The Representation of Joe Whelks: Charles Dickens’s Reflections on a Theatre Audience

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AbstractThis article explores how Charles Dickens both alludes to and occludes the Victoria Theatre’s looking-glass curtain in his article ‘The Amusements of the People’ (1850). This vast mirror curtain hung at the Victoria in the early 1820s and again in the mid-1830s. Contending that Dickens would have been aware of this spectacular novelty, this article argues that his reference to the Victoria Theatre’s management ‘holding up a mirror’ to its audience is an allusion to the curtain. The mirror curtain reflected the working-class audience at the theatre back to itself, putting it ‘on the stage’, a comment on the nature of representation and its relationship to reality. Like theatre itself, which it also figured, the mirror curtain had a heterotopic nature, both representing and contesting reality. This challenge was particularly unsettling to middle-class onlookers in the context of the representation of an unrepresented (disenfranchised) plebeian audience. I argue that Dickens’s article, like the mirro...