Using the John Larpent Collection of the Lord Chamberlain's Plays, 1737-1824

The plays and pantomimes, songs, prologues, and epilogues in the Larpent Collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, present a rare opportunity to study the systematic implementation of government stage censorship over a very long period of time. It is a remarkably rich research resource covering, as well as the political and social history of censorship, aspects of literary taste, changing attitudes to gender, representations of race and of Britain’s encounter with its global empires of trade and power as well as the representation of crucial ideological themes about patriotic identity.

The Larpent Collection’s timespan covers the staging of plays in Britain over a period of considerable social, political, and economic upheaval. Such changes and turbulences are best indicated from the perspective of military events such as the 1745 pro-Catholic rebellion and its crushing, the American War of Independence and loss of the British colonies in America (1776-82), the impact of the French Revolution (1789-93) on British political culture and the entire period of the war with France (1793-1815). Of course, the Larpent Collection, by definition, is also an archive of new writing for the stage so that changing generic and thematic fashions can be traced very easily.

The purpose of this essay is, first of all, to provide a sense of the structure of the controls on stage writing and also to give some indication of the things which will – and will not – be found in the Larpent Collection. Broadly, new writing for the stage came from London but only from certain parts of it. The second section of the essay will discuss what it is like to get to grips with the manuscripts themselves and the third section will outline some research methodologies which can be adapted to individual requirements.