Mr Wopsle

Mr Wopsle is the church clerk in Pip’s home town in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1). He is prone to delivering poetic and dramatic pieces at the drop of a hat, particularly Shakespeare and “The Passions: An Ode to Music” (1746), by William Collins. Even a newspaper story becomes fodder for a dramatic recitation:

“A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus.” (Chapter 18)

Mr Wopsle’s excessive fondness for recitation leads him to quit his clerkship to become an actor (under the name ‘Waldengarver’). At a small metropolitan theatre in London, Pip attends a hilariously appalling performance of Hamlet, with Wopsle in the role of the melancholy Dane (Chapter 31). Pip later sees him in the deus ex machina role in a nautical melodrama (the genre parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore) and in a Christmas pantomime (Chapter 47).

Video killed the radio star…

…but radio killed the recitation star.

That’s the verdict of “Reciters: Kind, Genial, Harmless Creatures — Their Day Is Done.” Time (11 June 1923). What is odd about the article is that it reviews two presumably recently-published recitation anthologies while simultaneously eulogizing the demise of the practice of recitation: “But the reciter of our forefathers — the reciter magnificent — the lady of the awe-inspiring brow and graveyard contralto who tore “The Raven” to tatters on the slightest provocation, the cadaverous youth who was so comic delivering “Farmer Corn-tassel at the County Fair” — these, with the hansom-cab-driver and the professor of penmanship who drew little birds with flowing scrolls in their beaks, are rapidly passing into oblivion. Alas!”

The two anthologies reviewed are:

Pertwee, Ernest, ed. The Comic and Humourous Reciter. London: G. Routledge, n.d.

Potter, Cora Urquhart, comp. My Recitations. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1886. [This is the first edition bibliographic information; the anthology was republished a number of times; Google Books has a limited preview of a reprint of the first edition, including the table of contents.]

The reviewer sums up the contents of Potter’s book thus: “Death, Villainy, Madness, the Grave here find their own. The soldier of the Legion is dying in Algiers, Sir Ralph the Rover visits the Inchcape Rock, “Charge Chester, charge!” “‘We are lost!’ the captain shouted as he staggered down the stairs.” Less well known morceaux deal with Blood (in quantity), with Wicked Atheists, with the Last Few Remarks of Pious Children.”

Ernest Pertwee (who appears to have also published under the name “Guy Pertwee”) edited a number of other recitation anthologies:

The Reciter’s Treasury of Verse, Serious and Humourous, with an Introduction on the Art of Speaking. London: George Routledge & Sons & Swan Sonnenschein & Co; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1907. Available at the Internet Archive.

The Art of Speaking. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. [Pertwee is described in this book as "Professor of Elouction, City of London School".] Available at the Internet Archive.

[Co-edited with Alfred Perceval Graves] The Reciter’s Treasury of Irish Verse and Prose. London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., [1915]. Available at the Internet Archive.

Pertwee also seems to have published under the name “Guy Pertwee” (he appears as “Ernest Guy Pertwee” in some Google Books and library catalogue entries). Facing the title page of Guy Pertwee’s Scenes for Acting from Great Novelists (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1913) (available at the Internet Archive) is an advertisement for “New Reciters,” which includes Scenes from Dickens for Amateur Acting, “arranged by Guy Pertwee, and Edited by Ernest Pertwee,” so I guess he kept his actor and professor personae distinct. (Mrs. Ernest Pertwee also seems to have had her hand in the recitation anthology trade: she is listed in the same advertisement as the author of A Second Book of Duologues and Dialogues for Recitation — unless this another nom de plume of Ernest’s!

Cora Urquhart Potter is better known as Cora Brown Potter (1857-1936), a well-known actress in the later 19th century. A brief biography of her can be read at Shakespeare and the Players.