William Brough 1 hr 9 min read

A rollicking Victorian Christmas burlesque of the ballet Le Corsaire, pirates, a sea-fairy, comic songs, and pantomime nonsense, staged for the holiday theatre.

William Brough's 1856 play is a comic stage burlesque and pantomime. Playful, punning, of its era. Read it for a delightful artifact of the Victorian Christmas theatre, a merry, song-filled send-up of a romantic ballet, complete with a fairy at the bottom of the sea, in the extravagant, pun-loving style of the mid-century English stage.

In its time

Published in 1856, during the 1850s, fairy tale and moral fantasy for a mass reading public; the sensation novel stirs.

Reading it

1 hr 9 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).