Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture ed. by Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman

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Reviewed by: Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture ed. by Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman Andrew Pink Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture. Edited by Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xxvi, 249 p. ISBN 978-0-198-81242-5. £55] This book of essays springs from a two-day conference held at Kings College, London in 2014, part of the "Music in London 1800–1851" project funded by the European Research Council and led by Roger Parker, the Kings College Thurston Dart Professor of Music. For those with an interest in British musical life of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries the name of Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) will be familiar not only as a prolific and popular autodidact songwriter and composer (and librettist) of theatre works but also as an actor, entrepreneur, impresario, author, and journalist. And yet today he may be regarded as one of the period's best-known unknowns, despite having extensive entries in both the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Jon A. Gillespie 2004, rev. 2014) and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Roger Fiske and Irena Cholij 1992, rev. 2001). But, for all his contemporary popularity and subsequent scholarly esteem, his music remains largely unperformed except for his patriotic naval song Tom Bowling, orchestrated by Henry Wood (1869–1944) and a 'BBC Last Night of the Proms' favourite. Part of the problem for Dibdin's reputation is that earlier commentators have relied almost entirely for their material on Dibdin's own autobiographical and journalistic writing with little direct reference to his artistic output and others' observations. These autobiographical and journalistic works, as the editors point out in the first chapter—"Introducing Mr Dibdin"—were highly selective in design, meant to present "the authoritative 'public' Dibdin" (p. 3), and as a result, he has been "ill-served by [. . .] academic enquiry" (p. 3), a situation the book seeks to redress. Following this expository chapter, the book is divided into three parts comprising a series of essays, "guest interludes", and an "afterword". I must confess to having found this plan a rather fussy concept; "chapter" in all cases would have sufficed. Part One 'Dibdin in Context' Chapter 2, "Mungo Here, Mungo There: Dibdin and Racial Performance" by Felicity Nussbaum discusses Dibdin's celebrated blackface role as the enslaved African Mungo, the main character in Dibdin's own "opera buffa" The Padlock (1768). There is some informative discussion of Dibdin's use of music to heighten the text. While Nussbaum helpfully places The Padlock in the context of Dibdin's several other stage works that also deal with racial and sexual/gendered captivity, as well as his other writings on slavery, she does not attempt in any meaningful way to link Dibdin's output with the abolition debates that swirled throughout the period. Nussbaum does however conclude that while Dibdin probably did abhor the cruel treatment of slaves he probably did not regard slavery as inherently abhorrent (pp. 39–40). Chapter 3, "Dibdin at the Royal Circus" by Michael Burden is a study of Dibdin's involvement (1782–84; 1785) with the setting up of this widely-known but little written-about south London theatre venue, its origins, its design, its collaborative management team, and its novel programming that mixed equestrian spectacle and musical theatre with child actors. A number of these children were the offspring of well-established London stage-folk, enrolled in the Royal Circus's own acting school. As we might expect from the pen of a senior figure in the world of theatre studies, the piece is informed by an assiduous attention to primary source material and historical antecedent. It is a shame, however, that there was not more to say about the acting school and its eventual demise. Also, with the attention given to topographical details, I would have liked a map to show the location. [End Page 304] Interlude 1, "Dibdin and Robert Bloomfield: Voicing the Clown in Town" by Katie Osborn presents us with some examples of Dibdin's use of rural characters and dialect in his stage works and songs, drawing our attention to use of...