Full Description
Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain, producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. This collection of essays illuminates the social and cultural conditions that made such a varied career possible, offering fresh insights into previously unexplored aspects of late Georgian culture, society, and politics.
Tracing the transitions in the cultural economy from an eighteenth-century system of miscellany to a nineteenth-century regime of specialisation, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture illustrates the variety of Dibdin's cultural output as characteristic of late eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by a growing preoccupation with specialisation in the early nineteenth century.
The chapters, written by some of the leading experts in their individual disciplines, examine Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career, spanning cultural spaces from the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, through Ranelagh Gardens, Sadler's Wells, and the Royal Circus, to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadside ballads and graphic satires, to newspaper journalism, mezzotint etchings, painting, and decorative pottery. Together they demonstrate connections between forms of cultural production that have often been treated as distinct, and provide a model for a more integrated approach to the fabric of late Georgian cultural production.
Contents
Roger Parker: Foreword
A Chronology of Charles Dibdin
1: Ian Newman, Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley: Introducing Mr Dibdin
Part One: Dibdin in Context
2: Felicity Nussbaum: Mungo Here, Mungo 'Der': Dibdin and Racial Performance
3: Michael Burden: Dibdin at the Royal Circus
4: Katie Osborn: Interlude 1 Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield: Voicing the Clown in Town
5: David O' Shaughnessy: The Detail is in The Devil: Dibdin's Patriotism in the 1780s
6: Judith Hawley: Dibdin and the Dilettantes
Nicola Pritchard-Pink: Interlude 2 Dibdin and Jane Austen: Musical Cultures of Gentry Women
Part Two: Songs in Focus
7: Oskar Cox Jensen: 'True Courage': A Song in History
8: Harriet Guest: A Motley Assembly: 'The Margate Hoy'
Nick Grindle: Interlude 3 Dibdin and John Raphael Smith: Print Culture and Fine Art
Part Three: Nineteenth-Century Transitions
9: Susan Valladares: The Changing Theatrical Economy: Charles Dibdin the Younger at Sadler's Wells, 1814-19
10: Jim Davis: Writing for Actors: The Dramas of Thomas Dibdin
11: Isaac Land: Each Song was just like a little Sermon': Dibdin's Victorian Afterlives
Mark Philp: Afterword: Dibdin's Miscellany
