The Inchcape bell
By: Edward Fitzball. Did you ever send your wife to Camberwell? / Joseph Stirling Coyne.  The game of speculation / George Henry Lewes. The lights o' London / George Robert Sims. The middleman / Henry Arthur Jones ; edited by Michael R. Booth
Contributors: Booth, Michael R; Fitzball, Edward, 1792-1873.; Coyne, J. Stirling 1803-1868.; Lewes, George Henry, 1817-1878.; Sims, George Robert, 1847-1922.; Jones, Henry Arthur, 1851-1929.
Series: Oxford drama library
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Oxford
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
Subjects: English drama -- 19th century
Other titles: Lights o' London and other Victorian plays
Description: The Plays in this volume were all successful in their time. Edward Fitzball (1792-1873) was a prolific writer of melodramas, and The Inchcape Bell (1828) contains the Gothic and nautical elements then popular on the stage. Joseph Stirling Coyne (1803-68), who wrote Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell? (1846), was principally an author of farces, and the play is typical of the kind of farce with a humble domestic setting and characters to match, popular in the 1840s.

George Henry Lewes (1817-78) wrote relatively few plays, but The Game of Speculation (1851) is a cutting comic satire upon greed and duplicity, softened by the usual Victorian sentimental ending. George Sims (1847-1922), the author of seventy plays, specialized, like Fitzball, in melodrama, but melodrama on a much larger social and urban scale. The Lights o' London (1881), which has never been printed, is the most famous of Sims's plays, with a stage history that stretched into the 1930s. The Middleman (1889), a play about capitalist exploitation and how the tables are turned, is a good example of the way in which the older melodrama became that staple of the late Victorian theatre, the 'drama'.

Its author, Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929), soon came to be ranked with Pinero and other important dramatists of the 1890s.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references
Table of contents: title: The inchcape bell, or the dumb sailor boy / Edward Fitzball - Did you ever send your wife to Camberwell? /Joseph Stirling Coyne - The game of speculation / George Henry Lewes - The lights o' London /Goerge Robert Sims - The Middleman /Henry Arthur Jones