Changes in Writer Stratifications across Media in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter focuses on the social and cultural stratifications of writers within and across media and the status of theatrical writing, which had been affected significantly by copyright laws. It finds that theatre’s status as a primarily adapting rather than original domain of writing had been indirectly determined by lax copyright laws, which led to producers favouring adaptations over original writing. The chapter further ponders adaptation’s effects on theatrical aesthetic theory, as well as the cultural and social position of the English theatre and the dramatic writer. Creating dialogues between prose writers and dramatic adapters such as Charles Dickens and William Thomas Moncrieff and studying other prose writers’ attempts to dramatise their own work, including Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, this chapter finds that the hierarchical values attached to different forms of writing and media were very much shaped by adaptation and in turn shaped attitudes towards adaptation and authorship. These dynamics only started to abate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when copyright laws governing adaptation tightened, resulting in more original theatrical writing and higher esteem for cross-media writing.