Collection No. [#] The Child of Nature, by Elizabeth Inchbald
1. Publication details
Author: Inchbald, Elizabeth
Author dates: 1753-1821
Title: The Child of Nature
First played: 1788
First published: 1788, for G. G. J. and J. Robinson [etc.] 53 p.
C18th availability: Available from ECCO (1788)
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO?dd=0&locID=utoronto_main&d1=0058201000&srchtp=b&c=2&SU=All&d2=1&docNum=CW3310565554&b0=inchbald+the++child+of+nature&h2=1&vrsn=1.0&b1=KE&d6=1&ste=10&dc=tiPG&stp=Author&d4=0.33&n=10&d5=d6
Modern availability: Available from LION (1997)
http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFulltext.do?id=Z000090832&divLevel=0&queryId=../session/1215540804_18944&trailId=11A6961F4CF&area=Drama&forward=textsFT&warn=Yes&size=153Kb
2. Genre / subgenre: Drama
3. Trend(s):
4. Brief Synopsis
5. Secondary commentary
5a. Patricia Sigl. ‘Elizabeth Inchbald: October 15, 1753-August 1, 1821.’ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 89: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Third Series. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider, University of Rochester. The Gale Group, 1989. Literature Resource Center. 8 July 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=utoronto_main&srchtp=athr&ca=2&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13706562&n=10&docNum
The Child of Nature (1788) was just another French translation, but in it Inchbald stumbled on a character that became an integral part of her mature theater--the ingénue. She took the play from Madame de Genlis's Zélie, ou l'Ingénue, an exquisitely refined dressing up of Molière's L'École des femmes (1662). Zélie, part of Genlis's Théâtre de société (1781), was probably never performed on the commercial stage. When Inchbald began cutting and altering it, she decided she liked working with the ingénue, whom she called Amanthis, and she began to improvise new dialogue for her. She found that the character could be used with touching pathetic, as well as comic, effect.
She had discovered a high-comic character perfectly keyed to her own talent for naïveté. Offstage, her friends relished and repeated her naïve strokes. There were not many roles of ingenuous women Inchbald could play on the stage--her comic delivery was slow because of her speech impediment--but in a small circle her simplicity and her stutter charmed. As Frances Ann Kemble said, "Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness and unworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness and halting, broken utterance, gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm...." Inchbald was a woman of the theater, trained to think always in terms of theatrical pose. She cultivated naïveté in the London drawing rooms and in her writings, where the ingénue, either in the form of a child or a young girl, is a stand-by.
The comedy she drafted from Zélie was originally five acts. Before the first night it was cut to four acts and in subsequent nights to three. On 23 April 1800 she reduced the text to two acts for Harriet Siddons and printed this version in her Collection of Farces (1809). The French ingénue was a little too refined and too sentimental for the English; yet the play remained perennially attractive, in three or two acts. The innocence and delicacy of Amanthis were what the box audience wanted. Her sensibility afforded a good recognition scene with a long-separated father. For the next generation Inchbald's play was frequently used for a theatrical début because the appealing simplicity of the heroine helped to ease the awkwardness of a first-night performance. Maria Foote played Amanthis on 26 May and 14 September 1814 for her London début.
6. Overview of varieties / dialects
7. Variety
7a. Sample of dialect
7b.1 Orthography
7b.2 Grammar
7b.3 Vocabulary
7c. Dialect area represented
7d. Density of dialect representation
7e. Location of dialect
7f. Characteristics of dialect speakers
7g. Consistency of representation
8. Narrative comments on dialects and varieties
9. Other points of interest:
Note: field 7 is recursive; where several varieties are represented a separate record is completed for each variety."