Elaine Hadley is Assistant Professor of English and of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

"This is a very significant and original contribution to our understanding of melodrama per se and, more generally, of Victorian social relations and cultural representations. Moreover, it is a masterful demonstration of the kind of historical research that many in literary studies now talk of doing, but few do with such vigor and thoroughness."—Christina Crosby, Wesleyan University "Centering her discussion around the term 'melodramatic modes,' Hadley examines a response to the social, economic, and epistemological changes that characterized the Consolidation of market society in the nineteenth century. . . . In spite of the fact that she covers the whole of the nineteenth century and cites multiple examples, Hadley's approach is unified, fresh, and innovative. She suggests new and significant ways of looking at Victorian culture and challenging some traditional judgments."—Choice

• Introduction: staging the melodramatic mode 1. Unromantic melodrama 2. The old price wars: melodramatising the public sphere in early nineteenth-century England 3. Storming the Bastille: Oliver Twist and the melodramatic resistance to the new Poor Law of 1834 4. The Queen's English: melodramatic rhetoric in Victoria's England 5. Blows into whispers: the melodramatic mode and intellectual culture in the 1870s and 1880s.