Serious play

by J. Jeffrey Franklin

Queen Victoria was famously not amused, and the age to which she gave her name is not generally known for its playfulness or sense of fun. But play was pervasive in Victorian society and in the realist novels that were central to that culture. In Serious Play, J. Jeffrey Franklin examines the role of play in three areas - gambling, theatricality, and aesthetic theory - demonstrating in the process how the realist novel served as a vehicle for play while play in turn entered and helped define the form of realism.