In this article Bernard Ince analyzes the characteristics and causes of personal insolvency and bankruptcy among professional theatrical artistes in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, 1830 to 1913, within England and Wales. This offers an illuminating development of the author's previous studies of the impact of bankruptcy laws on the Victorian theatre and the pattern of failures in theatre management over this period. It identifies key points of convergence and divergence between the trends in failure of managers and artistes, considering reasons for these variations and for the number of failures overall. It concludes that prominent among the many causes of insolvency in artistes were touring company failures and irregularity of employment, which goes some way to explain why a higher percentage of artistes than managers were engaged in at least one occupation unrelated to theatre work. The article also provides a necessary methodological foundation for future study of an area that has often been overlooked. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of tne Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.

Bernard Ince here surveys insolvency and bankruptcy in the theatres of England and Wales during the period 1830 to 1913. His methodology analyzes failures in absolute and relative terms, using aggregate and disaggregated data. The annual pattern of failure shows a marked volatility in the aggregate, with the absolute number of failures tending to increase towards the 1880s before declining thereafter. When the data are expressed as a rate relative to annual theatre population change, the trend is, however, reversed, failures being much higher in the 1830s and 40s than in the later decades. When annual failures are analyzed alternatively in terms of the number of theatres actually managed or owned by bankrupts, and the data disaggregated between the London and provincial theatres, different patterns of failure emerge, London theatres experiencing higher risk during those early decades, while the provincial Theatres Royal on the other hand are especially vulnerable during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, and other theatres in the provinces are exposed more during the 1860s. From an analysis of over 200 cases it is clear that factors contributing to theatrical failure are diverse and often complex. Rarely is failure the result of a single catastrophic event but is more often caused by a combination of events, or from the cumulative impact of insolvencies carried over from previous years. While a correlation between annual fluctuations in theatrical failures and cycles in the general economy cannot be firmly established, anecdotal evidence suggests that regional or local conditions play a more important role. It is concluded that while the financial situation of many theatres operated on the limits of financial viability, bankruptcy on a significant scale was uncommon, indicative of remarkable resilience in the face of profound economic, social, political, and legislative change. The author is an independent theatre historian.

Recent scholarship has suggested that frequent receipt of news, especially in new media such as newspapers, altered conceptions of time in the early modern period. In particular, a new and modern “present” was born. This occupied a half-known and semifluid point between the fixity of the past and the unpredictability of the future. It created an imagined contemporaneous moment that linked geographically dispersed events. It was progressive, appearing to move the world ever forward into a novel state. However, close examination of English newspapers in the period 1695–1713, the first era of sustained news periodicals, calls these suggestions into question. Certainly the press of this era provided a constant and corrective update of information from all over Europe. This might have encouraged a sense of a fluid, contemporaneous, and progressive present. However, newspapers also tended to catalog information like a chronicle, which had the potential to fix contents as established history rather than fluid news. Delays in communication from distant places and journalistic practices of holding back stories for later publication ensured that information of different ages was presented on the same page. This destroyed any clear sense of a contemporaneous moment. The requirement to print the next issue even when there was no new information drew explicit attention to the lack of progressive development in some stories. This article posits a highly fractured presentation of time in later Stuart newspapers. It suggests that this is perhaps best analyzed by concepts drawn from “postmodern” theory rather than a hunt for emerging features of “modernity.”