‘New light’: gas and the elementary affect of early melodrama

Abstract

ABSTRACT The development of coal-fired gas took off very rapidly between 1802 and 1818, used for the illumination of streets and buildings in Britain and Ireland but especially in the metropolis of London. These changes coincided with the emergence of melodrama as a new theatrical sensation, beginning with Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery in 1802. At the same time, playgoers were being exposed to a variety of innovations and experiments in visuality such as the phantasmagoria, the panorama, and the ‘aquatic theatre’ of Sadler’s Wells that tested categories of the ‘real’. The London theatres were not only a venue for the marketing of gaslight as a technology but were themselves transformed into palaces of light, both within the auditorium and on stage. Melodrama’s protean qualities as an art form were thus closely bound up with the application of fossil capitalism, for which melodrama acts as a structure of feeling, an elementary affect.