ABSTRACT
Victorian artistic, theatrical, and print cultures were rife with conflicts between good and evil. This chapter focuses on plays, novels, newspapers, and music halls, by which the Victorian era is particularly well-illuminated. These are characterized by a fascinating combination of melodrama, spectacle, and morality. Theatre, print culture, and music hall were mutually interdependent and influential. Arts and print culture were also full of spectacular and extreme effects, both physical and emotional. In the earlier Victorian period, theatre, and in particular melodrama, thrived, especially after an 1843 Act abolished the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate theatres. Throughout the Victorian period, middle-class and upper-class families were fond of private theatricals, including charades and tableaux vivants, in which families and friends would stage scenes at home for one another's entertainment. Audiences were made up of mostly working-class and lower-middle class people, but middle-class and even upper-class people might go to the West End halls.
