ABSTRACT
The 1880s and 1890s saw much energy expended in attempts to create a new world. While the imperialists scrambled for Africa, Gladstone stormed through Midlothian, proclaiming Britons should ‘remember the rights of the savage, as people call him’. Both were seeking a way out of the darkness of the past, and both Gladstone’s and the imperialists’ impetus was for a new world order based on regularity and respectability. Socially, the old raucous, ribald, riotous Britain was giving way to ‘middlebrow’ values and more inhibited behaviour. Irving’s Lyceum came to be regarded as the national theatre, though without the subsidy available to continental theatres like that of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen or the Comédie Française. While politicians, imperialists and industrialists created their new world in the last years of the nineteenth century, these honoured actor-managers, who dominated the theatre of the time, gave that world a romantic and respectable image of itself.
