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Performing “The Profession” in Leonard Merrick's The Position of Peggy Harper (1911)

2013; Routledge; Volume: 94; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0013838x.2013.814327

1744-4217

Janine Utell,

Theatre and Performance Studies

AbstractIn The Position of Peggy Harper, an unjustly neglected novel by Edwardian playwright Leonard Merrick, a young idealist seeks a career in the theatre only to run up against the tawdry commercialism of third-rate touring companies and rapacious managers. In Merrick's novel, the tension between inauthenticity and sincerity is linked to the problematic place of the professional artistic self in the late Victorian/Edwardian cultural marketplace. The metaphoric work done by theatricality in Merrick's novel drives his investigation into the problem of the authentic artistic self committed to a professional ideal in spite of the demands of the marketplace and the impulse towards massification and insincerity in commercial cultural production. Merrick's realistic and ironic representation of the construction of a working professional self in the world—here, the theatre—in tension with an ideal of profession as vocation, ultimately speaks to and for the anxiety of performing an authentic self in early twentieth-century modernity. AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Erin D. Sells, Erin Templeton and Chris Forster for comments on earlier drafts of this article.Notes1Merrick, Actor, 31.2All quotations from Virginia Woolf are as cited in William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker, 127. Baker and Shumaker's book is the only full-length study of Leonard Merrick's work. The title of the monograph comes from J. M. Barrie's preface to the 1918 reissue of Merrick's Conrad in Quest of His Youth where Barrie calls him “a novelist's novelist” (vi). This is from the same series of 1918 reissues for which Arthur Wing Pinero wrote a preface for The Position of Peggy Harper. Woolf's review is of the 1918 reissue, not the original 1911 publication; her article addresses the entire collection, although the praise is directed specifically at The Position of Peggy Harper. All of the works authored by Merrick cited in this article are available as free e-books on Google Books; the novels are out of print.3Pinero, viii.4Orwell, Aspidistra.5Orwell, “Introduction,” 53.6Merrick's depiction of Tatham's failure to negotiate royalties shows how disastrous he is at looking out for his own self-interest, which is of course part of his characterization as a sensitive artist: by 1911, it was fairly standard for a playwright to be able to negotiate royalties. It may also show how unprotected and naïve Tatham is, and how anti-acquisitive.7In the ways he is concerned with the status of the emerging professional, as well as the anxiety around the theatre, Merrick is aligned with the realist novels of the nineteenth century. J. Jeffrey Franklin, Emily Allen and Alison Byerly have all argued that nineteenth-century realist authors such as William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot deploy theatricality and theatrical tropes as a way to grapple with the anxiety of self-fashioning and self-representation, the performance of the self in the world. In Merrick's novels, especially The Position of Peggy Harper, theatricality has kept the association of insincerity it had for nineteenth-century realist authors (with none of its concomitant subversive or deviant connotations); however, where he differs from his forebears is in his exploration of the processes of fashioning a modern, urban, professional self and in his deep sense of irony towards these processes (perhaps the author where one sees the most parallels there is Thackeray).8Besant, 20.9Colon, 6–7.10The following dates may give a helpful timeline for the process of professionalization that serves as the context for discussing Merrick's novel: Reports on the Select Committees on Dramatic Literature, held in 1832, 1866, 1892 (commissioned by the government; focusing on investigations into who was attending the theatre and types of audiences drawn to specific venues); 1833: Dramatic Copyright Act, founding of Dramatic Authors Society; 1843: Theatre Regulation Act; 1858: Dramatic College founded; 1875: publication of G. H. Lewes's Actors and the Art of Acting; 1877: The Theatre founded; 1884: Society of Authors founded, swallows Dramatic Authors Society; 1886: Theatrical Restrictions on Ash Wednesday abolished; 1888: William Archer's Masks or Faces?; 1891: Actors’ Association founded; 1892: Percy Fitzgerald's The Art of Acting; 1895: Henry Irving knighted; 1904: Royal Academy of Dramatic Art founded; 1905: Actors’ Union founded.11As cited in Booth, 112.12Fitzgerald; Archer; Terry.13West, 16.14Colon, 181.15Woodfield, 33.16Merrick, Actor, 215.17Ibid., 109.18Ibid., 50.19Donohue, 14–16.20Michael Baker, 22–4.21Merrick, Position, 2.22Ibid., 10–11.23Ibid., 20.24Jerome.25Merrick, Position, 39.26Ibid., 66.27Ibid., 69.28Ibid., 76.29Ibid., 270.30Ibid., 261.31Ibid., 240.32Ibid., 245.33Ibid., 255.34Hadley, 191–2.35Franklin, 89.36Merrick, Position, 118.37Allen, 135.38Merrick, Position, 131.39Ibid., 145.40Ibid., 181.41Ibid., 185.42Ibid., 277.43Hapgood, 12.44Ibid., 39.