ABSTRACT
The popularity of the sensation melodrama coincided with - and probably had a major effect on - changes in the organisation and practise of theatre management in London theatres. The popularity of many of the plays reviewed here shifted management practices into longer runs of single plays, starting later in the evening and finishing by 11 pm, rather than long mixed bills which often ran until midnight. The sensation melodrama, which playwright Dion Boucicault claimed to have invented, took elements of earlier Gothic, romantic and crime melodramas and blended them with stories of respectable middleor upper-class families with dark secrets and violent pasts. The sensation melodrama was part of a circulation of ideas, imaginative tropes and genres of fictions of strong feeling. Sensation melodramas and society dramas allowed audiences to experience scandal and excitement with little risk.
