1 Suffolk Street, London, England
November 28-29, 2014
In addition, Dibdin’s sea songs were central to establishing the Royal Navy as the mainstay of British patriotism, in spite of mutiny, sedition, and the press-gang, playing a significant role in uniting a fractious nation after the upheavals of the 1790s. Charles’ private endeavours were also prolific. Family members included his daughter Ann Dibdin Dacre, a talented artist who provided illustrations for Dibdin’s Memoirs. His affair with the actress and dancer Harriet Pitt (1748?-1814) resulted in a daughter, and two sons: Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin (1768-1833), who staged spectacular mock-sea battles in his aquatic theatre at Sadler’s Wells; and Thomas Dibdin (1771-1841), opera librettist, poet, composer and author of numerous theatre-pieces including Harlequin and Humpo, between them continuing their father’s legacy into the nineteenth century.
Topics might include:
- Patriotism, propaganda and performance
- Orientalism and the staging of empire
- Blackface and representations of race
- Legitimate and illegitimate theatre
- Celebrity, biography, reputation
- Gender and the public sphere
- Performance practices
- The one-man show
- Music and morality
- Genre and composition
- Origins of the music-hall
- Book history and broadsides
- Theatrical and musical economies
- Music markets, copyright and piracy
- Forms of writing: the novel and the song
- Provincial and metropolitan entertainments
The conference will be in a workshop format consisting of a series of roundtable discussions of pre-circulated papers. Dinner, accommodation, and a performance of Dibdin’s songs will be provided for all participants. Papers will be circulated by November 14, 2014.These will form the basis of a collection of essays placing Dibdin in his world, providing new ways to conceive of the relationships between legitimate and illegitimate theatre, elite and popular entertainment, and provincial and metropolitan performance.
Abstracts (max 500 words) for 3-5,000 word papers should be sent with a short biography to Dibdin200@gmail.com by May 26, 2014. For more information please contact the organisers, Drs Oskar Cox Jensen (King’s College London), David Kennerley (Oxford) and Ian Newman (Notre Dame) at Dibdin200@gmail.com.
This conference forms part of the ERC-funded project “Music in London, 1800-1851”, led by Professor Roger Parker, King’s College London, with support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.