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Farcical Process, Fictional Product: Thackeray's Theatrics in Lovel the Widower

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Anne Layman Horn
Anne Layman Horn
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

Although long slighted by critics, Lovel the Widower should be recognized as the most overtly theatrical work we have from one of the nineteenth century's most theatrical writers. Adapted for the Cornhill Magazine from Thackeray's failed drama, The Wolves and the Lamb, Lovel is narrated by a character who calls himself the “Chorus of the Play” and tells the story of a governess who must hide the fact that she was once an actress. Thackeray published the story to keep the Cornhill's readers entertained while he began work on his last completed novel, The Adventures of Philip. As a piece of occasional journalism, Lovel therefore shares a closer kinship with Thackeray's other periodical writings and Christmas books than it does with his mature novels. Not destined to be the newly-launched Cornhill's chief fictional attraction (that honor went to Trollope's Framley Parsonage), Lovel actually functioned in the magazine as the literary equivalent of a theatrical comic afterpiece.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 135 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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