ABSTRACT
Douglas Jerrold’s The Factory Girl mentions injustices at work and a factory is burned down, but the play never addresses the genuine problems of nascent capitalism. Probably the only play which meets these problems head-on is John Walker’s The Factory Lad. More interesting, perhaps, were a small number of ‘factory plays’, like G.F. Taylor’s The Factory Strike which presents the looming displacement of the workers by machines. J.T. Haines’s The Factory Boy is similarly unable to capitalise on its promising start. The hints of an alternative dramaturgy utilising either irony, symbolism or metatheatrical devices glimpsed in Taylor’s Swing or Walker’s The Factory Lad were never followed through. Interestingly, once the 1843 Theatres Regulation Act had broken the old Royal Patent monopoly, no new theatres were opened for over twenty years. Through the 1830s and 1840s, the demand for theatrical entertainment continued to expand as the nature of personal experience changed.
