Stephen Ridgwell

Interior view of the Victoria theatre, then known as the Coburg, c. 1819. Smithsonian Design Museum. Public Domain.

‘Jane Eyre’ Goes to the Theatre

When it arrived on the Victorian stage, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had a cast of new characters and a new social order.

Toussaint Louverture, 19th-century engraving. Alamy.

Britannia’s Black Spartacus

Toussaint Louverture, the father of Haitian independence, became an unlikely star of the Victorian London stage.

Jack Sheppard sits for Hogarth (right) and Thornhill (left), while talking to James Figg. Engraving by George Cruikshank, 1839.

Sheppard’s Warning

A thief who had been dead for more than a century caused a moral panic in the theatres of Victorian London.

‘Strangled for a bird’: The Case of the Aldbury Poachers

A double murder in an English wood became a Victorian cause célèbre, provoking a national debate about the tyranny of land ownership and the loss of ancient liberties.