I was browsing some playbills in the online collection of the British Library, when I came across an interesting poster advertising a stage adaptation of the Charles Dickens novella The Battle of Life and the melodrama The Black Doctor, a play later made famous by Ira Aldridge.
It's been the season for Dickens, who followed up A Christmas Carol in 1843 with a new Christmas book, The Chimes, the following year. After The Chimes was likewise a bestseller, Dickens wrote The Cricket on the Hearth to be sold at Christmastime in 1845 and The Battle of Life in 1846.
A Christmas Carol is divided not into chapters but five staves, like the staves of a poem or song. The Chimes is broken up into four quarters, like the quarters of an hour, and The Cricket on the Hearth has three chirps. Perhaps Dickens had grown weary of this humorous conceit, as The Battle of Life is simply divided into three parts.
Those three parts do correspond well to the three acts of a play, which might have made the piece ripe for adaptation to the stage. The playbill from the Theatre Royal in Bath announces the closing of both shows on January 7, 1847, which means the adaptation must have been written soon after Dickens had published the book the previous month.
Dickens purposely set The Battle of Life about a hundred years in the past. As with Robert Browning's play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, which Dickens had championed, the 18th-century setting was necessary to portray certain values that had already become obsolete by the Victorian era. Rather than being set in the city, like many of Dickens's novels, the story takes place in the countryside, in a town near a famous battle site.
After setting up the action, the story moves forward three years. It is this second part that takes place around Christmastime, and in fact the main event of the narrative occurs during a Christmas ball, when the beautiful Marion mysteriously disappears. She does not return until the third part, which occurs another six years later. Though The Battle of Life is by no means Dickens's most famous work, I can see why it would be tempting to adapt it for the stage, since the three parts correspond so well to the three-act structure preferred in many plays of the period.
The Black Doctor, however, was originally divided into seven acts when it was written in French by Auguste Anicét-Bourgeois and Philippe François Pinel Dumanoir under the title Le Docteur Noir. It was later turned into a four-act play translated by John Vilon Bridgeman and further adapted by Thomas Hailes Lacy. It is this version that seems to have been advertised on the playbill, rather than the adaptation by Thomas Archer that Aldridge later appeared in and made famous.
I would have liked to have seen that evening of plays produced in Bath! Having just read The Battle of Life and having a long-standing interest in The Black Doctor, I would be intrigued to see how the company handled both works.
