Literary Levers

Directors read. Directors read a lot. One of the first things we do when beginning a new production process is try to immerse ourselves as much as possible in the world of the play. This takes many forms: iPod playlists, collections of art and poetry, handwritten lists of images and sense-responses to the text, and often the reading of a great many books and articles. We go through a lot of highlighters. Knowing the history a story is set against is a critical component of the given circumstances in which the characters operate. Other people’s ideas, whether you find yourself agreeing with them or not, are great levers for prying open the text, tipping you off to angles of analysis and approaches to thinking about the play you may have otherwise missed entirely.

One of the first things that jumped out at me immediately when beginning this work was the incredibly broad range of disparate literary works the period produced – so much so that I found myself stopping everything else to assemble a timeline of when they were published. Arranging them in order is like looking at a fantastic cross-section of the ideas that were at play shaping people’s lives during the reign of Victoria in England.

More on this to come…in the meantime, here’s the list:

Timeline of Victorian Era Literature

1813 – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

1819 – Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

1833 – Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1837 – Begin Reign of Queen Victoria

1837 – The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle

1839 – The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

1841 – On Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle

1843 – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

1844 – The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels

1845 – Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman

1850 – David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

1854 – The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1854 – Walden, Henry David Thoreau (United States)

1859 – On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

1859 – A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

1859 – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (trans.), Edward Fitzgerald

1859 – On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

1861 – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

1864 - Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman

1865 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

1872 – Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

1879 – Euclid and his Modern Rivals, Lewis Carroll

1883 – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

1885 - Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1885 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

1886 – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

1887 – A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1888 – A New English Dictionary (OED), Vol 1

1890 – Gunga Din, Rudyard Kipling

1891 – A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1891 – Rerum Novarum “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” – Pope Leo XIII, influenced by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning

1893 – The Final Problem, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1894 – The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

1895 – The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

1897 – Dracula, Bram Stoker

1899 – Rudyard Kipling

1901 – End Reign of Queen Victoria

1902 – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1923 – Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw