Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Playing the provinces; 2. Patronage: merchants, tradesmen; 3. Combination acts and friendly societies; 4. Weavers; 5. Mines and mills; 6. King Ludd, Captain Swing, Captain Rock; 7. Vagrants, beggars; 8. Poachers, smugglers, wreckers, coiners; 9. Explosions, conflagrations, and other happy endings.

Promotional Information

Frederick Burwick reveals how the most volatile developments in British drama from the 1790s to 1830s took place in the industrial provinces.

About the Author

Frederick Burwick is a Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author and editor of thirty-two books and one hundred and fifty articles, he has been named Distinguished Scholar by the British Academy (1992) and by the Keats-Shelley Association (1998). The International Conference on Romanticism presented him a Lifetime Achievement Award (2013). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009) and general editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (2012). Recent monographs include Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting (Cambridge, 2009), Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830 (2011), and, co-authored with Manushag Powell, British Pirates in Print and Performance (2015).