Write a Script

Vicky (u.k.)

[Writing experiment]

Play Title: Lodger on the Fringe

Setting the scene: At the back of the stage, various brown doors, all slightly ajar, with figures looming behind them carrying a small box or bag. To the left of each, a small card with something written on it, illegible to the audience.

Direction: One spotlight lights a figure of a man dressed in 1970s brown clothes, sitting at a desk, a bubble machine turning out his thoughts. The light fades, the man slightly still in view.

[This is Michael Anderson, whose 1971 study on family structure revealed the ubiquitous presence of the lodger in the home. However, apart from the second character, this seminal work has almost been forgotten].

Direction: Spotlight on a second character, also at her desk, heading more into 1980s fashion, catching a bubble, and a blub lights up. She rises, then walks over to a blackboard, rubbing out a line, leaving it somewhat as a blur as a character behind one of the doors emerges. The light fades a little, but not much, as the character sits back at her desk, churning away at her typewriter.

[This is Leonore Davidoff, whose interest in the blurred lines between work and home discusses how the lodger and the household accommodating them navigated this perilous tightrope.]

Direction: “Hustle-and-bustle” – two characters - enter the stage, dressed in reasonable eighteenth-century dress and carrying large(ish) stuffed bags. They don’t see the other two characters, and the stage promptly spins to reveal an eighteenth-century courtroom. Bedding, keys, and various small domestic items are all on view to judge and jury. A corpse lies in the background. Hustle-and-bustle begin keenly to throw papers and books, scattering wide and far.

[Enter the eighteenth-century historians. They don’t acknowledge Davidoff but promptly turn to the court records to reveal tales of lodgers that emerge in times of tension, including death].

Direction: They continue as the stage turns back round to the doors and desks. It’s quiet, except for the chimes of the millennium clock. The 1970s man is not visible, the female character, the light barely shining on her. The doors in the background almost conceal those waiting patiently behind.

Suspense.

Direction: A female character – dressed in smart Victorian attire - carrying a box on children’s building blocks enters the stage. As she begins to build, one of the doors opens, and a stream of less-than-desirable characters emerge, building with the female character a house but not quite as we know it. All the time, a few characters in the background look on, noticing these undesirables but at the same time not quite acknowledging them.

[This is a prominent historian looking at the Victorian lodgings house. In the background are historians who mention lodgers but don’t unpick beyond noting their presence].

Direction: Another door opens, a man dressed in late Victorian work clothing emerges, and smartly dressed – but still evidently poor – women enter the stage. For a moment, the spotlight shines brightly upon them.

[In the mid-2010s, including one I wrote, there was a spate of articles discussing the Victorian lodger and the households that took them in. However, each author left it at that and went on to focus on other things].

DARKNESS, THEN A LOUD CRASH

Direction: I emerge on stage with a crash, holding tatty postcards in my hand from the US and Canada. As I move around the room, the spotlights focus on characters as I pass them by. I open a door, and ‘hustle-and-bustle’ enter the stage, handing me what appear to be court transcripts. The corpse in the courtroom is visible through the door. I then proceed to throw open the remaining doors. Behind them are men in work clothes and a whole host of other Victorian characters carrying bags and looking at other characters who entered the stage from the side – women with children at their feet, elderly hunched women, and hungry-looking married couples – who greet them both with trepidation and relief.

[There’s been a host of articles on lodgers over the past few decades from US and Canadian scholars, fascinating stuff that hasn’t been engaged with, but lots to tell us – maybe parcels rather than postcards(?). I’m then acknowledging all the work done by Anderson and Davidoff, but then I look to the methodology of historians examining lodging in the eighteenth century, focusing on the corpse to represent my choice of looking at coroner’s inquests. In doing so, I show how lodgers and the households accommodating them were not just workmen and elderly widows but a whole range of people.]

…..

Additonally, here's an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book. This chapter explores the sexual relationships between wives/widows and their male lodgers, all revealed in the coroner's courts. I wrote this during the creativity catalyst and after refining it, it remained in the copy that went to the publishers.

5
Beyond the Boundaries

Busy with washing, Betty Scott was startled by a sharp, quick, bold, confident rap. Hastily drying her hands, the young widow approached the door to be greeted on the front step by a tall, powerfully, and proportionally built man with a heavy moustache and whiskers. “I’m Robert Templeton. I’ve come ‘bout the lodgings,” the bachelor declared. “Come in,” beckoned Betty. As he stooped to enter her home, Betty immediately sensed a change in fortune. Had this been the opening scene of a Victorian Music Hall entertainment or a Dickens or Swepstone novel, what would have followed would have been Betty’s ‘embarrassing romantic pursuit of a resistant lodger’. As Nadine Muller discusses, such works frequently portrayed romantic liaisons between lone male lodgers and their widowed landladies as a relationship pursued by the bereaved woman to fill ‘the vacant space left by the departed spouse’. The lodger, a victim, is entrapped and devoured by his desperate – if not delusional – landlady. However, Betty’s story is not one of fiction but a tale of reality revealed in the Victorian coroner’s court and one that took a very different trajectory from that portrayed in popular culture. Although I have taken artistic license with the story of how Templeton arrived in Betty’s home as a lodger, we know from the inquest reports that – alongside his physical description – within weeks, Templeton’s position shifted from one of a lodger to a lover. Yet the evidence of the coroner’s court reveals that the courtship had not been a result of the widow’s relentless wearing down of an unwitting lodger. Instead, it was the male lodger in a tireless pursuit of the young widow with whom he lodged – a pursuit with a tragic ending, as we will see shortly.