George Robert Sims

The Lights o' London

1881. Reprinted in The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays. Ed. Michael R. Booth. OUP, 1995.

Lived at 12 Clarence Terrace from the 1890's to 1922.

Act 4. Sc.3. The Slips, Regent's Park...
(Harold and Bess come across bridge - down steps to tree L.)
Harold: We can rest a little while, Bess.
Bess: If I could only rest a little I should be better then. (They sit.) ...Harold, dear, you've never been sorry you married the little country girl, whose father was your father's servant?
Harold: Sorry! Bess my darling... I'd sooner sit here tonight an outcast in this desolate park with you by my side than be my father's heir, with the finest lady in the land for my wife...

The Slips were 'a short section of the Regent's Canal on the north side of Regent's Park, just below St. Mark's Bridge, where the canal widens into a small pool or basin used as anchorage...now Cumberland Basin'.

Harold has been wrongfully convicted of a jewel robbery - the culprit is actually his ne'er-do-well cousin Clifford, who, by one of those coincidences so frequent in this type of play, now 'enters R on to the bridge, smoking cigarette.' He is followed, unseen, by Seth, who threatens to expose him unless he makes an honest woman of his daughter. In the ensuing struggle Seth is pushed into the canal.

Bess (starting up alarmed): Harold! Harold!...there, over there, there's a man struggling in the water!
(Harold rushes up on to bridge, flinging his coat off. Bess follows him.)
Bess: Harold, what are you going to do?
Harold: Save a life! (Jumps off bridge into water. Bess stands on the bridge - gazing half-frantic after Harold.)
Bess: Harold! Harold! (Harold comes up with Seth clinging to him. He seizes bank and holds on.)
Seth (recognizing him): Harold Armytage!
Harold: Seth Preene! (Business. Curtain.)

One of the first and most popular melodramas, still being revived 30 years later, the play received a grudging tribute from The Times: 'It serves to amuse, if not particularly edify, an audience, and if that standard of merit is to be accepted there is no doubt that The Lights o' London must be called a successful play.' Conceding that the scenery of the Slips was 'a tolerably exact reproduction', the critic went on to wonder at 'the attraction exercised' by such representations of the real 'when exhibited behind the footlights.'

Other 19th century plays with scenes in Regent's Park featured the well-to-do rather than the unfortunate. Act 2, Scene 1 of Lost in London (Watts Phillips, 1867) is set in the interior of 'Ferns Villa'; Scene 2 is the exterior, with 'windows of house brightly illuminated.' These scenes 'supply Mr. Lloyd with subjects for a series of effective pictures' (The Times, 12th September 1874), but the dialogue contains only a glancing reference to the park. Act 1 of Prince Karatoff, later retitled The Silver Shell (Henry J.W. Dan, 1892) is also set in a house in the park, but there is no further reference to it.

The drawing-room comedies of the 20th century continued this tradition, employing a Regent's Park address purely as a social marker. In both W. Somerset Maugham's The Unattainable, retitled Caroline, (1923) and W.F. Casey's As Old As The Hills (1927) the action 'passes in the drawing-room' of houses with 'French windows which look out over Regent's Park.'