ABSTRACT
As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, society fragmented into bitter oppositions. Simultaneously, the dramatic turbulence echoed the experience of the French Revolution or the Luddite revolts or even the enclosure of local commons. Melodrama's concerns are with the values and experiences of working class people in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. It is therefore a kind of drama we are largely unfamiliar with, though it certainly spoke powerfully to its intended audiences. William Thomas Moncrieff’s comparative benevolence towards the aristocracy, however, is the exception in melodramas. Working class attitudes to the sea, sailors and the navy were also ambivalent, as a large number of melodramas attest. Murder formed an unusually productive subject for melodramas, since a murder maps an emotional upheaval onto everyday life. The most infamous ‘real life’ murder to appeal to melodrama writers was the murder of Maria Martin in 1827.
