George Taylor

During the French Revolution most performances on the London stage were strictly censored, but political attitudes found indirect expression. New and popular genres like pantomime, gothic drama, history plays, musical and spectacular entertainment, and, above all, melodrama provided metaphors for the hopes and fears inspired by the conflict in France and subsequent European wars. This 2001 book looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the ideas and events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. He argues that melodrama had its origins in this period, with certain gothic villains displaying qualities attributed to Robespierre and Napoleon, and that recurrent images of incarceration and dispossession reflected fears of arbitrary persecution, from the tyranny of the Bastille to the Jacobin's Reign of Terror. By a cultural analysis of the popular entertainment and theatre performances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Taylor reveals issues of ideological conflict and psychological stress.

This book is part of the Archive Photographs series, which uses old photographs and archived images to show the history of various local areas in Great Britain.

This superb collection of 200 archive images contrasts two ends of a scale: from village days before the new town was thought of to the events, activities and people of modern Harlow. George Taylor was asked by Harlow Council to record the town and its people through photographs. This book contains some of the images from the resulting archive, which comprises around 20,000 negatives, as well as some examples of much earlier photography in the old town, now preserves by Harlow Museum. Harlow has built up an international reputation for its successful progression from a greenfield site to a planned town of 60,000 people and there is much in this book that will be remembered and enjoyed by today's residents.