Popular Reception by Dramatic Adaptation: The Case of Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Abstract

The downmarket dissemination of the Waverley Novels in nineteenth-century Britain is usually considered in terms of collected editions, but adaptations for print and stage played an important role in placing the fictional works of Walter Scott at the centre of contemporary social tensions. There were thousands of performances in various forms at patent and non-patent venues throughout Britain for nearly every work of fiction. Melodramatic versions of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) in London, for the Royal Theatres Covent Garden and Drury Lane as well as minor theatres south of the Thames such as the Surrey, provide the basis for a case study that describes the participation of venue, performance, and audience in successful production and reception. The involvement of commerce and politics, print and theatre, upmarket and working-class audiences indicates the importance of Scott dramatized in the study of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism, popular culture, and national identity and group formation in the nineteenth century.