ABSTRACT
When one surveys the mass theatrical market that existed in London alone, not to mention the provinces, in 1850, thirteen years after the accession of Queen Victoria and seven years after the passage of the Theatre Regulation Bill, even a brief treatment of one of the most popular contemporary dramatic forms, farce, seems impossible. A hundred years before, in 1750, the population of the metropolis was perhaps 750,000 and there were two theatres regularly open at which farces were performed as afterpieces. It is therefore possible to examine with some care the whole corpus of mid-eighteenth-century farce, since it is a significant but not overwhelming collection of material [1]. In 1850, however, London's population was about three million, and ten times the number of theatres were performing dramatic pieces. The writing of farces as afterpieces for all these theatres – scarcely a single night's playbill was without its farce – became a matter of mass production. For the purposes of this paper, then, I have selected from the period 1832–57 a fairly representative dozen for discussion; such a selection seems reasonable because it illustrates the principal characteristics and tendencies in the farce of the time.
