ABSTRACT
On 16 March 1850, Reynolds’s Miscellany, a popular magazine of fiction and reportage, promised an exciting new serial for the following issue. The story would be different from the historical blood and thunder yarns that were the journal’s normal stock in trade:The Tale will be of a domestic character——the plot belonging to the present age, and the scene being laid in England. Invoking the seamstress in early Victorian Britain frequently involved the use of melodramatic conventions derived from the stage and popular fiction. Melodrama became an effective form of address in the early nineteenth century because it acknowledged that everybody had a story to tell; in the melodramatic imagination even the humblest could turn out to be royalty in disguise. The cosmology of melodrama with its binary oppositions between good and evil, rich and poor, town and country provided a form of knowledge that structured the way social problems were presented.
