, the number totalling 1673 individuals. By the 1880s, the number of self-declared authors had risen to 6111 (Salmon 2013, 6).² The status of writers, writing, and literary arts in the nineteenth century was the product of multiple factors, including copyright law, remuneration for writing, the class of consumers, and media theories. Adaptation also greatly influenced the status of authors and writing within and across media. For most of the nineteenth century, theatres were castigated for their recourse to adaptation, which was seen to lower theatrical writers and writing for a variety of reasons discussed in this chapter. However, by the 1890s, theatres were (dis-)playing high-quality, often original, writing; adaptation practices were more tightly regulated legally; the professional accreditation of playwrights was established and esteemed,³ resulting overall in an improved relationship between literary practitioners across media by comparison to earlier in the century. All of these developments were influential in shaping the profession of authorship and theatre as a writer’s medium.

Their lack of official recognition meant that earlier in the century, authors sought other ways to establish themselves professionally, including rivalries with other authors forged in debates over adaptations. As established in the previous chapter, novelist Charles Dickens and playwright William Thomas Moncrieff were not viewed with the same social, aesthetic, and economic regard. Their battle over authorship in adaptation indicated how the interplay of various cultural values—economics, reputation, the class of their audiences, and the media in which they wrote—competed complexly and variably to establish the authorship and social status of each. This chapter examines more widely how adaptation and authorship were inflected by each of these values.

The Profession of (Dramatic) Writing

Writing within and across media created formal, social, economic, aesthetic, and theoretical stratifications of prose and dramatic writing and writers. The economic remuneration, social standing, and attributed quality of literary work by which authors and writings were assessed were inextricably linked: for example, as detailed below, lower-class audiences who paid lower prices for their fiction and plays were often charged with having lower aesthetic tastes that limited the quality of writing that their authors were able or allowed to produce; concomitantly, the lesser-paid writers who wrote for lower-class audiences were often charged with being less talented, forced to write poorly because of the volume of writing that they had to produce to survive economically. Allardyce Nicoll points out that, between 1830 and 1860, when the theatre had a low social standing and was chiefly frequented by the lower classes, “little could be made by a practising playwright unless he were prepared to sacrifice all his literary ambitions and devote himself to hack-work” (1949, 6).

Often this “hack-work” took the form of adaptation, which was furthermore charged with having low aesthetic value because it lacked the Romantic originality deemed essential for good writing in this period. Original writing, it was claimed by middle-class authors, was naturally preferred by the middle classes, while the lower orders, they argued, preferred adaptations. The fact that adaptations of English prose fiction in theatres were more prominently targeted as theft than the covert pilfering of French plays, and that adapter-dramatists of English fiction were being impeached and charged with criminal behaviour by the courts, press and novelists, confirms that adaptation itself exacerbated the general low status of theatre during this time. Joining the criminalising rhetoric applied to adaptation as theft that we saw in Chap. 2, a rhetoric that continues in this chapter, claims that adaptations lacked originality and were easy to write devalued adapters under a middle-class work ethic, triggering further debates about the relative moral and cultural value of prose and dramatic writers and writings.

However, when celebrated prose writers tried and failed to adapt their fiction to the stage or to write good quality original plays, this challenged assumptions about adaptations and media hierarchies based on originality and work ethics, bringing medium specificity theory to bear on discourses of adaptation. Even as adaptation was roundly attacked from the perspective of multiple cultural values, adapters found ways to defend themselves and their writings discursively.

Copyright law, as we have seen, affected the fortunes of writers across media. Chapter 2 documents how playwrights benefitted from the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833, which granted them greater ownership of their writing, and from new copyright laws that allowed them to freely adapt other texts to the stage without paying royalties or crediting sources. In 1832, a Select Committee spearheaded by Edward Bulwer Lytton was appointed to inquire into the Laws affecting Dramatic Literature, summing up its findings in a report that led to the 1833 Act but, more importantly for this study, illuminating a number of these issues. As Nicoll states, the status of dramatic writing was far from lucrative for most of the nineteenth century. In 1832, “A considerable decline, both in the Literature of the Stage, and the taste of the Public for Theatrical Performances” was “generally conceded” by the Select Committee (1836, 3). The report faulted “the uncertain administration of the Laws” and “the slender encouragement afforded to Literary Talent to devote its labours towards the Stage” (1836, 3), which the Committee argued had produced hardship and inequities for dramatic writers by comparison to other writing professions—hardship that lowered the quality of dramatic writing:

In regard to Dramatic Literature, it appears manifest that an Author at present is subjected to indefensible hardship and injustice [cited in the epigraph]; and the disparity of protection afforded to the labours of the Dramatic Writer, when compared even with that granted to Authors in any other branch of Letters, seems alone sufficient to divert the ambition of eminent and successful Writers from that department of intellectual exertion. (1836, 5)

The Committee hoped that changing copyright laws would improve these conditions:

Your Committee, therefore, earnestly recommend that the Author of a Play should possess the same legal rights, and enjoy the same legal protection, as the Author of any other literary production; and that his Performance should not be legally exhibited at any Theatre, Metropolitan or Provincial, without his express and formal consent. (1836, 5)

The Committee argued further that better pay would produce better writing:

In regard to Authors, it is probable that a greater variety of Theatres at which to present, or for which to adapt, their Plays, and a greater security in the profits derived from their success, will give new encouragement to their ambition, and, perhaps (if a play is never acted without producing some emolument to its Writer) may direct their attention to the more durable, as being also the more lucrative, classes of Dramatic Literature. (1836, 5–6)⁴

Seven years before his dispute with Dickens over adapting Nicholas Nickleby (see Chap. 2), Moncrieff testified before the Select Committee regarding the reputational and financial injustices suffered by dramatists in the 1830s:

As the drama is at present constituted, it is impossible for any man, whose misfortune may oblige him to resort to that species of writing, to obtain a fair remuneration for his labour and talent; the laxity that has crept into the different theatres in London renders it impossible, except by mere accident. A man may write a good piece and get well paid for it, but he must wait a long time. (1836, 176)

Moncrieff suggested that if the French law of remuneration for theatrical writing were to be adopted,⁵ “instead of being one of the poorest men,” he “should be one of the richest,” concurring with the Committee that, if the profession itself was more lucrative, more dramatic talent would emerge. Additionally, they agreed that the demand for adaptation, made lucrative through a lack of copyright protection for what was adapted, prevented originality and talent from emerging in dramatic writing.

Social, Cultural, and Economic Stratifications of Writers and Writing

The findings of the Select Committee paved the way for the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833. Although the rights given to dramatic authors placed them on an equal legal footing with any prose fiction writer (Nicoll 1949, 70), this did not, on its own, ensure a rise in status or remuneration for the playwright. There were other economic and social factors influencing the low standing of theatre in general, and of adaptation in particular.

In 1839, seven years after his deposition, locked in a battle of words with Dickens, Moncrieff acknowledged that he was at a disadvantage because of the differing cultural valuations of prose fiction and theatrical writing at the time. In his open letter addressed “To The Public” in June 1839 (also referred to in Chap. 2),⁶ Moncrieff reminded the public that he and Dickens were equal in terms of class—both were gentleman who wrote for a living:

I confess I write for my living, and it is no discredit to Mr. Dickens to say that those who know him best are aware he is as much indebted to his pen for the dinner of the day, as I can possibly be. (qtd. in Fitz-Gerald 1910, 125)

At the same time, he highlighted the marked class and economic differences between celebrated novelists and adapter-playwrights, hoping that Dickens would “indulge in a little more generosity of feeling towards his humbler brethren of the quill” in future (126). Yet his faux humility underscored the way in which one kind of writer sought to elevate himself by putting down another—in this case, by deprecating in his turn Dickens’s discursive depreciation of him on moral grounds:

I would beg to hint to Mr. Dickens that depreciating the talents of another is but a shallow and envious way of attempting to raise one’s own—that the calling the offending party a thief, sneering at his pecuniary circumstances, and indulging in empty boasts of tavern treats, are weapons of offence usually resorted to only by the very lowest order. (125)

If Dickens had criminalised Moncrieff’s writing as theft, Moncrieff retaliated by charging the very writing that criminalised him as immoral and low-class, implying that through his adversarial writing Dickens had devalued himself not only as a writer, but also as a gentleman. This debate, and many others, indicates for adaptation critics today the central role that adaptation played in the establishment and contestation of media and writer hierarchies in the nineteenth century.

The comparative lack of social and cultural esteem given to playwrights as opposed to novelists was closely linked to hierarchical ranking of the two media themselves. While it would be overly simplistic and inaccurate to argue that all fiction writers were ranked more highly than all playwrights, it was not until later in the century, as copyright laws offered more protection to writers, as the social status of theatregoers rose, and as the original writing deemed the hallmark of good art (by contrast to adaptation) was established in force in the theatre, that any playwright had any chance at being as highly regarded as a prose fiction author so famous and celebrated as Dickens.

One primary area in which media differences devalued the theatre lay in the fleeting nature of performed plays in comparison to printed prose fiction; concomitantly, public recognition of the stage adapter was brief in contrast to the prose writer whose work persisted and was often reissued in print. Moncrieff was keenly aware of this difference: “I can assure him I have never anticipated that any credit I might derive from dramatising ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ would more than endure beyond as many days” (125). Often, adapters were not credited at all: in 1837, Moncrieff was identified merely as “the author of ‘Tom & Jerry’” on a playbill for his dramatisation of The Pickwick Papers by Dickens. Despite “Tom & Jerry” also not being original work, but an adaptation of Pierce Egan’s journal Life in London, or Peake (1821), Moncrieff, though unnamed, is nevertheless acknowledged as the “author.”⁷ Yet in identifying him by the title of his former work, rather than by his own nominal title, the credit works more to favour the theatre than the author, informing audiences that, if they liked “Tom & Jerry,” they are likely to like this play.

The playbill for “Sam Weller! Or the Pickwickians,” performed at the Strand Theatre from July 1837 (Fig. 3.1), is an intriguing document informing relations between the prose writer and dramatic adapter, particularly in terms of the subsequent dispute between Dickens and Moncrieff. By all appearances, Moncrieff himself wrote a paragraph for the advertisement, explaining the circumstances of the adaptation and his situation as adapter, as well as his ability as a literary critic, his views of the hybridity of Dickens’s visual writing, and how medium specificity brought challenges to his own writing in adaptation:

The most graphic writer of any age or country, “Boz” presents to the dramatist both peculiar advantages & peculiar difficulties;—he is a painter in print, with all the finish, minuteness, and truth to nature, of the Dutch School;—in a sort of pen and ink actor, placin[g] vividly before us “in their form and habit, as they live” every character in life, from the highest to the lowest;—in short, for whim, and humour, and the power of delineating a character by a touch, he may truly be regarded as the verbal Cruikshank of the day.⁸ To meddle with so extraordinary a writer, therefore, is as dangerous as it is enticing […] and with these observations all parties concerned, throw themselves on the kindness of their best Patrons the Public! and if only in honor of their original, the popular favorite “Boz,” confidently anticipate a patient hearing and an impartial judgement. (“Playbill: Sam Weller,” Fig. 3.1; emphasis in original)

The unnamed adapter here pays homage to the pseudonymous Dickens, highlighting the peculiar appeal that he holds as a pictorial, visual writer not only for the public, but also for dramatists. He underscores not only the difficulty but also the danger of adapting such writing to the stage and, as much as he credits the original writer and appeals through him to the audience, Moncrieff ultimately declares a degree of independence from the author in rewriting his work for adaptation and defers to the public’s judgement, irrespective of Dickens’s opinion of his work. The critical acclaim of an adapted play was also less important than its appeal to the audience, whose presence was more directly instrumental to its economic success and the fortunes of the playwright than any kind of published criticism.

Fig. 3.1

“Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians” at the New Strand Theatre. Playbill 1837. Wikimedia Commons

However, the class of consumers determined the price of tickets and the profits that could be reaped by a play, which indirectly determined the class of writer and the critical value accorded the writing produced, regardless of which class he was born into and how much money he made. Katherine Newey argues that, “for all its reformist zeal, the 1832 Select Committee made recommendations that were based on a set of class assumptions [… emerging] from a largely middle-class point of view, which valued literariness […] and sought an improving and educational purpose for the theatre” (2010, 123).

Twenty-six years after the Select Committee Report, in “Dramatic Grub Street,” an essay published in Household Words on 6 March 1858,⁹ Wilkie Collins called for improvements in the class of theatre audiences to be brought about in part by the kinds of plays written for the theatre. Aesthetic improvements were inseparable from economics; concomitantly, changes in the class of audiences were figured as inseparable from aesthetics. Collins addressed the situation of dramatic writers and the state of English theatre through a fictional letter exchange between “Mr. Reader” and “Mr. Author,” in which he blamed the decline of English theatre on the poor pay of theatrical writers and that poor pay on the low incomes of theatre audiences, observing that, “while the remuneration for every other species of literature has enormously increased in the last hundred years, the remuneration for dramatic writing has steadily decreased” (1858, 267). Ultimately, Collins as “Reader” argued that a radical change of theatre practices was necessary to elevate the medium and make it appeal to a more elevated audience: that is, an audience that could pay more for tickets.

The poor financial remuneration of dramatists in the early and mid-nineteenth century was inextricably tied to the class of patrons and the price of tickets, whereas lucrative payment for prose fiction did not depend on higher prices but could be profitable by simply reaching far greater numbers than theatres through print circulation. So, “even the highest earnings of Victorian dramatists” paled against the financial incentives given to novelists, whose material conditions of writing and working were generally preferred to those of the dramatic writer, where “quantity rather than quality was necessary to maintain any sort of income level” (Booth 1991, 143). Collins even argued that, at “the present low rate of remuneration, a man of ability wastes his powers if he writes for the stage. There are men still in existence, who occasionally write for it, for the love and honour of their Art” (1858, 269). The crux of the matter, he asserted, was the need for “great dramatists” (266), who would not write great theatre without great economic rewards. Just as Moncrieff in the 1830s deferred to the judgement of the audience, so too Collins contended that change within the theatre was highly reliant on the audience and that only the public alone bring about the reforms needed (1858, 267).¹⁰ Writers themselves therefore actively promoted the idea that the opinion and judgement of the audience were paramount, regarding not only the reception of a play and its author, but also about what was written and how it was represented. Censors were also keenly concerned with the audience: here too, plays fared worse than novels, as the Lord Chamberlain’s Office granted greater freedom to novels than plays: “what is seen and heard on a public stage before a mixed audience must remain less explicit than what is read individually and in private” (Stephens 1980, 78).

The view that theatre audiences were comprised mainly of the lower classes has been widely questioned in later studies of the era: “the range of Victorian theatre was as wide as that of Victorian society, for it was the principal medium of entertainment available to literate and illiterate alike” (Jackson 1989, 9). Nevertheless, Collins’s view did express the opinion of his day, and he was part of a mid-century “drive towards respectability and status” designed to attract the “moneyed and educated classes” to the theatre (Booth 1975, 14). Richard Pearson proposes that Queen Victoria’s support of the theatricals not only created new enthusiasm for the theatre across the class divide, but that her patronage also marked a rise “in the status of the author, and the interest in writing for the theatre by authors such as Wilkie Collins, Thackeray, Trollope[,] and George Eliot” (2015, 13). Nicoll also credits technological changes with attracting a better class of audience, as well as a larger number of theatre-goers. Physical changes such as design and technical evolutions in lighting and staging heavily affected the appeal of theatre to audiences. Matinees and other changes to performance times added more theatre-goers. Developments in transport furthermore enabled audiences to travel more easily to city theatres (1949, 10).¹¹ In December 1888, The Saturday Review, stated: “the theatres today fill a more important place in the national life, at any rate in London, than ever […] There is no denying the fact that the stage has become more fashionable and more popular” (lxvi: 76).

From the 1880s, the establishment of longer runs for plays brought better financial remuneration to dramatists, as did the increasing substitution of royalties for outright purchases. All of these changes “came to guarantee to the author of a successful play an income which compared favourably with the remuneration received by a popular novelist or essayist” (Nicoll 1949, 69; 7). Rising income brought with it greater esteem for theatrical writers generally.

By the end of the century, the theatre was a thriving medium, attracting the best writers:

in every way now men of literary genius could be attracted to the theatre; they were tempted by the possibility of great material rewards and they knew that their work, if worthy, would no longer be forced to remain in guarded manuscript or, at best, be issued in cheap series of stage texts, but were likely to appear in dignified form apt to appeal to the ordinary reading public. (Nicoll 1949, 72)

Adaptations and the Problem of Originality

More central to this study than these general points about novels, theatre, class, and economics is the role that adaptations played in these debates. In his testimony before the Select Committee, Moncrieff had blamed the prevalence of theatrical adaptations on economics: “such is the spirit of parsimony among the managers, that sooner than pay an author for a piece, they will set Hamlet, and call it by some other name” (Select Committee 1836, 5). Adaptation, in spite of the labour and different kind of writing required to produce it, was perceived as unoriginal, and therefore aesthetically lacking under prevailing Romantic aesthetic theories.¹²

Richard Salmon discusses how the relationship between the “Romantic figure of creative genius” and that of “the worldly Victorian professional” posed difficulties for the writer, as the terms “genius” and “professional” were both antonym and synonym to one another (2013, 10). Theories of art that had persisted from the Romantic period were opposed to widespread nineteenth-century practices of adaptation, even as adaptations across multiple media platforms in all directions and combinations were in great popular demand—hence, dictated and determined by audiences (see Meisel 1983).

Collins also attacked adaptations in 1858. Denouncing the current rage for them, he lamented that original dramatic writing was not valued financially by theatre audiences or managers, and that it was therefore all but absent from the English stage. Collins offered a clear economic and class basis for his own and the larger cultural estimation of the insignificance of the dramatic writer in the theatre of this time: “[A] man of ability” is better rewarded with rattling off “Original Adaptation,” supplied by the “well-paid Frenchman,” than wasting “his powers if he writes for the stage” and “throwing away [his] talents if [he takes] the trouble to invent,” as the manager will “cast what garbage he pleases before” the audience, whose “unquestioning mouths” are “open, and snap at it” (1858, 269). Collins controversially suggested that “the theatre [in England] is the luxury of the illiterate classes—the house of call where the ignorance of the country assembles in high force, where the intelligence of the country is miserably represented by a minority that is not worth counting” (1858, 266). Consequently, he blamed the lower class, lower taste, and lower income of those frequenting the theatres in the middle of the century with the dearth of theatrical originality and quality, which he affirmed would appeal “naturally” to the educated middle classes, represented by “Mr. Reader.” Adaptation, then, kept the middle classes away from the theatre in Collins’s estimation.

By the 1880s, along with the rising fortunes of drama generally, adaptation was also viewed less disparagingly than it had been previously in the nineteenth century. Through new laws established by the Berne Convention in 1886, writers in most instances were being contracted to adapt legitimately, removing charges of criminality against them. Rather than adapting a piece of foreign work without intermediary assistance or acknowledgement, as had been the practice, writers were now hired directly and officially by theatres. A “certain amount of honesty” had now been forced into adaptation practices on an international level, as theatre managers and authors had to acquire the legal rights to adapt a work and did so as soon as a new work emerged on the international market. This resulted in pay becoming more stable for writers, as adaptations were now “commonly paid for by a fixed sum” (Dramatist 1888, 79). The consequences of this were not only more regulated and respectable practices of adaptation, but also greater diversity in the plays being produced.

However, even with theatre’s rising fortunes, the high value placed on originality remained problematic for theatrical adapters. A playwriting manual published in 1888, Playwriting: A Handbook for Would-Be Dramatic Authors, written by “A. Dramatist,” offers insights into the practical aspects of nineteenth century dramatic writing.¹³ A. Dramatist observed that, in the theatre world, there was prejudice against a new writer, simply for being “new,” whereas “a popular author is fought after like a pretty girl at a picnic, and can dictate his own terms” (1888, 67).¹⁴ Nicoll also states that commercial managers preferred plays “written by a limited number of already tried and recognised authors’ (1949, 58). In contrast, the attention given to new dramatists was negligible, leading to a connected devaluation of new and original writing for the stage. The conundrum for the emerging dramatist was the fact that his/her professional value as a writer was reduced by writing adaptations or formulaically repeating his/her own successful original plays with variations (a form of self-adaptation) and yet it was just this kind of adapted writing that was essential to gaining access to theatre managers and audiences.

Playwrights were also reluctant to present original work to managers in case their ideas were stolen and given to the stable of playwrights to write under their own name. An article written by William Allingham for The Athenaeum, published on 6 March 1886, reads:

The question, of some importance to the English Drama, is this, How shall a writer outside theatrical circles bring a play under the eyes of managers without the risk that, should it contain anything of value for stage purposes, this will be appropriated without the smallest acknowledgement. (qtd. in Nicoll 1949, 59)

Clearly, original work by dramatists was not rewarded and the lack of legal protection from uncredited adaptation of their own original work by others made original writing even less rewarding, as A. Dramatist confirmed:

[I]f you devote your time to writing a play or a book, the law washes its hands of you, and leaves you to the mercy of a bunch of ill-worded, involved, and not-to-be understood statutes, under which you can be robbed and swindled with impunity by every dirty blackguard who may be hanging on to the fringe of the theatrical profession. (1888, 85)¹⁵

Paradoxically, it was the lack of protection from unremunerated, uncredited adaptation or plagiarism by others that led so many not to risk new writing, but to adapt the writing of others instead.

While Nicoll, writing from an early twentieth-century perspective, faulted the materialism of the Victorian age for restricting the “scope of the playwright” (1949, vii), and for the consequent lack of high art in theatre, this is more a reflection of the modernist values that directed his thinking than of historical record: copyright law was more centrally to blame, as it favoured adaptation and adapting writers over original writers and writing economically. As a result, A. Dramatist warns his readers:

[Y]ou will come down to adapting very soon. You will start with the high resolve to uphold the dignity of your profession and your country, and scorn the idea of being the mere purveyor of other men’s thought. After a few years you will take kindly to Bowdlerising French indecencies, and cooking up German horse play, and terming the result your “new and original play.” (1888, 79; emphasis in original)

However, even as playwrights acknowledged the pragmatic necessity of adaptation, they continued to lay claim to the ideal of original writing, disguising adapted works as original writing to uphold the value of their writing and themselves as writers. Nevertheless, some dramatists managed to establish themselves as celebrated, original literary writers by the end of the century, including Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, John Galsworthy, and J.M. Barrie, who raised the reputation of the drama, and with it, that of the dramatist.¹⁶

Classifying the Adapter

Yet the notion that adaptation writing and writers were inevitably and always inferior to original writing and writers has been called into question. Andrew Maunder laments that the “picture of hack dramatists running amok has coloured perceptions of Victorian stage adaptations” (2013, 57), giving insufficient credit to their creativity in adaptation and to the ingenuity of the interconnections and exchanges that their writing forged between adapted and adapting works. For example, we saw in Chap. 2 that Moncrieff penned an original ending to Nicholas Nickleby, one that correctly guessed elements of Dickens’s intended ending, forcing him to change it—to adapt his original writing to an adaptation of it—and constructing Moncrieff as a semi-original writer. Beyond such piecemeal originality, Philip Cox has argued that “on the one hand the playwright is seen as having a secondary status to the original novelist, on the other he is capable of surpassing the narrative’s originator and achieving a significant work in his own right” (2000, 134). These notions are not new to the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. An anonymous periodical author, writing on “Originality” in 1869, citing Shakespeare as the epitome of a theatrical adapter, opines that “adapted plays may individually show originality now as truly (though no doubt in a different manner and degree) as the similar process showed it in Shakespeare’s time” (Every Saturday 1869, 365).

Additionally, reflecting on how literary criticism is tied to cultural status, Janice Norwood points out that “antipathy to ‘hack’ dramatists was stoked” by authors who were protecting their own interests (2015, 4). That Dickens, his contemporaries, biographers, and critics have influenced contemporary perception of Moncrieff’s status as a “hack” adapter is indisputable. Chapter 2 documents the violent verbal condemnation of adapters in public discourses, especially by those whose work they adapted (as in Dickens’s castigation of them as “thieves,” “pirates,” and “vermin”), a rhetoric continued by literati and champions of Dickens. More recently, critics have sought to provide a more balanced assessment and redress this neglect of dramatic adapters being “reduced to footnotes in literary history,” as Lissette Lopez Szwydky states. Szwydky, moreover, points out that dramatic adapters saw the practice of adaptation as a “reciprocal relationship that primarily benefited poets and novelists” and themselves as “positive, active contributors to the arts in general” (2020, 88). Norwood similarly argues that “it is a mistake to undervalue the work of adaptors and fail to recognise the significance of their contribution to theatrical practice,” as “much of the vitality of nineteenth-century drama can be attributed to the continual inventive re-imagining of plots, characters and motifs from fiction, poetry, the visual arts and music” (2015, 5).

Chapter 2 also demonstrated that the derided adapter himself sometimes wrote back to a derisive author, not only to defend himself, but also to challenge assumptions about hierarchies of writing, as Moncrieff did to Dickens. Besides castigating Dickens’s ethics in abusing a fellow gentleman and writer in less advantageous economic and professional circumstances, Moncrieff suggests that Dickens’s mistreatment of him as a writer derives from Dickens’s envy of Moncrieff’s authorial success in the theatre, in contrast to Dickens’s failed attempts at dramatic writing: “having himself unsuccessfully tried the drama, there is some excuse for Mr. Dickens’ petulance towards its professors” (qtd. in Fitz-Gerald 1910, 125; emphasis in original). Moncrieff thereby proposed that the profession of dramatic writing required an artistic talent that Dickens, the most celebrated prose writer of the day, did not possess. Moncrieff also stressed his medium-specific, original writing in the playbill to his 1837 adaptation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837):

[T]he absence of that continuity of plot so essential in a dramatic piece, has also been the subject of much embarrassment and had led the adapter to draw on his own resources very frequently, when he would more gladly have availed himself of the superior material of his master, but he had no alternative; his aim has been, by a necessary compression and condensation, to embrace all the leading and dramatic points of his prototype. (“Playbill” Strand Theatre)

Thus, while Moncrieff conceded his lower economic and cultural status, he laid claim to possessing writing ability that Dickens lacked, a subject that is pursued further in the second half of this chapter on discourses of medium-specific writing.

The hierarchies of writing in adaptation became blurred when the original writer and adapter were both prominent literary writers. In 1872, Charles Reade adapted Anthony Trollope’s novel, Ralph the Heir (1871), to the stage without authorisation, giving it the title Shilly-Shally. Although Reade intended to credit Trollope, he had not obtained his permission prior to adapting the work, claiming that Trollope’s absence from the country prevented him from doing so; he would not otherwise have “taken the liberty,” despite his actions being legally permissible (Lauriat 2009, 1–2). Trollope was nevertheless displeased. Unlike Moncrieff, however, Reade was not considered a “hack” writer and was an eminent literary figure as well as an authority on copyright law. Also unlike Moncrieff, Reade was also an accomplished novelist, and wrote easily across the two media.

What is particularly important for my argument about modes of elevating adaptation is that the ensuing, widely publicised dispute between Reade and Trollope introduced other means of elevating adaptation. In Trade Malice (1875), Reade justified his actions by stating that he had seen the novel’s nationalist potential and had decided to adapt it before anyone else did: there were “gems in [it] that ought not to be lost to the British Stage, so barren of English life, English characters, and English idioms” (26). Recalling Collins’s entreaty that the English stage needed to be revitalised, Reade championed the notion that he was preserving and presenting national culture to a new audience through his actions as adapter.

Dramatic Writing and Adapting across Media

Any assessment of adaptation in the nineteenth century needs to take into account that some writers, including Reade, were both original authors and adapters, and that some adapters were doubly respected because they were the successful adapters of their own work across media, holding twofold value as original authors and acclaimed adapters.

Like the fiction of Dickens and many others, Collins’s fiction had been adapted to the stage without authorisation by others numerous times; his attempts to diminish unauthorised adaptations of his work often, but not always, took the form of adapting his fiction himself, before anyone else had the opportunity. In her biography of Collins, Catherine Peters suggests that he “found the drama more exciting and more rewarding than novel-writing” (1991, 345). Andrew Maunder and Graham Law (2008) argue that, although the cynic’s view would be that Collins was simply money-spinning in producing adaptations of his novels, “allowing him to regurgitate old material for extra profit, while the complexities of the novels [we]re distorted by being squeezed into the straightjacket of melodrama,” they counter that Collins “was very conscious that he could not simply transfer dialogue from page to stage verbatim.” Therefore, rather than “destroy the texts,” he “re-fitted” and “re-visualized” them for the stage (2008, 120–1). While some novelists hastened to realise their work dramatically solely in order to safeguard it from adaptation by others, Collins engaged thoughtfully with his work, not only adapting his prose into dramatic form, but sometimes also rewriting the narrative, thereby demonstrating his awareness of the need to write differently for different media and audiences, by contrast to the “cut and paste” approach that was conventional among adapting dramatists (see Chap. 2).

In the case of his most popular novel, The Woman in White (1860), Collins realised that an adaptation to the stage of such a widely read novel also required changes to the plot in order to (re)create the sensational surprises of the original work. After serial publication of the prose fiction version finished in August 1860, the work was published as a three-volume novel in the same month, followed in November 1860 by the first of many unauthorised adaptations.¹⁷ Intriguingly, Collins did not attempt to adapt the novel himself until nearly eleven years after its publication, his version opening on 9 October 1871 at the Olympic Theatre.¹⁸ At this point, Collins was aware that theatre audiences were so familiar with the plot and its mysteries, both in the novel and on stage, that he entirely rewrote the narrative, receiving positive reviews for doing so. The Daily Telegraph hailed his success as an adapter, claiming that, “a more masterly instance of adaptation for the stage from a story has seldom been seen” (11 October 1871). More recently, Norwood has documented that Collins “deliberately avoided the obvious sensation scenes”; instead, as a dramatist, he surprised his audience by changing details and toying with their expectations, thus creating “intellectual titillation rather than [merely] stimulating physical excitement and suspense” (2007, 226). A Times reviewer went further to observe that the changes to the 1871 adaptation were made wisely to suit the conventions of the stage: “[Collins] has firmly grasped the rarely appreciated truth, that situations which appear dramatic to a reader, are not necessarily dramatic when brought to the ordeal of the footlights” (12 October 1871). In the playbill for The Woman in White, Collins himself stated that he “had endeavoured to produce a work which shall appeal to the audience purely on its own merits as a play” and had not “hesitated, while preserving the original story in substance, materially to alter it in form” (qtd. in Norwood 2007, 227). Collins’s appreciation for and understanding of medium specificity conventions were evident throughout his career, and he proved more versatile than Dickens in writing across media,¹⁹ writing critically acclaimed and best-selling plays and prose fiction, though he never achieved the fame or reputation of Dickens as a writer overall (and neither did anyone else).

Even so, Collins’s successful stage adaptation of The Woman in White, meant that he was able to set and control the terms for future dramatisations of his other work. This can be seen in the contractual demands that he placed upon Ava Cavendish, who starred in and produced his play, The New Magdalen,²⁰ at the Olympic in 1873:

No alterations of any sort are to be made in the dialogue without my permission. The play is to be produced under my directions. The cast of characters, the scenery, and the dresses are to satisfy me—or failing that I am to have the right of withdrawing the play. If the continuous run of the play is interrupted it is to be left to my discretion to resume the performance of it at the Olympic theatre or not. Proofs of the posters play bills and of all other advertisements are to be submitted to me—and I am to have the right of altering adding to or cutting out any words or expressions to which I may object. (qtd. in Peters 1991, 343; punctuation in original)

The agreement placed Collins in complete artistic and executive control over the adaptation; any changes, whether internal or external, had to be approved by himself and he had the right to cancel the production altogether if his wishes were not followed.²¹ As both the original and adapting writer, Collins was thus like the “pretty girl at the picnic,” able to use his literary status to gain more authority over the production.

Successful adaptation was also profitable. Collins’s adaptation of The Woman in White signalled the most successful stage of his career as a dramatist, according to Peters, who notes “that his lifelong obsession with theatre was finally paying off,” as he was making “real money” through a percentage of the profits rather than the usual flat fee, thus making £47.10 s in the first week and £59 in the second (1991, 333–4). Norwood argues that, since Collins was not able to gain dramatic copyright for the adaptation at this point, money would have been a major motivation for him to adapt his earlier work at this time.

Although Collins did not create all of his fiction with a view to adapting it to the stage, some of it was nonetheless written with dramatisation in mind. According to Peters, this strategy is evident in the 1871 novella Miss or Mrs?, although it was never adapted by Collins, and in the 1872 short novel, The New Magdalen, which he did dramatise and which ended up being one of his most successful plays. However, Peters argues that both prose works suffer from “literary economy” and that these two stories in particular seem “stagy, rather than dramatic” (1991, 337).²² The success of Collins’s works, both prose and drama, including his own adaptations, nevertheless demonstrate that he was adept at writing across media, adhering to the expectations of his time regarding different media, even if these do not reflect twenty-first-century views formed by modernist medium specificity theories, such as Peters’s.

However, Collins’s ability to write and adapt across media was not unilateral; in fact, writing across media made him particularly aware what fiction was suited to adaptation and what was not. This was not only a matter of form, as modernist medium specificity would have it, but also of content and cultural contexts, as seen with the adaptation of The Woman in White, where audience familiarity and expectations were as important as formal considerations. A letter to John Hollingshead dated February 1873, about an unauthorised dramatisation of his novel Poor Miss Finch (1872) indicates what fiction he considered to be ill suited to adaptation:

My “Poor Miss Finch” has been dramatized (without asking my permission) by some obscure idiot in the country.

I have been asked to dramatise it, and I have refused, because my experience in the matter tells me that the book is eminently unfit for stage performances. What I dare not to do with my own work, another man (unknown in literature) is perfectly free to do, against my will, and (if he can get his rubbish played) to the prejudice of my novel and my reputation. (in 2005b, 362; emphasis in original)

His reluctance to adapt all of his novels suggests that, rather than leaping on the nineteenth-century bandwagon, in which everything was fair game for adaptation, he entertained notions of medium specificity prominent in the late eighteenth century. Rather than imitate other art forms, each art should work within its own formal limitations and connected phenomenologies (as suggested by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön in 1766); this rationale would resurface in the early twentieth-century, where critics, such as Irving Babbitt in 1910, Béla Balázs in 1924 and 1930, and Rudolf Arnheim in 1932, among others, would develop Lessing’s work further in discussions of the arts, including film (see Chaps. 5 and 6).

Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, sister art theories were often preferred to metaphors of the arts as separate species.²³ Therefore, in spite of his sensitivity to medium specificity in adaptation, Collins affirmed his faith in the sister arts in the dedication to his 1852 novel Basil^24:

Believing that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction; that the one is a drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted; and that all the strong and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel-writer is privileged to excite also. (2008, 4)

Yet in spite of their sibling resemblances as drama, they take different forms: the novel is narrated whereas the play is acted. The key to adaptation from one to the other lay in the writing. Norwood argues that Collins’s rhetoric acknowledges the two art forms as equal; yet, writing in the twenty-first century, she cannot resist pulling away anachronistically from the very sister arts theory that Collins embraced to argue, somewhat condescendingly, that the play should not be likened to the novel, as twins are, but that, “it is more instructive to view it in its theatrical context, taking into account the circumstances of its performance. It should thus be recognised as a valid drama in its own right” (2007, 233). Like the hordes of future literary film adaptation scholars, who would insist that film adaptations be viewed as films “in their own right” (see, for example, Geoffrey Wagner 1975), Norwood misses an opportunity to understand how adaptations were theorised in the nineteenth century by those who wrote them and the role that writing played in adaptation from narration to performance.

Hybridity on Page and Stage

If Collins occasionally wrote with a possible eye to stage adaptations, as Peters suggests, making some of his prose fiction more “stagy” than narrated, some authors did so often, hoping to have their work adapted or intending to adapt their work themselves. In discussions of literary film adaptation, it is common to read that novelists write with an eye to the film rights. The same was true for nineteenth-century novelists with regards to adaptations for the stage. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was one author perceived by contemporary reviewers to write with the stage in mind. Jennifer Carnell cites the Athenaeum review of Eleanor’s Victory (1863b) as one of many assessing that Braddon’s novels appeared to have been written with adaptation in mind, in ways that made them “suitable for transfer”; however, this reviewer considered that such writing degraded her work:

Miss Braddon is throughout beset by the consciousness that her story must be adapted for theatrical purposes, and to her conviction of this necessity she has sacrificed all the higher qualities of a work of fiction. (qtd. in Carnell 2000, 195; emphasis in original)

This statement positions theatre unilaterally as a lower art form. The review charges that, by writing with an eye to adaptation, Braddon not only lowered the standard of her novel, but also herself as a writer of fiction. The critique here seems to be less about the superiority of medium specific writing, as it had been in the late eighteenth century and would be again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as about the class status of theatre mid-century.

Even so, in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Martin Meisel attests that the Victorians were keenly interested in mixed media and adaptation across media. Despite hierarchical boundaries between the arts, picture and drama affected both style and structure of the novel in the nineteenth century, with fiction increasingly turning to drama for both “manner and matter” (1983, 52; 64).²⁵ Building on Meisel’s study, we can argue that prose fiction and the profession of writing also adapted themselves to a more visually descriptive model of representation in nineteenth-century culture.²⁶

Braddon was prominently perceived to be an author who moved between media and integrated other media forms within a single medium: a former stage actress before becoming popular as a novelist, her prose fiction was not only adapted to the stage by others, but she herself also wrote original plays and, as we have seen, adapted novels and plays by others without authorisations or acknowledgement. Her experience and background with the stage had an influence on her prose writing and provided her with material for her novels, including Aurora Floyd (1863a) (Carnell 2000, 284; Holder 2000, 165).

Similarly, critics often claim that Dickens was “indebted” to the stage for his work.²⁷ For Dickens, writing and acting were intertwined in the composition of a novel as well as its adaptation to the stage. His preface to A Tale of Two Cities (1859) attests:

I first conceived the main idea for this story. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.

As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself. (1859 [1998], 397)

The passage makes clear that he envisioned his characters in performance before spectators and that he embodied them in performance before he wrote them down as prose narrative, allowing them to possess him, as much as he possessed them. This is an extreme claim not only to authorial ownership of his prose characters, but also to a pre-existent ownership of their embodied performance, which his own body has “verified” and authorised, before he wrote them in prose. Performance here comes first, and prose second. In this formulation, he sets himself not only before the adapters who rewrote his work for the stage, but also before the stage actors who performed his characters.

Dickens’s hybrid writing and performance persisted after he published his novels, as he rewrote and performed his fiction on a stage before an audience, thereby turning himself into a profitable adapter-performer of his fiction.²⁸ As Chap. 2 attests, when authorised and unauthorised adaptations threatened authorial reputations, authors resorted to other modes of adaptation to reinforce their authorial ownership publicly, as well as to benefit financially. When authors could not or were not allowed to write plays of their own works, they sometimes turned to giving staged public readings of them to assert authorial control over their performance. According to Amanda Adams, these performances were used as “tools of resistance,” where both the role of the “protected author” and “protected text” were intimately embodied in the performance (2011, 224). No one did so to greater effect than Dickens.

Adaptation produced hybrid writing that was perceived to be new: Dickens’s first readings prompted reviewers to credit him with inventing “a new medium for amusing an English audience,” such as the Illustrated London News, from 31 July 1858. Like contemporary reviewers, Adams suggests that Dickens invented a new genre of performance, in which performances struck “a delicate balance” between “theatre and authorial reading.”²⁹ Philip Collins, however, observes that Dickens was not the first “author-recitalist,” but concedes that his success with the readings, which uniquely combined “literary eminence” with “an accomplished stage presence” was unrivalled (1975, xlvi–liii).³⁰

Authors not only adapted their writings to public readings, but also their authorial personae. Discussing A Christmas Carol, Adams argues that his performance

tapped into the cultural approach to intellectual property that imagined the work as expressive of the inner life of the author, rather than as merely the product of the author’s labor. And yet while his method of dramatic reading performed a connection to [the] text, it also reminded audiences that the performer was an author and not an actor. (2016, 72–3)

The hybrid enabled Dickens to foreground his authorial identity so that it never disappeared into his characters or stories, but remained visible. It also enabled him to take the lion’s share of the profits. In “Grub Street,” Wilkie Collins suggests that the poor remuneration of dramatists was not due to a general lack of money in the theatres, but because they chose to distribute most of it to celebrated actors and actresses (1858, 263), a practice that persisted in early film and continues to the present day.³¹ Dickens circumvented this, starring as the author reading his own work.

The same performing body that represented the author was extended into a body performing many literary characters, thus creating a unique hybridity of author, text, and character, as well as of prose and theatre. Witnesses of his readings agreed that Dickens effectively embodied a variety of his characters: “the facility with which Mr. Dickens suited his voice to the various characters comprised in his selection was most striking. [The characters] were each admirably rendered, and gave increased effect to the wonderful descriptive power of the author” (Cheltenham Examiner, January 1862). Kate Field, in her eye-witness account of one Nickleby reading, was more critical of certain character portrayals, but stated nevertheless that the character of “Nicholas Nickleby might be done better on stage, but never is” (1871, 61–2; emphasis in original).³² Dickens’s performative command over his characters thus worked to assert authorial ownership over his characters, authorised in performance by his “own person,” in a performative literalisation of his preface to A Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens’s claim to adaptive as well as originating ownership of his work was reinforced by the material that he selected to perform, as the case of his Nicholas Nickleby readings demonstrates.³³ Having battled with Moncrieff over the adaptation of this novel to the stage, he used the readings to reassert his ownership of the work in performance. The Nickleby readings started in October 1861 and, unlike stage adaptations, which tended to repeat night after night, it appears that Dickens adapted each of the following 53 readings differently, either textually or performatively. Both short and long versions of Nickleby were used, depending on what other readings accompanied it.³⁴ Adams suggests that the many versions gave authorial exclusivity to the readings: since there was no single printed authoritative version of his readings and, as Dickens changed them from reading to reading, there never could be an authoritative version: “Only the author could decide, night by night, what the latest authentic version was to be” (2016, 67–8). These readings therefore allowed Dickens to reclaim and reassert ownership over his printed work through adaptation continuously, as he freely adapted his writing textually and performatively. However, the additional point to be made in the context of his authorial battles with Moncrieff is that Dickens was flaunting his versatility and inexhaustible facility in adaptation.

Visibility of Authorship

Adapting his own writings to and in performance by himself indubitably also enhanced Dickens’s literary reputation, as he displayed himself favourably before public audiences as an author and performer of his writings, whilst simultaneously visualising himself as an authorial persona above and beyond his textual identity and written words. Salmon discusses how the cultural visibility of authors within the public sphere during the nineteenth-century was being increasingly coded in visual and verbal media, which intensified authors’ “apprehension of exposure to market conditions” (2013, 17).³⁵ The increasing visibility of authors can also be traced back to their unprecedented exposure within the nineteenth-century press, which solidified further their professional status and cultural authority.

However, despite his success in writing fiction and with the dramatic readings of his work, as well as his keen interest in theatre generally, Dickens’s own playwriting endeavours—both in terms of adaptation and of original work—were deemed less proficient, not only by Moncrieff, other playwrights, and theatre producers, but also by critics. By contrast, his friend, Wilkie Collins, experienced increasing success in his dramatic ventures and was praised as “a dramatist of unusual ability whose dialogue was pointed and skilful,” according to Peters, who documents further many critics preferred at least one of Collins’s dramatic adaptations over its source novel (1991, 341).³⁶ Collins himself believed that his own faculty lay in the dramatic arts more than in novel writing and, had the economic circumstances of the theatre been more favourable, his stories would have appeared in dramatic form (2005a, 208).³⁷ Lyn Pykett considers that Collins was at his most successful as a dramatist when adapting his own work (2005, 95). This view poses an intriguing notion regarding the role of the original prose work as preparatory, requiring adaptation in order to develop the optimal art of dramatic writing; stated more simply, it posits adaptation as enabling a writer to produce optimal work—by contrast to views that originals were optimal work.

There were other modes of hybrid writing besides authors mixing media and writing across media: collaborations between writers also produced hybrids that were partly written by one author and partly written by another. Prior to his independent success in the 1870s after Dickens’s death, Collins had been writing collaboratively with Dickens, a practice that was not unusual in the century. Although Dickens was initially the guiding mentor in their writing collaboration, the question of who benefitted most from their relationship has been an ongoing topic in critical discussions,³⁸ and only in more recent critical studies has the focus shifted to highlight Collins’s dramatic abilities as significant contributions to their collaborations. Artistically, Sue Lonoff argues that Dickens was the beneficiary of Collins’s talents in terms of the plotting and density of their stories (1982, 51), which continues critical perceptions in their own day that Collins was a better dramatic writer than Dickens.³⁹

This form of collaborative adaptation was beneficial to prose authors with limited knowledge of dramatic conventions. Frances Hodgson Burnett, for instance, collaborated on all of her dramatisations with more experienced playwrights.⁴⁰ It was not only fellow writers who collaborated on and influenced the final production, but also other figures within the theatre. Madge Kendal, an actress who managed and produced the production of The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1888, recounted her experience with Burnett in 1890:

When the play was produced, Mrs Burnett said to me, “You have cut it about rather severely.” I ventured to remark that had I cut any flowers out of the play, I would humbly beg her pardon; but that I thought I had only knitted my cloth a bit finer, and by that means brought out its brighter gloss. That is, of course, only what habit gives you the power of doing,—that, and the instinctive feeling of what will be more or less dramatic.

Kendal continued: it “is no easy task to ‘cut’ well, as we call it; that is, to be able to make judicious omissions,—to leave all the beauty, and only take out the weeds” (1890, 106–7).⁴¹ Her experience within the dramatic environment certainly qualified her to judge staging productions, although her extensive cutting of the author’s words appears to undermine Burnett’s authority here, whose objection seems to be marginalised.

Yet Kendal herself felt equally that the profession of dramatists was universally disregarded and criticised. At the beginning of her Dramatic Opinions, she complained that:

the playwright of today is hardly appreciated as he should be. His work is subject to keen and universal criticism; for it is a curious fact, that whereas few would venture to criticize books, poems, or paintings without some little special knowledge, every one thinks he has a right to pronounce judgement on a stage-play, and is convinced that that judgement is infallible. And again, the dramatist runs the risk of being misinterpreted, and consequently misunderstood. (1890, 7–8)

For the prose author to write for stage, a knowledge of dramatic conventions and agencies was necessary, but Nicoll has suggested that prose authors often failed to make the required adjustments due to a “sense of superiority” to the theatre:

attempts were doomed because they originated not from within the theatre but from without. Instead of coming to the level of the stage and seeking gradually to raise the standards of performance, literary men persisted in standing aloof, self-consciously lowering their precious tragedies and dismally monotonous comedies as though these were divinities, machine-borne, by which alone the evil course of events might be altered. This sense of superiority, allied to a sad ignorance of theatrical conditions, marred practically every effort. (1925, 163)

Collaborations, unsurprisingly, often resulted in disputes. Like Collins, Reade believed that “his natural gift was for the drama: my greatest love” (1882, 166) and his collaborations with other authors were manifold.⁴² His first joint venture of writing was the original play, Masks and Faces (1852), co-authored with Tom Taylor.⁴³ This generated various disagreements, causing Reade to subsequently adapt the play to his debut novel, Peg Woffington (1853), published only a month later, much to the annoyance of Taylor,⁴⁴ although Taylor and Reade continued to collaborate on future projects.

This was likely because, as Pearson points out, there were legal as well as aesthetic advantages in writer collaborations across media:

By setting out to co-author a play, the authors could assert their rights through the authority of the team. This was particularly attractive to writers seeking to connect together their fictional productions with dramatic ones. Rather than seeing the two forms as occupying antagonistic spheres, writers could see the combination of the two as a powerful media capture. (2015, 124–5)

Although the “team authority” could be beneficial in some cases, it also produced social and legal ambiguity surrounding authorial ownership, authority, and autonomy, as the level of contribution made by each participant remained indiscernible and the romantic notion of the solitary genius was destabilised. Pearson argues that the nineteenth century “foregrounded the notion of drama as collaborative performance” and that, as a result, the play-title rather than the author “pervaded the Public Sphere and the invisibility of authorship prevented any identification between writer and text.” Pearson credits the Dramatic Copyright Act with saving the “authorial disintegration in relation to the drama” (2015, 151). Yet the case of dramatic adaptations is more complex, since here, the recognition of the title, as well as its original author, was marketed, thus heightening the invisibility of the adapter/dramatist, while making the prose author more visible.⁴⁵

That said, the Dramatic Copyright Law of 1833 did contribute to the rising visibility of the original dramatic male author, gradually establishing his professional esteem. For women, it was more difficult. Kerry Powell argues that “even the most prominent women novelists—could not readily obtain a hearing as playwrights and remained uniquely vulnerable to textual invasion from dramatists” (1997, 114).⁴⁶ Even so, writing across media was common for women such as Braddon, who also wrote poetry and original drama. Carnell describes Braddon as a “failed” playwright, who “longed for success” and, discussing the poor reception of Braddon’s plays, speculates that “[p]art of Braddon’s anger at the unauthorised versions of her most popular novels must have stemmed from the fact that they were enormously popular, while her own plays were not” (2000, 398). Like Dickens, Braddon had a keen interest and background in theatre, yet failed to realise her ambitions as a dramatic author.⁴⁷ Pondering negative contemporary reviews, Carnell canvases reasons why Braddon’s “talents were limited as a playwright,” proposing that her plays were at times old-fashioned, in contrast to the controversial contemporary plots within her novels, and that her dialogue was unrealistic and therefore not well received in live performance (2000, 398). Heidi Holder argues that Braddon’s plays “are as good as if not better than many pieces produced on West End stages in the latter half of the nineteenth century”, and blames Braddon’s personal life and the fact that the drama was at a “perennial low point” for her perceived failure as a dramatist (2000, 166/170).⁴⁸

These arguments, in addition to demonstrating differing opinions at different periods, show that literary merit, status, and form were inextricably linked with gender as well as class hierarchies in critical reviews, and that it was difficult for female prose fiction writers to break into dramatic writing and be critically and commercially successful, just as it would be a few decades later for them to succeed in writing for film.⁴⁹

Despite the citation in the epigraph to this chapter referring to writers of “Dramatic Literature,” the notion that all authors were suffering from “indefensible hardship and injustice” in some form or another during this period is palpable. The implied stratifications regarding media, writers, and their writings were clearly informed by wider social and cultural hierarchies of the nineteenth century, working together to construct the fluctuating status of literary writers, as well as perceptions regarding the quality and status of the media in which they wrote. Although the worrying decline of theatre was halted by changes late in the century, leading to a thriving profession for many dramatists at the end of the century, the arrival of the new medium of film and its adaptation practices would soon change the dynamic among different kinds of writers again, dynamics that were heightened in writing across media. The struggles and rising and falling fortunes faced by nineteenth-century prose and dramatic writers, especially those writing between media and industries were extended and varied with the advent of film and industry film writers, and their relationships with both novelists and playwrights is the subject of the next three chapters.