ABSTRACT
The major feature of the English opera libretto in the nineteenth century is its particular type of plot. In nineteenth-century terms, the action took place fairly recently, for one character is the Austrian governor of Presburg and another a proscribed Pole. The basic events are as follows. The governor’s six-years old daughter is kidnapped. Twelve years elapse, during which she is brought up by gipsies. English opera was one of the media, as was the mélodrame, whether staged in Paris or in London. So, in large measure, was the novel, whose development was a special feature of the period. The manichaeistic plot requires the heroine to be caught in dilemmas that would crush a person of lesser fibre. Playbills trumpet her moments of greatest trial. In an age when equations were drawn between the internal and the external, according to one theory the heroine’s beauty itself reinforced her virtue.
