The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays: The Inchape Bell; Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell?; The Game of Speculation; The Lights o' London; The Middleman (The ^AWorld's Classics) by Edward Fitzball

George Henry Lewes (1817-78) wrote relatively few plays, but The Game of Speculation (1851) is a cutting comic satire upon greed and duplicity, softened by the usual Victorian sentimental ending. George Sims (1847-1922), the author of seventy plays, specialized, like Fitzball, in melodrama, but melodrama on a much larger social and urban scale. The Lights o' London (1881), which has never been printed, is the most famous of Sims's plays, with a stage history that stretched into the 1930s. The Middleman (1889), a play about capitalist exploitation and how the tables are turned, is a good example of the way in which the older melodrama became that staple of the late Victorian theatre, the 'drama'.