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68 MELODRAMA
The Britannia, under Mrs. Sara Lane, had for playwright-in-ordinary C. H. Hazlewood, whose plays ran into hundreds. His Jessy Vere ; or, The Return Of The Wanderer in 1856 had a baronet who secretly marries a vicar's daughter and finds her a bar to his social success ; that was an old story but the sentiments were up to date. Jacob Thorne, a poor but honest labourer, asks, " Does not nature bless us with bounteous harvest, and flocks and herds in plenty ? But man — greedy, grasping man — stands like a fiend between the food of life and his fellow creatures." The Hon. Arthur Fanshawe, heir to a baronetcy, joins in the man-hunt when Jacob is falsely accused :
Jessy What has the man done?
Arthur [slightly intoxicated) 'Pon my life I don't know — something, I suppose, or if he has not, it's of no consequence ; he's a poor halfstarved devil, and such people are fit for nothing else than to afford folks like us a little amusement.
Yet the most popular dramatist was Shakespeare, " for the proper representation of whose works many talented performers are engaged ". This was also true of the Standard, Shoreditch, the Britannia's neighbour. As both places were rebuilt to house crowds of 3 ,000 a night the popularity of their performances, Shakespeare or melodrama, is manifest. John Douglass, who began as a pantomime child at Covent Garden, managed theatres at Gravesend and Chelsea while becoming one of the most popular of Jolly Jack Tars. In the 1860s he managed both the Standard and the Pavilion, Whitechapel.
" From Mayhew's cyclopaedic work " was the strange derivation of an afterpiece, London Labour And London Poor ; or, Want And Vice, at the Whitechapel Pavilion in i860. It was a local drama of real life with scenes of thieves' kitchens, station-houses and boozing kens. A wife is persecuted by a roue, cornet in the Guards; her husband is tempted to crime by the cadger chief. " It is questionable how far it is provident to rivet the attention of an uneducated audience by a vivid representation of the social aspects of the outcasts of society ", was a critic's judgment.