James L’Angelle
University of Nevada, Reno
Dr. A. Keniston
21 November 2019
A Paradox: Mr. Wopsle in Victorian England Theater
Charles Dickens creates a character in his novel Great Expectations who initially is an obscure clerk in a village parish church but moves on to London where he performs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Mr. Wopsle, through the narrative first-person view of Pip Pirrip, is a bumbling B-rated actor going by the name “Roscius” as well as “Waldengarver.” Wopsle, along with just about everybody else in the play, is humiliated by the “Debating Society” in the cheap gallery seats, subject to rude remarks and pelted with food.
Exactly why Dickens bothers to feature Mr. Wopsle at all is a complete mystery. Was it to merely entertain his readers with a unique twist in Great Expectations or is there a deeper significance, perhaps to shed some light on Victorian theater? Twofold then is the objective:
first, the evolution of Mr. Wopsle as a character in Great Expectations; second, a close look at his relation to mid-nineteenth century London theater as personified in presentation of Mr. Wopsle’s Hamlet.
(Footnote)- “In that respect few subjects offer a tougher challenge than Charles Dickens, with whom the novelist Jane Smiley has been paired. As she acknowledges at the outset of her book, his is ‘possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history.’ This is partly because he is arguably second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of English writers, and so has attracted almost as much critical and scholarly attention.” (David Lodge, The Atlantic)
Sources
Shakespeare, W., Hamlet, 2019, Norton, New York
Dickens, C., Mr. Wopsle’s Hamlet (1861), 2019, Norton, New York, pp 312-14
Lodge, D., Dickens Our Contemporary, 2002, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/dickens-our-contemporary/302494/
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Mr_Wopsle_as_Hamlet%2C_by_Harry_Furniss.jpeg
