{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023276240667545016, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011857707509881422, 'mean_word_length': 5.058510638297872, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Investigating Early Film and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre

Early film provides a wealth of information about Victorian performance practices, and Victorian theatre greatly influenced the development of film. Both points have been well documented by David Mayer, who has for decades argued that ‘films made between 1895 and 1935 offer frequent, unexpected, and sometimes curiously skewed glimpses . . . of the Victorian and Edwardian stage’. This rich area of historical and critical inquiry continues to generate exciting new work on the contiguities between early film and nineteenth-century theatrical practices. Perhaps, the most obvious way in which the reciprocal relationship between early cinema and nineteenth-century performance operates is through adaptation, often through shared adaptation of literary texts. For example, Oliver Twist was Charles Dickens’s most frequently adapted novel in the nineteenth century. In excess of 200 stage adaptations based on the novel were mounted in England or America by 1900. The brutal murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes was enormously popular not only on the melodrama stage but also in Dickens’s own wildly successful staged readings, in which he played both characters. Filmmakers in turn began adapting it almost as soon as film was invented. Less than two years from the moment in December 1895 that the Lumière brothers first publicly displayed motion pictures, a film adaptation of Oliver Twist appeared, The Death of Nancy Sikes (1897), unfortunately now lost. The depiction of Nancy’s violent death was in such high demand that, as Sue Zemka remarks, after this first ‘thirty-seven-foot short’ introduced Dickens to the screen, ‘Nancy was murdered on celluloid at least ten more times before sound films.’ But such insistent reiteration could only happen because Oliver Twist had already been adapted to the stage. In Dickens Dramatized, Philip Bolton explains that ‘actresses would step back and forth between the two media. Playwrights became screenwriters. Plays became films’. Just as the role of Oliver was typically played by a woman rather than a boy in melodramas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so the tradition transferred to film. A case in point is Marie Doro, who portrayed Oliver in the 1912