This volume examines Charles Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career as an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author, and offers fresh insights into late Georgian culture, society, and politics.

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.

In September of 1809 during the opening night of Macbeth at the newly rebuilt Covent Garden theatre the audience rioted over the rise in ticket prices. Disturbances took place on the following sixty-six nights that autumn and the Old Price riots became the longest running theatre disorder in English history. This book describes the events in detail, sets them in their wider context, and uses them to examine the interpenetration of theatre and disorder. Previous understandings of the riots are substantially revised by stressing populist rather than class politics. Baer concentrates on the theatricality of audiences, the role of the stage in shaping English self-image and the relationship between contention and consensus. In so doing, theatre and theatricality are rediscovered as explanations for the cultural and political structures of the Georgian period. Based on meticulous research in theatre and governmental records, newspapers, private correspondence, and satirical prints and other ephemera, this study is an unusually interesting and original contribution to the social and political history of early 19th-century Britain.

This book presents history an analysis of the English glee, a neglected art form popular in England during the time of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. With an introduction, bibliography, indices, music examples, tables and figures.

55,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2002.

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.