Social Melodrama

Barbara T. Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, University of Delaware

Footnote 31, Chapter 3, of the author's Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, which Princeton University Press published in 1988. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

For enlightening discussions of social melodrama see John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Louis James, "The Social Context of Early Victorian Fiction," in The Yearbook of English Studies, ed. G. K. Hunter and C. J. Rawson (Modern Humanities Research Association, 1980), pp. 87-101; and Anne Humpherys, "The Geometry of the Modern City: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries of London," Browning Institute Studies it (1983): 69-80.

Last modified 10 June 2001