ABSTRACT
‘Theatricality and role-playing are the living heart of Nicolas Nickleby’: so Michael Slater says. Theatre, including street theatre, as the epitaph shows, is everywhere; part of an immediate popular culture. The drama becomes a definite discrete subject with the arrival of Miss Petowker who ‘went on’ in the pantomime. Dickens needs the camp aspects of this tableau, echoed in Mantalini’s affectation of the aristocrat, and in his accent, and baby talk. The comic cruelty he discerns in pantomime contrasts with melodrama, whose sentimentalism historically derived from the sentimental drama into which bourgeois tragedy as exemplified by The London Merchant, Or, The History of George Barnwell by George Lillo declined in the eighteenth century. What Oliver Twist calls 'transitions' are interruptions inside melodrama, the picaresque/episodic novel, and pantomime alike.
