Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires

Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform

Tracy C. Davis

This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods –including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations’ insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what ‘dramaturgy’ can teach us about ‘history’.

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University. She has published books on nineteenth-century theatre, the economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, and gender and theatre. Her latest book combines these interests in a study of two generations of Victorian activists.

Advance praise

‘With her distinctive form of precision historiography, Tracy Davis has given us a vital and necessary addendum to the long history and ongoing project of abolitionism. Focusing primarily on the lives and work of three Victorians, Davis elaborates a theory of performance that situates seemingly minor forms of activism - hosting dinners and attending meetings, letter-writing campaigns, journalistic reportage, and speechifying - as fundamental to the cultivation of solidarity and to the momentum of political engagement. This is a wonderful book: meticulously researched, compellingly argued, and beautifully narrated.’

Patrick Anderson, University of California, San Diego

UK publication July 2023

US publication September 2023

352 pages

9781009297530 Hardback £29.99 | $39.99 USD | $45.95 CAD

At a glance

• Offers copious examples of how nineteenth-century reformers utilized dramaturgy to describe, enact, and improve political efficacy

• Takes an interdisciplinary approach and traces strategies of reform campaigns in the first transcontinental movements that are still in use today as the cornerstones of single-issue movements and even social media campaigns

• Follows the fortunes of historically neglected activists in the abolitionist, anti-genocidal, and pro-civil rights movements in Britain, the US, South Asia, and throughout the worldwide sphere of British influence and political liberalism

CASS R. SUNSTEIN