Popular sentiments: Victorian melodrama, class, and sentimentality

A sentimental mode of representation flourishes in Victorian literature because such a mode can accommodate the representational needs of vastly divergent readers, spectators, and writers. Novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, and Ellen Wood attempt to use the emotional appeal of sentimentality while distancing it from its eighteenth-century class connotations. With a keen eye on their predominantly middle-class readership, these novelists strive to demonstrate, produce, and shape proper emotional responses in their readers, distinguishing these responses from working-class feeling and from eighteenth-century models of aristocratic sentimentality. Victorian stage melodrama, in contrast, uses sentimental images to appeal to the most socially diverse audiences. Melodramatic playwrights in London\u27s West End, recognizing that their audiences include both aristocrats and chimney-sweeps, negotiate between the expectations, desires, and fantasies of such disparate audiences by presenting sentimental images of the family or the nation. Such images allow for freedom in the stage representation of dissident values, while ensuring that the implications of these values are never worked through. As a working-class leisure culture becomes increasingly well-defined and distinct late in the century, melodrama, which earlier made its appeals to diverse audiences, plays directly to the middle class and loses its position of prominence on the stage. Adapting to a mood of fin-de-siecle despair, late melodramas offer increasingly shrill declarations of optimism and moral certainty while losing the ability to appeal across class lines. Music Hall offers to its spectators not change but the consolation of working-class philosophy, exchanging narratives of wish-fulfillment for comic stoicism and class solidarity