Digital Lacy and the Victorian sense of humour

Lou Burnard (Independant Researcher)

The Digital Lacy project

Digitization of all 100 volumes of Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays
freely available in digital form, both image and transcription
along with detailed descriptive metadata.

Thomas Hailes Lacy (1809-1873)

Available forms for the drama

manuscript
performance traces
acting edition
collection of scripts
volume set
post facto edition
digitization

Manuscript

Traces of Performance

Acting Editions

Script Collections

The market

Volume sets

"the most perfect Edition of Plays ever published"

Editions

Digitization

Representativeness

Q. Can we consider the LAE as a representative sample of the whole population called "Victorian Theatre"?
A. Depends how you define that population!

The datasets used are maintained online at https://github.com/lb42/Lacy

Date

Size

Authorship

Classifying authors by their productivity...

Genre

Conclusion

The LAE is a reliable source of information about most varieties of comic performance during the period 1850 to 1870
It thus provides a sound basis for understanding the evolution of the Victorian sense of humour

Project website (in development): https://lb42.github.io/Lacy/