Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain, producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. This collection of essays illuminates the social and cultural conditions that made such a varied career possible, offering fresh insights into previously unexplored aspects of late Georgian culture, society, and politics. Tracing the transitions in the cultural economy from an eighteenth-century system of miscellany to a nineteenth-century regime of specialisation, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture illustrates the variety of Dibdin's cultural output as characteristic of late eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by a growing preoccupation with specialisation in the early nineteenth century. The chapters, written by some of the leading experts in their individual disciplines, examine Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career, spanning cultural spaces from the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, through Ranelagh Gardens, Sadler's Wells, and the Royal Circus, to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadside ballads and graphic satires, to newspaper journalism, mezzotint etchings, painting, and decorative pottery. Together they demonstrate connections between forms of cultural production that have often been treated as distinct, and provide a model for a more integrated approach to the fabric of late Georgian cultural production.

Auteur

Oskar Cox Jensen is a Leverhulme Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. From 2013 to 2017 he was a Research Fellow on the ERC-funded project 'Music in London, 1800-1851' at King's College London. His publications include Napoleon and British Song, 1797-1822 (2015), and The London Ballad-Singer, 1792-1864. With David Kennerley, he is preparing a collection on music and politics, c.1780-1850. He has authored various articles and book chapters, as well as several works of fiction. David Kennerley is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the 'Music in London, 1800-1851' project at King's College London. His research explores the history of sound, music, and performance in Britain in the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on sonic aspects of gender, and of political culture. His work has been published in the Historical Journal, and has featured in a Bodleian Library exhibition and accompanying book on Staging History, 1780-1840. He is currently completing a monograph on female singers in early nineteenth-century Britain, and, with Oskar Cox Jensen, editing a collection of essays on music and politics, c.1780-1850. Ian Newman is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish studies. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature. His work has appeared in Studies in English Literature, European Romantic Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Romanticism. He is currently completing a book The Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution. He is engaged in a digital project tracing the meeting places of the London Corresponding Society and is a founding editor of the Keats Letters Project.