Abstract
It is with tremendous sadness that we acknowledge the death of Professor Jim Davis, who was an editor of this journal from 2008. For the past nine years, Patricia, Janice, and Sharon had the pleasure of working with him on the publication and organising various related symposia and conferences. A particular highlight was in 2018 in Venice where Jim’s legendary conviviality was much in evidence in the non-working part of the schedule.
Jim’s research was extraordinarily wide-ranging, taking in the late eighteenth, as well as the nineteenth century, and historical, biographical, literary, and sociological questions. At various times, Jim’s writing encompassed: actors, adaptation, audiences, the Britannia Theatre, Robert Burns, circus, comedians, Dickens, John Liston, Edmund Kean, pantomime, portraiture, scenic design, Shakespearian performance, spectatorship, transmedia and cultural exchanges and Frederick Wilton. His work made a substantial contribution to theatre history and historiography and had wide interdisciplinary reach, influencing the thinking of scholars around the world, as shown by the tributes below.
An advocate of studying nineteenth-century performance in its widest sense, Jim was an enthusiastic supporter of new scholars and those new to studying theatre. He was notably collegial in this as in all things, a prolific editor and enabler, and a great collaborator, most notably devising the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) project to investigate Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century together with Kate Newey and Patricia Smyth, and in organising the research events for that project.
Jim’s notable publications included significant monographs, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (with Victor Emeljanow; University of Iowa Press, 2001); John Liston: Comedian (Society for Theatre Research, 1985), Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Theatre & Entertainment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and a number of edited collections, Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900 (Ashgate, 2014) and The Cambridge Companion to Circus (with Gillian Arrighi; Cambridge University Press, 2021). His scholarly editions were equally important: Plays by H. J. Byron (Cambridge University Press, 1984); The Britannia Diaries of Frederick Wilton (Society for Theatre Research, 1992); Lives of the Shakespearean Actors II: Edmund Kean (Pickering and Chatto, 2009); and Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens (with Jacky Bratton; Oxford, 2017–18).
In September 2024, we will be hosting a symposium in tribute to Jim’s work at the University of Cambridge and will subsequently be publishing a special edition of the journal inspired by his scholarship. As colleagues and friends, we mourn his loss, but celebrate his life and achievements with thanks.
Tributes
Gillian Arrighi
UNSW, Sydney
I first met Jim over twenty years ago in 2003. It was in Brisbane, at the annual conference for ADSA, the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies. It was my first academic conference, and I was utterly in awe of all academics.
Jim was happy and gregarious. He was looking forward to taking up his new position as Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. After eighteen years at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, he was exhilarated, I think, by his professorial appointment at Warwick. It was a strident validation of his research, his ideas, his energy, drive, warmth, and professionalism. What struck me about Jim, from that first acquaintance, was his approachability, his sense of humour and fun, and his generous support for younger scholars in the early stages of their academic career. The next time I saw Jim was in St. Petersburg, a year later, in 2004, at the IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) conference – the first of many international conferences where we’d catch up, and he’d introduce me to an ever-growing circle of collegial acquaintances, some of whom became my friends over the years.
And over the years Jim became a valued and trusted mentor for me, as I’m sure he was for many others; a sounding board for ideas and enquiries, a generous and tireless writer of references and letters of support, but most especially, a friend. His home was always open to me, as was his kitchen, where he was an energetic and imaginative cook. More recently we co-edited a book together, the Cambridge Companion to the Circus. Published in 2021, we ‘cooked up’ the idea for this book in Jim’s kitchen in 2011. Jim was an immensely generous host to academics from abroad.
His breadth of knowledge, and his keen awareness of who was doing what in research was remarkable, arising from his curiosity and genuine interest in what others were doing, and where our discipline was going. He understood the challenges for academics in Australia, due to geographic distance from the cultural centres of the northern hemisphere, and challenges in getting research noticed internationally. He championed ideas and initiatives that would enable research from many different countries to be heard in international fora.
I think Jim loved Sydney, the harbour city, with its vibrant light and blue skies, where he had a wide circle of friends, and of course his daughters, Catherine and Helen. Jim developed long, deep friendships in Australia, and garnered immense respect from academics in our field. That respect was due to his research and extensive publishing, and for his support and advocacy for ADSA, the peak body for theatre and performance studies in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The University of New South Wales was the first Australian university to establish a Drama department. That was in the 1960s. Jim made a significant contribution to the standing of that department during his years of tenure there. Many students he taught moved naturally into the arts and culture sectors and many of his past students remember Jim with fondness, respect, and gratitude as a deeply knowledgeable and generous teacher. His influence on theatre and performance studies in Australia goes on.
Jacky Bratton
Royal Holloway, University of London
Jim Davis is a deep loss to the world of theatre history, and to his many friends in the field. He was an unfailingly sweet, reliable, and welcome presence in our gatherings, a witty and sensible voice in every discussion, and a friend to everyone in the field. His many generosities will be remembered across the academic world by colleagues and students alike.
His research fields and mine ran very close to each other, but always to fruitful effect – we often worked on related materials, but there was never any gate-keeping or competition in our many discussions. Jim would always have some helpful response to whatever one shared; he would always openly share from his own research, which was not only deep and extensive, but exact, scholarly, and analytically considered.
Our last project, two volumes selecting and editing plays derived from the work of Charles Dickens, came about when I asked him whether he thought such a book would be a good idea – and he immediately responded by magically producing a collection of such texts he had already edited and had stashed in a drawer somewhere. His selection was not the same as mine; we could publish them side by side.
Jim was a modest, funny, and unassuming man, who worked unstintingly and wrote illuminatingly in a field he loved. All of us are the richer for having known him.
Michael Burden
University of Oxford
There are many words that could be used to describe Jim; the one that I think sums him up best is an overwhelming sense of generosity. I found him receptive of new ideas, and deeply knowledgeable in a wide range of theatrical (and other) subjects. In a conversation that could start with an esoteric discussion of David Roberts’ scene design, the discourse could move to set perspective, to watercolour techniques, to what opera might benefit from such dramatic designs, to what the possible results of a tour of the country by a strongman might have been, to what the best pub was we could patronise for dinner at a conference.
Intellectually and personally generous then, certainly, but he was, above all, generous with time. He was there to be consulted, to commiserate, to support, and to cheer on scholars and academic endeavours. We intersected on a book series with Boydell & Brewer, reading panels for conferences, and advisory boards of all kinds, activities at which he excelled, and to which he gave an unmatched, unflagging, attention.
That he enjoyed meeting friends and colleagues was obvious; I remember his huge disappointment when I broke the news to him that the London Stage in the Nineteenth-Century World III had, like much else, to be held online. He’d hoped, he said, that this would be the first in-person conference in post-COVID times! But there was always a next one, and I remember him at the Exeter conference, his joyful camaraderie undimmed. I miss him.
Tracy C. Davis
Northwestern University
I met Jim when I was a graduate student and he was on the faculty at Roehampton: we both attended one of Susan Bassnett’s high-powered one-day workshops at the University of Warwick (on semiotics, if I recall correctly), and when I was researching in London, Jim followed up by inviting me to a Sunday lunch. It was one of the few homecooked hot dinners I ate during those years, and I was deeply impressed by his hospitality as well as culinary skill. (He served coq au vin, and yes, a whole bottle of red wine went into the pot.)
A few years later, after we had both relocated – Jim to Sydney, NSW and me to Kingston, Ontario – we had both been to a conference in the Midlands (a Richard Foulkes’ nineteenth-century theatre meeting) when we found ourselves standing in between cars on an overstuffed Sunday train back to London. Jim had discovered Fred Wilton’s diaries in the State Library of New South Wales and was preparing an edition, and I was going blind from squinting at census microfilm rolls in the genealogical annex of the Public Records Office. We realised that if we combined forces, something interesting could result. So, we decided to collaborate on what led to ‘The People of the “People’s Theatre”: The Social Demography of the Britannia Theatre (Hoxton)’. This entailed writing a section of the article, dispatching it in a yellow envelope to the other side of the planet, waiting six weeks, then repeating the process. We subsequently worked on a set of paired essays about Jessie Wilton.
Jim was an exemplary collaborator; generous to a fault, open to ideas, and willing to be challenged by new approaches. He had not needed to work with me – a mere post-doc whose name meant nothing – and took a risk in doing so, but the combination of his curiosity and kindness cemented a friendship. It is no wonder that so many of his publications came about as cooperative enterprises: the book on audiences with Victor Emeljanow, the Dickens collection with Jacky Bratton, and latterly, his research project on visual cultures with Pat Smyth and Kate Newey. But Jim in no way needed a collaborator to spark ideas or to get things done. His early work on John Liston and H. J. Byron proved a solid foundation for what came later. The breadth of his writing and knowledge of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century acting and performance cultures was prodigious, and his solo-authored output is a handsome legacy. He was singular in his attention to farce and other popular genres, and had a great talent for thinking through sources, discerning actors’ and dramatists’ unique styles, understanding reception, and rendering this in prose that is a pleasure to read.
It was not just the memory of that first hot dinner that made me grateful to see Jim over the course of four decades, whether it was in Brisbane, Warwick, Reykjavik, or any other location chosen by ADSA or IFTR. One could count on Jim to be unsparing in his engagement with others’ scholarship and to be the first to propose adjourning to the bar (where, often, the more detailed and productive discussion continued). New scholars and old friends were equally welcomed by Jim – in my memory, he sported an ever-present red scarf, a gift from one of his daughters, who thereby was always with him – and Jim ensured newcomers held a glass.
At a time when many scholars recited their credentials as bona fides of their importance, Jim was without prejudice or hubris. If anything, he went out of his way to efface his educational background as irrelevant. I think this went a long way towards cementing a community of nineteenth-century British scholars in the aftermath of Michael Booth’s departure from Warwick in 1984. Whereas Booth had boisterously championed a field he’d helped to create, Jim (along with David Mayer and a few others) just kept showing up and doing the hard work. They edited and contributed to collections, supervised graduate students, and edited the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. They also ensured that, through the ‘theory turn’ of the 1990s, theatre history – and especially popular entertainment – remained central to British curriculums.
Perhaps my fondest memories are of Jim as a host. He never stinted his spare room or sofa to a passing Australian (or anyone else, from what I could tell), and he took great joy in twice organising conferences for IFTR. He once hosted a one-day conference to launch a collection I had edited because our mutually beloved colleague Baz Kershaw was a contributor. When he took up the professorship at Warwick in 2004, he was determined to shift the culture into a convivial and comradely department. In his presence, one felt that was the most natural thing in the world.
Kate Newey
University of Exeter
I first met Jim at an ADSA conference (the Australasian Drama Studies Association as it was known then) in the late 1980s, when he’d just arrived at a job in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales. From the beginning of his time in Sydney, Jim was remarkable for his energy and his generosity. His energy ferreted out the diaries of Frederick Wilton, Stage Manager at the Britannia Theatre, languishing in the Mitchell Library (the rare books and manuscripts section of the State Library of NSW), and his book, The Britannia Diaries, which reprinted Jim’s meticulously edited selections from Wilton’s diaries, was published in 1992.
Jim’s generosity was in the way he shared his work, and made opportunities for others. Together with John MacCallum, Jim set up an informal theatre history research group, and we would meet annually for a day of papers and discussion. This was part of what I call the ‘new theatre history’ which was brewing in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and it was through Jim that I was invited to be a part of it. Impatient with the older, antiquarian style of theatre history which gave the nineteenth century a bad name, Jim was part of a small group of theatre historians who renovated – indeed, turned over – theatre methodology and historiography. His invitation to me was along the lines of ‘We only want the good people there. No fuddy-duddies’. As a very recent PhD graduate, I was genuinely humbled to be considered one of the ‘good people’ and not a fuddy-duddy, and it was at that theatre history seminar in Sydney one Saturday that I gave my first paper on what has become a lifelong piece of work on nineteenth-century women playwrights.
I remember one of Jim’s papers at one of these meetings of theatre historians. It was typically both scholarly and hilarious – not for nothing had he made it his life’s work to study comic acting. He started with a wonderfully evocative enactment of a theatre historian from the future, and that scholar’s paper about the performance culture of the 1990s. Jim’s fictional paper from 2100 was full of astute and funny analyses of the 1990s, and the political and cultural meanings of late-twentieth-century Western society – a true product of the cultural turn of the 1990s (and its culture wars). At the end of this imagined paper, Jim gave the reference: this imagined historian of 2100 was talking about the 1990s using the ‘evidence’ of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Jim’s point was how careful we need to be about drawing huge conclusions from isolated pieces of evidence. This challenging but human intellectual work was typical of Jim’s scholarship to the time of his death.
In the mid-2010s, I had just finished working on the Pantomime Project with Jeffrey Richards, and I’d had various conversations with Jim over the years about our mutual interests in theatre and the pictorial. It seemed obvious that we were both converging in this field, and it seemed equally obvious to suggest to Jim that rather than compete, we collaborate. So together with Patricia Smyth, Jim and I wrote the grant application for what was to become the Theatre and Visual Culture project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In that project, we created a scholarly network which brought together a number of art historians, historians of popular visual culture, the theatre, and various forms of unconventional performance. The project offered a number of scholars a home in a truly interdisciplinary field, and it’s a testament to Jim's energy and generosity that these collaborations are continuing.
I feel surrounded by the ghosts of my mentors at the moment: David Mayer, Elizabeth Webby, my PhD supervisor, and possibly one of the best Australian literary historians of her generation, and now Jim Davis. All we can do is keep on collaborating, and producing our best work with generosity and energy.
Anna De Domenico Sica
University of Palermo
I have wonderful memories of the dear Professor Jim Davis, colleague and unforgettable friend. Jim Davis accepted my invitation to come to the University of Palermo as a visiting professor in 2016, and in March 2017 he delivered an unforgettable class on nineteenth-century acting and staging, ‘Nineteenth-Century English Melodrama in Context’. During his visit to Palermo, he also wrote a relevant essay on acting and declamation, ‘Rhetoric, Representation, Repression. English Actors and Declamation’, published in the volume Al di là di un concetto visibile. Teatro & teatralità: musica, poesia, recitazione (2017).
A treasured memory is that Jim gave me as a present a beautiful portrait of Tommaso Salvini when he came and visited me and my husband Nicola in our house in Licata, in the countryside close to The Valley of the Temples, in Agrigento. Jim played a significant role in my research on the Italian acting method known as la drammatica as the first eminent scholar to publish my article on the early results of my research on the Italian acting code of drammatica in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 37.2 (Winter 2010). I am much in his debt for his exquisite attention to my work, having encouraged me to continue the investigation on deciphering the drammatica’s acting code. In so doing, Jim Davis has given distinguished support to the historiography of Italian theatre studies indeed.