The London stage 1800–1900: A data base for a calendar of performances on the nineteenth-century London stage

IN the first ten years of the nineteenth century, the number of theaters operating regularly or frequently in London can be counted on the fingers of both hands. By the end of the century, the list extends to upwards of two hundred theaters, music halls, and other places of theatrical or quasitheatrical activity in the greater London area. The phenomenal growth of this theater in the course of the nineteenth century, and its growing centrality in the lives of Londoners, has recently been attracting much interest on the part of theater historians and students of popular culture. My colleague James Ellis (of Mount Holyoke College) and I, who have been students of the subject for some time, joined forces two years ago after independently coming to realize that research could proceed only in a limited and unsatisfactory way unless we had that basic tool of modern theatrical historical research, a daily calendar of performances. No such calendar exists for Shakespeare's time, of course, nor will it ever, since the amount of surviving information is too scant to compile daily records. By the post-Restoration period, however, the information begins to grow in volume, and the result in terms of modern scholarship has been the completion of The London Stage 1660-1800, a daily calendar of performances. Published in eleven volumes in 1960-68, the information in that calendar has more recently been prepared in machine-readable form as The London Stage Information Bank, a data base of 22,000,000 characters at Lawrence University.' Since, however, the London theater grew so phenomenally during the century beginning in 1800, James Ellis and I estimate that in compiling a data bank of information about daily performances in this later period, we are looking for evidence representing up to one million performances. Considering that the daily calendar entry, with its titles of plays, names of authors and players, and much other information, may average some two thousand characters, and conservatively estimating a fifty percent survival rate of evidence, we conclude that our data base could swell to as many as a billion characters, virtually fifty times as large as the data base for the previous one hundred forty years. It is clear, then, that the purpose of our project to compile as full and accurate a calendar as the sources will allow will take considerable time to accomplish. We view it as a minimum ten-year project. To this end, we have established a cadre of nineteen contributing editors, based in this country, Canada, and Britain, who are ready to begin work as soon as the broad outlines of the data base have become well enough defined and exact methods worked out for compilation and data entry. A pilot project conducted over the last two years has yielded much of the theoretical and technical information we sought, and we are now close to the point where actual compilation can begin. The pilot project has concentrated on analysis of samples of playbills and programs from each decade of the century; that analysis also serves as the foundation for the design of the data base itself. At the same time, however, account has had to be taken of the fact that the raw data is not confined