The Performance of Revolt: A Closer Look at VIC 61.1

Gregory Vargo’s article, “Chartist Drama: The Performance of Revolt,” from Victorian Studies newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, editor Rae Greiner provides an introduction to Gregory’s work.

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In “Chartist Drama: The Performance of Revolt,” Gregory Vargo shows how Chartist activists made powerful political use of the stage, re-contextualizing familiar plays and penning new ones, producing staged re-enactments of historical events, and navigating the demands of amateur production during a turbulent period of radical reformist activity. Mining primary texts unfamiliar to many readers today, Vargo deepens our understanding of the energies—and violence—that fueled both the Chartist movement and the vibrant scene of 1840s drama.

Abstract Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London's largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins's John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet's 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

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Gregory Vargo is an Assistant Professor at New York University. In 2018, Cambridge University Press published his book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel.

He is a co-editor of Chartist Fiction Online (chartistfiction.hosting.nyu.edu/), which indexes over nine hundred stories and reviews in over thirty-five Chartist periodicals. He is also the editor of a collection of four Chartist plays for a volume under contract with Manchester University Press.

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