Jane Eyre on Stage reviewed at TLS

The Times Literary Supplement reviews the latest book by Patsy Stoneman: Jane Eyre On Stage, 1848-1898 (check our own review here):

(...)Now Patsy Stoneman has produced a useful and illuminating study of eight adaptations of Jane Eyre staged within the first fifty years of the novel's publication. If for no other reason, this book would be welcome simply as an accessible version of plays that exist only in manuscript in the British Library (which holds the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays for licensing), or in fairly rare acting editions. But Stoneman has done more. By setting the plays side by side, she has enabled us to make reasonable assumptions about the audiences for these melodramas, and by extension, for domestic melodrama more generally. (...)
The Surrey drew a generally working-and lower-middle-class audience, and it specialized in "servant" plays (Susan Hopley, or, The Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl ran and ran), and this Jane Eyre did not disappoint. The play opens with Betty Bunce bemoaning her lot as "servant of all work to a charity school", and pitying the girls who "are sent out of the way by fathers and mothers that can't very well account for their being in the way". When Brocklehurst bullies Jane Eyre, Joe Joker, another servant, is sacked for sympathizing with her. As Stoneman notes, his departure from Lowood with Betty makes Jane's departure "less the solitary flight of a Romantic individualist than part of a concerted rebellion of class victims".

This Jane Eyre was staged in 1848, the year that saw publication of The Communist Manifesto, the final Chartist petition, and several European revolutions. Yet the servants, seemingly so independent in Act One, by the last act are happily employed by Rochester: Act One, it turns out, is a protest against bad masters, not the concept of masters and servants. When Joe Joker sees Rochester about to be engulfed in flames, he rushes forward to rescue him:
"He is our master and must not perish thus!". (...)
Alongside these individual insights, Stoneman examines the similarities and changes across fifty years: some versions stress the predatory nature of Rochester, and the fate of a woman who succumbs to a false marriage; others are more interested in class mockery of the lower orders. Rochester's moral worth fluctuates -in the 1848 version, the madwoman is his wife; in several others, she is his evil brother's immoral widow, mother to Adele; in 1879, Adele is his illegitimate child, and not only is the madwoman his wife, but there is a parallel story of John Reed's seduction and abandonment of Blanche Ingram that emphasizes what happens when "the choicest jewel of a woman's life" is taken away from her.
These richly rewarding texts have been edited well by Stoneman, with some thoughtful notes on Victorian melodrama in general and specific theatres in particular. One wishes that her publisher had employed a proofreader -the text is littered with errors -but melodrama-lovers everywhere must be grateful to have access to a version of Jane Eyre that includes renditions of a song called "I'll Wear the Trousers, Oh", and another that includes the line "Hark! Sir Rowland himself -I know his proud step".

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Theatre