[In the following essay, Maunder explores the way in which Trollope appropriates techniques used by nineteenth-century theater actors in creating the characters in his fiction.]

The novel and the drama, were, contended Wilkie Collins in his “Preface” to Basil (1852) the “twin sisters in the family of fiction.” Yet while comments on the presence of theatrical elements in the works of Hardy, Balzac, Reade, James and particularly Dickens, have become a critical commonplace (critics generally agree that they all consciously applied some of the current theatrical techniques to their own novels), Trollope is rarely mentioned in discussions of the relationship between the two genres beyond the fact of his passion for Jacobean and Restoration drama. “Mr Trollope,” wrote The Times (23rd May 1859), “carries his aversion from anything melodramatic to an extreme.” (Smalley 103) Like Charlotte Brontë, he was seen to take “Truth and Nature” as his guides, and thus “restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement; over bright colouring too …” (Wise and Symington 152)

Certainly many “realistic” novelists did react towards what they regarded as overt theatricality with antagonism. George Eliot writing in the Westminster Review claimed of Charles Reade that the “habit of writing for the stage misleads him into seeking after those sort of exaggerated contrasts and effects which are accepted as a sort of rapid symbolism by a theatrical audience but are utterly out of place in fiction” (October 1856: 574). At the same time it is clear that just as many did turn to the theatre as a source of both subject matter and technique drawing upon what Ian Gregor has called “a whole rhetoric of effect” (Gregor 10)—one which was visual as well as aural. Even in the works of that apparently realistic novelist, Anthony Trollope, who depicted a world of polite restrained society, aspects of the art of the nineteenth century actor were adopted as part of the novelist's techniques of characterization.

John Stokes has noted that “to act” in the nineteenth century involved participation in a bravura display of human emotion physically expressed through a continued repetition of movements and gestures (Stokes 5). In 1744, Garrick, in his Essay Upon Acting, defined the art as “an entertainment of the stage, which by calling in the aid and assistance of articulation, corporeal motions and ocular expression, imitates, assumes, or puts on the various mental and bodily emotions arising from the various humours, virtues and vices, incident to human nature” (Cole and Chinoy 133). A century later Trollope's work is full of characters who recognise, like Lizzie Eustace, the advantages to be gained from trying “a little bit of acting” (ED 288) and their creator cleverly exploits stock theatrical devices as an effective means of characterization. “‘I would press you harder still to gain the glory I covert,’” the slimy Mr Emilius tells Lizzie. “And he made a motion with his arms as though he had already got her tight within his grasp” (ED 368). In the hands of charlatans such as Lizzie Eustace, Sophie Gordeloup, Felix Lopez and Mr Lupex, such gestures look overtly histrionic and stagey, yet these very larmoyant qualities, which many Victorian theatre-goers were beginning to dislike, are here adopted by Trollope as an obvious way of expressing personalities whose basis is humbug theatricality. Trollope's work is full of mockery for those (comic) characters who adopt what they feel to be the correct poses in order to disguise a lack of real depth of feeling. Trollope's description of Dolly Longestaffe's proposal to Isabel Boncassen shows the suitor “throwing himself into an attitude that was intended to express devoted affection. … Then he clapped his hands together, and turned his head away from her towards the little temple. ‘I wonder whether she knows what love is,’ he said, as though he were addressing himself to Mrs Arthur De Bever” (DC 254). Here the theatricality of descriptive gesture becomes the very expression of his Dundreary-like character. Dolly is the silly-ass-type of young nobleman; to look ridiculous is part of his eccentric (empty) comedy personality.

This relationship between the techniques used by the nineteenth-century actor and the comparable attempts at striving for effect made by the novelist of domestic realism and his characters, is not as mismatched as it sounds. Both draw on the same store of accumulated practice and knowledge as set down in the many handbooks and hundreds of memoirs of the period:

Mr Lupex was seated on a chair in the middle of the room, and was leaning with his head over the back of it. So despondent was he in his attitude that his head would have fallen off and rolled on the floor, had it followed the course which its owner seemed to intend that it should take. His hands hung down also along the back legs of the chair, till his fingers almost touched the ground, and altogether his appearance was pendent, drooping and woebegone. … Mr Lupex did not stir when first addressed by John Eames, but a certain convulsive movement was to be seen on the back of his head, indicating that this new arrival in the drawing-room had produced a fresh occasion of agony.

(SHA 449-50)

Mr Lupex follows this display of what was known in theatrical circles as “despair” by jumping up to accuse Cradell of being the cause of Mrs Lupex's unexplained disappearance. He “went” (the narrator tells us), “through a motion with his hands and arms which seemed to signify that if that unfortunate young man were in the company he would pull him to pieces and double him up, and pack him close, and then despatch his remains off, through infinite space, to the Prince of Darkness.” Apparently struck again by the thought of his wife's duplicity, he decides to relapse into the previous position of despair into the chair. “Finding it on the ground he had to pick it up. He did pick it up, and once more flung away his head over the back of it, and stretched his finger nails almost down to the carpet” (SHA 450).

One of the reasons why these characters appear so ridiculous (although their acting is not without effect on the spectators) is their operating on a higher emotional plane than the situation demands. Although the importance of making, as Henry Morley noted, “every gesture an embodiment of thought” (347) was still recognised, it was nevertheless important in an age of many different and emerging styles to fit into the type of acting demanded by the text or situation. Gesture was still an effective and necessary tool but what was more important, according to G. H. Lewes, whose On Actors and the Art of Acting (1872) is dedicated to Trollope, was when and how these gestures were employed:

it is obvious that a coat and waistcoat realism demands a manner, delivery and gesture wholly unlike the poetic realism of tragedy and comedy. … Attitudes, draperies, gestures, tones, and elocution which would be incongruous in a drama approaching more nearly to the evolutions of ordinary experience, become in the ideal drama, artistic modes of expression.

(115; 172)

One of the common faults of ordinary actors, Lewes argued, was their tendency to mix up acting styles with, as we often see in Trollope's work, unintentionally farcical results. This unfortunate juxtaposition occurs in Marion Fay—a novel which is essentially a comedy of manners but containing several characters who seem to have strayed into the novel (if their gestures are anything to go by) from the realms of high tragedy. When Lady Frances announces her intention of marrying George Roden, the post office clerk, her step-mother's reaction is suitably excessive:

When the accidental calling of the name was first heard and the following avowal made, the Marchioness declared her immediate feelings by a look. It was so that Arthur may have looked when he first heard that his queen was sinful,—so that Caesar must have felt when even Brutus struck him. For though Lady Frances had been known to be blind to her great destinies still this,—at any rate was not suspected. “You cannot mean it!” the Marchioness had at last said.

“I certainly mean it, mamma.” Then the Marchioness, with one hand guarding her raiment and with the other raised high above her shoulder, in an agony of supplication to those deities who arrange the fates of ducal houses, passed slowly out of the room.

(MF 19-20)

While the Marchioness makes the correct technical gesture for an appeal to heaven, her actions are more suited to what Lewes called the optique du théâtre of the “ideal” drama than the “familiarity of daily intercourse.” (Lewes 115) “It was evident,” the narrator of Is He Popenjoy? tells his readers, “that two scenes had been going on in the same house at the same moment. Through the door the Baroness came first, waving her hands above her head. Behind her was Aunt Ju, advancing with imploring gesture. And behind Aunt Ju might be seen Lady Selina Protest standing in mute dignity.” (IHP 267)

From these examples it might seem that Trollope reserves the striking of attitudes so beloved by the actors of melodrama as a subject for humour and that his adoption of current performance styles extends no further. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was scientifically respectable, as well as an aesthetic convention, to identify the internal mental state with its external physical expression. Actors, audience and critic depended upon an acknowledged relationship between general human behaviour and its physical expression on stage. As Paul Schlicke notes, the humour of Mr Crummles's leave-taking in Nicholas Nickleby derives from Dickens's joke that grandiloquent stage direction accurately conveys real emotion, a joke which is improved by our clear awareness that the posturing is not false, only extravagantly inflated. “[T]he underlying assumption of such prescriptions is that stereotyped expressions create an objective manifestation of human emotion. The acting was considered natural because it was an imitation of agreed exterior signs of feeling” (Schlicke 77).

Gestic expression is an important part of the communicative art of the Trollopian character, as well as of the nineteenth century actor. George Taylor has pointed out, both “actors and audience wanted to know exactly what was happening in psychological terms; they had no time for hidden motives or suppressed emotion” (43). Certain lines would demand a specific demonstrative gesture. Just as in act three of Tom Robertson's Caste when Polly tells the Marquise to leave her house, her words, “There is the door—go!” (169) cry out for a suitable physical accompaniment—so in the Trollopian novel, moments of emotional stress naturally require visual and physical expression, comic and serious. “Where is the man who can endure such a fall,” he writes of Crosbie, “without showing it in his face, in his voice, in his step, and in every motion of every limb.” (SHA 443)

Although a popular twentieth-century conception of the nineteenth-century actor is that of a figure whose rant was accompanied by crude semaphoric arm movements—what James called “hopeless staginess and mannerism” (James 106)—Victorian audiences and critics were particularly responsive to what were seen as “suggestive” movements: movements which could raise ideas in the minds of the audience. Next to the face it was the arms and hands which had the greatest expressive potential. A typical example is the representation of (feminine) helplessness, despair and also joy, expressed by the clasping of both hands in front of the body. Lewes tells a story about a girl Voltaire was coaching. She gesticulated so much and so uncontrollably, that he had to resort to making her recite with her hands tied to her side. She started off quietly but soon, carried away with the lines she was reciting, she flung out her arms forcibly enough to snap the threads. Aghast she apologized. Voltaire however, was delighted with her. The irrepressible gesture had been a good one, as irrepressible gestures usually are. This anecdote provided for Lewes proof of his claim that “it is the man and not the brain that thinks; it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ that feels and acts” (Cole and Chinoy 319). He implied that the movement of the body was impulsive rather than forced, that gesture was a natural reaction to the stimulus of the moment. When an individual experienced or encountered a particular emotion or sensation, his or her body would express itself in a certain recognisable way. This was, as Trollope was also to show, the natural response of the heroine to an exciting piece of news. Even when encumbered by a parasol and the rest of the paraphernalia of the Victorian lady. Clarissa Underwood, cannot stop herself from making “a gesture as though she would stop and clasp her hands together …” if she could (RH 56).

With this type of instinctive gesture, the degree to which it is to be taken seriously by the reader depends upon what we know about the character in question. When sincere characters like Lucy Morris or Marion Fay use it, theirs is the natural expression of girlish enthusiasm. Other characters, however, knowing what the gesture is intended to imply, exploit it for their own ends. Amelia Roper is a typical example: “‘Oh, John, is it to be thus, after love such as ours?’ And she clasped her hands together, and stood before him” (SHA 318). The precedent for this physical response is obvious, as can be seen in many theatrical paintings. Juliet, for example, was generally painted with her hands clasped modestly, looking wistfully at some distant object. Henry Briggs' Juliet and the Nurse (1827) is a notable example. In The Eustace Diamonds we see Lizzie, in an attempt to project herself as the helpless, girlish heroine of popular perception, exploiting the imploring aspect of the gesture to its fullest. “She was,” notes the narrator, “almost invincible.” As she leans towards Frank Greystock, “her eyes were full of tears, and her lips were apart as though still eager with the energy of expression, and her hands were clasped together” (ED 176).

In an age famous for its melodramas it is no surprise that one of the most popular theatrical postures which survived from the previous century, and retained its place in portraiture and photography, was that of placing the arms “akimbo.” For Trollope, use of this flamboyant gesture usually denotes the swaggering braggart. Lopez, the narrator notes, “put his arms akimbo, resting his hands on his hips, and altogether declined the proffered civility, ‘You had better walk on,’ he said, and then stood scowling on the spot till the other should pass by” (PM 315). When women adopt the posture, the effect is even more ludicrously unnatural. While there is something admirable in the way in which Amelia Roper stands up to the repulsive Mrs Lupex, such an attitude would be out of place if she were the serious, rather than the comic low life, heroine of the novel. There is something un-lady-like about such a posture and not surprisingly, in Barchester Towers it is the aggressive Mrs Proudie who feels the need to adopt it in order to cajole her husband into giving way:

“You don't mean to tell me,” said Mrs Proudie, “that you are going to make yourself ridiculous by lending your name to such a preposterous attempt as this? Mr Slope Dean of Barchester indeed!” And she tossed her head, and put her arms a-kimbo, with an air of confident defiance that made her husband quite sure that Mr Slope never would be Dean of Barchester. In truth, Mrs Proudie was all but invincible; had she married Petruchio, it may be doubted whether that arch-wife tamer would have been able to keep her legs out of those garments which are presumed by men to be peculiarly unfitted for feminine use.

(BT 70)

Trollope seems to view Mrs Proudie's posturings in the same light as the author of The Thespian Preceptor of 1810 who argues that the popular posture known as “arms akimbo” is not the attitude of “grandeur” but instead “the certain sign of vulgarity and inflated imbecility …” (137).

As far as the nineteenth-century actor and audience were concerned, hands raised above the waist signified force and intensity. “‘Unanimity is everything in the direction of such an undertaking as this’” Melmotte tells the sceptical Paul Montague, “‘With unanimity we can do—everything.’ Mr Melmotte in the ecstasy of his enthusiasm lifted up both his hands over his head. ‘Without unanimity we can do—nothing.’ And the two hands fell” (WLN 379). The regular use of the arms above the waist generally indicates great determination and force of character. It is no surprise in The Last Chronicle of Barset to find Mrs Proudie using her arms like a policeman on point duty. Again there is a precedent for this in paintings of theatrical subjects. This is after all the usual stance for Lady Macbeth as portrayed in Maclise's The Banquet Scene (1840). Trollope seems to follow the theatrical painters in his characterization. When not basing their depictions of Shakespeare's villainess on the performances of Mrs Siddons or Mrs Pritchard, artists tended to follow the usual reading of the character as being an overtly masculine female heavy whose gestures were appropriately authoritative.

In contrast, hands which fell below the waist were an obvious indication as to an individual's passivity, despair or listlessness. “The acting is full of charming detail,” wrote Henry James of a Parisian production of Molière's Mariage Forcé in 1872. He particularly admired the “way in which in a subsequent scene the young girl, listening at evening in the park to the passionate whisperings of the hero, drops her arms half awkwardly along her sides in fascinated self surrender,” claiming that this was “a touch quite foreign to English invention” (James 5-6). Yet this “eloquent” use of “intonation in gesture” on the part of Mademoiselle Reichemberg is not only the same as that displayed by Nora Rowley in Stone's illustration “‘But you must give it up,’ said Sir Marmaduke” but is also identical to that used by Mrs Hurtle in the final parting scene between her and Paul Montague “‘I ought to have known that it could not have been so’” she tells him, “‘I know I was wrong, and now the punishment has come upon me. Well;—I suppose you had better say good-bye to me. What is the good of putting it off?’ Then she rose from her chair and stood before him with her arms hanging listlessly by her side” (WLN 445).

At a basic level any act accomplished with the hands and arms such as tearing off and throwing a trinket, which the male “heavy,” George Vavasor, does in Can You Forgive Her?, would be gesturally indicated. It would be recognised (obviously) as an act of will relating in some way to the given situation. Michael Booth has pointed out that it often seems to be the case that the nineteenth century actor “cannot refer to another person on the stage without pointing at him” (190). In Trollope's The Way We Live Now, Mrs Hurtle's response when Paul Montague finally announces that he will not marry her, is to stretch out her right arm (towards him?) “as though again to grasp something” (WLN 447). The pictorialism of the theatre meant that such graceful statuesque gestures and poses were very popular. This heightened effect is presumably what Madalina Demolines is aiming for:

“I won't deny that Clara van Siever has a certain beauty of her own. To me she is certainly the most unattractive woman that I ever came near. She is simply repulsive!” Hereupon Miss Demolines held up her hand as though she were banishing Miss van Siever for ever from her sight, and shuddered slightly.

(LCB 262)

While many of Trollope's characters adopt the theatrical mannerisms popular in their youth, “‘Unwell!’ said Lady Demolines. And John was stricken at the moment with a conviction that her ladyship must have past the early part of her life upon the stage. ‘You would trifle with me, sir. Beware that you do not trifle her,—with Madalina. …’” (LCB 854) the nineteenth-century theatre also saw the emergence of the so called “French school”—exponents of which replaced the physical pyrotechnics of the “heavy” actor with delicate by-play, elegance and piquancy. The 1860s and 1870s were the years in which Robertson's success was at its height, a success which prompted the appearance of an increasing number of middle class actors whose forte was the personification of elegant urbanity. By the 1870s extravagant emotionalism displayed on stage, was in the view of Joseph Knight, The Athenaeum critic, “undignified, excessive and almost unmanly” (29th April 1876: 609). Although by the 1860s Le Brun's list of twenty-four passions was still consulted, a number of playwrights increasingly based their textual directions for facial expression on the principles of moderation and understatement. In Robertson's Caste, for example, the expressions of his characters are natural and accompany the general daily moods and feelings of his audience. The physical emotions of polite middle and upper class society were being expressed by actors like Squire Bancroft, who, according to The Saturday Review, possessed “an unusual capacity for indicating rather than expressing passionate emotion” (19th January 1878). As William Archer was to note in 1893, “suggestion” was in many respects superior to “direct presentation” (Archer 246).

Many observers then, felt that it was more effective to hint at what was happening beneath the surface, particularly when the subjects were English ladies and gentlemen. “Already we see a great reduction of gesture and mere ranting on our modern stage, and actors convey their meaning by quieter and subtler methods” wrote the playwright Henry Arthur Jones (548). Again this theatrical trend towards what was regarded as “naturalism,” as personified in the 1860s by the great French actor Charles Fechter, is reflected in the “realistic” world of Trollope's novels.

Because it was important to display, as the Athenaeum noted “feeling without going outside the boundaries of social custom” (9th October 1875), the emotions of male characters in Trollope (who are invariably gentlemen) are guided by a demand for polite reserve. Because naturalness is somehow crude, gestic expression is rarely instinctive. The characters of 1870s Trollopian London, like those depicted by Wilde, Pinero and Jones twenty years later, have taught to control themselves—as Trollope's description of Plantagenet Palliser's attempts to make Lady Dumbello his “intimate” friend demonstrate:

He did come to her, and stood over her, looking unutterable things. His unutterable things, however were so looked that they did not absolutely demand notice from the lady. He did not sigh like a furnace, not open his eyes upon her as though there were two suns in the firmament above her head, nor did he beat his breast or tear his hair. Mr Palliser had been brought up in a school which delights in tranquillity, and never allows its pupils to commit themselves either to the sublime or to the ridiculous. He did look an unutterable thing or two; but he did it with so decorous an eye, that the lady who was measuring it all with great accuracy, could not, as yet, declare that Mr Palliser had “forgotten himself.”

(SHA 611)

Although Palliser, like many of Trollope's Englishmen, is naturally inexpressive, it is also the case that his behaviour is governed by the society in which he moves—the same society which Trollope is attempting to depict accurately. As Mrs Allonby remarks in A Woman of no Importance (1893): “the secret of life is never to have an emotion that its unbecoming” (Wilde 351). Certainly much of the biting edge of both Wilde's and Trollope's work derives from the disparity of the polite behaviour displayed by his characters and the reality of feeling which lies beneath it. As in plays like Henry Arthur Jones' The Case of the Rebellious Susan (1894), characters are perpetually anxious to retain their elegant poise. Trollope often demonstrates the artificiality of this world by introducing in the midst of it, a character (usually his heroine) whose unspoiled behaviour contrasts favourably with the air of polite restraint around her. When Glencora makes her first appearance in the fashionable world of Can You Forgive Her? she is, like Wilde's Hester Worsley, “painfully natural.” (Wilde 328) The same is true of Mary Germain in Is He Popenjoy? who encounters a world where remaining dignified is all important. The women of Trollope's world are trained to restrain their emotions behind social masks, knowing, as Trollope's Arabella Trefoil does, “how much depended on her personal bearing” (AS 334).

Although self control is important, many of Trollope's characters react instinctively to good or bad news. This is particularly true for women and a noticeable feature of Trollope's serious use of theatrical gesture is his tendency to restrict its sincere use to women rather than men. In Trollope's world, hysterical men are ridiculous because they generally have the opportunity to do something about their predicament; the same is not true of women, who are invariably restricted by the social mores of the time. Arabella Trefoil, Julia Ongar and Laura Kennedy are all characters who at some time let their masks slip.

The most striking of these tragic women is the passionate Mrs Hurtle. The American widow is another recognisable type from the theatre of the late Victorian period. As categorised by Shaw in the Preface to Man and Superman, she is “a woman [who] has, on some past occasion been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman” (150). Mrs Hurtle is Trollope's version of the adventuress who attempts to transcend her past and achieve respectability. The use of expansive gesture is a way of indicating a woman who in some way threatens the dominant sexual or moral ideology of the time. Certainly many equated what was seen as an unladylike bearing with self exhibitionism. Lizzie Eustace, “much given to action, and to the expression of her thoughts by the motion of her limbs” (ED 16-17), is presumably (like her foreign counterparts) much too much inclined towards what she thinks are expressive gestures, to be attractive. Lizzie Eustace and her moral opposite, Lucy Robarts, seem to represent respectively, the disparate ideologies of English and continental femininity; the reserved, spiritual and languid versus the energetic and sexually dynamic. Similarly, in The Way We Live Now, Trollope presents us with different female characters all representing varying levels of feminine passivity/activity. Mrs Hurtle, like Pinero's Paula Tanqueray or Julia Ongar in the earlier The Claverings, is the representative repentant courtesan figure who challenges, through expansive gestures and a blatant sexuality, the chaste, pure and insipid image of the English girl. Free speaking, she throws off the usual image of cloying femininity to reveal the passionate, physically demonstrative woman beneath. “‘Why should you kneel there?” Mrs Hurtle asks Paul, “‘You do not love me. A man should kneel to a woman for love, not for pardon.’ But though she spoke thus,” Trollope tells us, “she put her hand upon his forehead, and pushed back his hair, and looked into his face. ‘I wonder whether that other woman loves you. I do not want an answer, Paul. I suppose you had better go.’ She took his hand and pressed it to her breast” (WLN 9). Trollope, presenting Mrs. Hurtle as a nineteenth-century Medea (WLN 261), shows her as a beautiful, dark, and tragic looking woman, who, although she schools herself into restraint until she becomes “soft and womanly,” expresses her emotions openly in long speeches, using her “rich and glorious voice” to harangue the man who has discarded her. She is another “witch of a woman” (WLN 389), “a wild cat” (WLN 370) for whom a “pistol or a horsewhip, a violent seizing by the neck … would have made the fitting revenge.” Yet as a lone woman, attempting to re-establish herself in a society obsessed by public opinion, hers is effectively a losing battle:

When he was gone she went to the doors and listened awhile. Then she closed it, and turning the lock, stood with her back against the door and with her hands clasped. After a few moments she ran forward, and falling on her knees, buried her face in her hands upon the table. Then she gave way to a flood of tears, and at last lay rolling on the floor.

(WLN 449)

Trollope, as we see, gives her explicit stage directions. Her rolling is presumably a representation of mental torture made physical. Despite the admiration she invokes in the minds of the narrator and his readers, she is to the nineteenth century reader a woman of dubious sexual morality. Thus although Mrs. Hurtle's writhings may seem faintly ludicrous to the modern reader, they are as “Trollope, a man of his time, realizes, the appropriate period movements for a woman of her theatrical type and situation. Mrs. Hurtle's movements are, after all those of the fictional repentant fallen woman who, in the nineteenth century, spent much of her time crouching on the floor, hands outstretched in an attitude of total despair.

Although Trollope modestly and famously describes himself as being no “favourite with the tragic muse” (BT 31) a reading of his work shows that he, no less than any other writer, was fully aware of the public taste for strong scenes which presented his characters responding to external and internal pressures. For this reason Trollope recognised, as many of his contemporaries did, the importance of making use of what G. H. Lewes termed the artistic “language” of performance in order to make his scenes dramatically effective:

The actor has to select. He must be typical. His expressions must be those which, while they belong to the recognised symbols of our common nature, have also the peculiar impress of the character represented. … It is the actor's art to express in well known symbols what an individual man may be supposed to feel, and we, the spectators recognising these expressions, are thrown into a state of sympathy. Unless the actor follows nature sufficiently to select symbols that are recognised as natural, he fails to touch us; but as to any minute fidelity in copying the actual manner of murderers, misers, avengers, broken hearted fathers, &c., we really have had so little experience of such characters, that we cannot estimate the fidelity; hence the actor is forced to be as typical as the poet is.

(124-25)

Although the prevailing mood of 1875 was that “people in general in plays should conform to those habits of behaviour and speech which society has found indispensable to its own existence” (Athenaeum 23rd January 1875, 133), it was also recognised that “a perfect copy of any man's expressions would be utterly ineffective on the stage” (Lewes 124). While it might seem strange to see an author whose work is apparently firmly embedded in the foundations of fictional reality, regularly drawing upon the theatrical techniques, the use of such techniques was not necessarily incompatible with fictional reality. The use of expressive gesture may have been traditionally the property of the actor but for novel readers also, the gestic statement was psychologically plausible as well as being immediately recognisable and it was not therefore, out of place in even the most realistic novels of polite society.

Bibliography

Archer, William. The Theatrical World for 1893. London, 1894.

Booth, Michael. English Melodrama. London: Jenkins, 1965.

Cole, T. and H. Chinoy, eds. Actors on Acting. New York: Crown, 1954.

Gregor, Ian, ed. Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form. London: Vision, 1980.

James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama. Ed. Allan Wade. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1948.

Jones, H. A. “Dr Pearson on the Modern Drama.” Nineteenth Century 34 (1893): 548-49.

Lewes, George Henry. On Actors and the Art of Acting. London, 1872.

Morley, Henry. The Journal of a London Playgoer. London, 1866.

Pemberton, T. Edgar. The Life and Writings of Tom Robertson. London, 1893.

Robertson, Tom. Plays by Tom Robertson Ed. William Tydeman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.

Schlicke, Paul. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Allen, 1985.

Shaw, George Bernard. “Preface to Man and Superman.” The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw. London: Hamlyn, 1965.

Smalley, Donald, ed. Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1969.

Stokes, John, ed. Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Taylor, George. Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.

Thespian Preceptor; or, A Full Display of the Scenic Art (The.) London, 1811;1828.

Trollope, Anthony. The American Senator. Ed. John Halperin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. [AS]

———. Autobiography. Eds. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. [A]

———. Barchester Towers. Ed. James R. Kincaid. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. [BT]

———. The Duke's Children. Ed. Hermoine Lee. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. [DC]

———. The Eustace Diamonds. Ed. W. J. McCormack. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. [ED]

———. Is He Popenjoy? Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. [IHP]

———. The Last Chronicle of Barset. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. [LCB]

———. Marion Fay. Ed. R. H. Super. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1984. [MF]

———. The Prime Minister. Ed. Jenifer Uglow. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. [PM]

———. Ralph the Heir. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. [RH]

———. The Small House at Allington. Ed. James R. Kincaid. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. [SHA]

———. The Way We Live Now. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. [WLN]

Wilde, Oscar, A Woman of no Importance in Wilde: Complete Plays. London: Methuen. 1988.

Wise, Thomas, and John Symington, eds. The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.