Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor lyricist composer singer-songwriter comedian theatre-manager journalist artist music tutor speculator and author of novels historical works polemical pamphlets and guides to musical education. This collection of essays illuminates the social and cultural conditions that made such a varied career possible offering fresh insights into previously unexplored aspects of late Georgian culture society and politics. <p/>Tracing the transitions in the cultural economy from an eighteenth-century system of miscellany to a nineteenth-century regime of specialisation <em>Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture</em> illustrates the variety of Dibdin's cultural output as characteristic of late eighteenth-century entertainment while also addressing the challenge mounted by a growing preoccupation with specialisation in the early nineteenth century. <p/>The chapters written by some of the leading experts in their individual disciplines examine Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career spanning cultural spaces from the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden through Ranelagh Gardens Sadler's Wells and the Royal Circus to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadside ballads and graphic satires to newspaper journalism mezzotint etchings painting and decorative pottery. Together they demonstrate connections between forms of cultural production that have often been treated as distinct and provide a model for a more integrated approach to the fabric of late Georgian cultural production.<br>