Editorial: Special Issue on Dion Boucicault

Abstract

If we take Dion Boucicault’s own word for it, 2022 marks the bicentenary of his birth. Characteristically, Boucicault may have ornamented the truth about this: his biographer Richard Fawkes thought 1820 was a more likely arrival date. So let us call 2022 the authorised anniversary, or the official commemoration year for the subject of this special issue on Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. This influential, colourful, often unscrupulous man of the theatre worked for over forty years in six countries, earning (and losing) vast sums as writer, adaptor, and actor-manager. At the height of his career, between the late 1850s and the tail of the 1870s, Dion Boucicault was an inescapable, ubiquitous figure in his industry.