![\"house](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/melodramaresearchgroup\/files\/2013\/08\/house-to-let.png\")
<\/a> House to Let<\/em> was written jointly by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins,\u00a0Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter for the 1858 Christmas edition of\u00a0Dickens’ Household Words<\/em>. The first three writers\u00a0are, of course,\u00a0closely linked to melodrama since it\u00a0infuses many of their novels. Dickens’ Bleak House <\/em>(1853), and many others\u00a0in his oeuvre, deploy melodramatic plots, while Collins’ The Woman in White<\/em> (1860) rests on coincidences, and Gaskell’s Mary Barton <\/em>(1848) focuses<\/em> on the suffering eponymous heroine.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
(For more on Dickens and melodrama see Juliet Johns’\u00a0Dickens’s villains: melodrama, character, popular culture<\/i>. Oxford University Press, 2003.)<\/p>\n
Procter’s name may not be as well-known today as the others, but in her time she was considered by some to be the country’s second favourite poet – after Alfred Lord Tennyson (according to Gill Gregory, “Procter, Adelaide Anne (1825\u20131864)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.<\/i> September 2004.)<\/p>\n
Dickens and Collins wrote the first chapter, “Over the Way”, and the last chapter “Let at Last” together, and each of the writers wrote one of the intervening chapters: Gaskell “The Manchester Marriage”, Dickens “Going into Society”, Procter “Three Evenings in the House” and Collins “Trottle’s Report”.<\/p>\n It has been adapted fairly recently (in 2006)\u00a0for a Radio 4 drama which was directed by Ned Chaillet and starred Marcia Warren.<\/p>\n Find the novella via the Gutenberg Project at: http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/2324<\/a><\/p>\n Alternatively, access it on the internet archive: http:\/\/archive.org\/details\/ahousetolet02324gut<\/a><\/p>\n Visit\u00a0our additional blog http:\/\/melodramaresearchgroupextra.wordpress.com\/<\/a>\u00a0for more information.<\/p>\n Do, as always, log in to comment, or email me on sp458@kent.ac.uk<\/a> to add your thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Posted by Sarah Since we have not had much of a chance to explore melodramatic literature in our meetings, I thought exploring a\u00a0short(ish) story\u00a0might be interesting, as well as fairly\u00a0manageable. A House to Let was written jointly by Charles Dickens, … Continue reading <\/a>The story concerns an elderly lady and the mysterious goings on in the house opposite: the ‘House to Let’ of the title. In addition\u00a0to\u00a0the more obvious\u00a0melodramatic elements of the story, it\u00a0should be interesting to analyse how each author deals with melodrama.<\/p>\n