A fascinating history of theatre told through the story of Britain's first ever pantomime clown

In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his generation and the most famous man in Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

Of all the theatrical genres most prized by the Victorians, pantomime is the only one to have survived continuously into the twenty-first century. It remains as