Retitled 'Two Views of a Cheap Theatre' in collected editions of the series  

The 'cheap theatre' in question was the Britannia Theatre on Old Street, Hoxton, which had been entirely rebuilt by its owner Samuel Lane in 1858. On its former incarnation,the 'Britannia Saloon', Dickens had already reported in 1850 (['The Amusements of the People [i]' and 'The Amusements of the People [ii]', HW, Vol. I, 30 March and 13 April 1850] see Vol. 2 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], Item 41). For a comprehensive history of the theatre's construction and management, see Jim Davis's The Britannia Diaries, 1863–75 (1992). According to Dickens's former HW colleague John Hollingshead, the theatre became 'familiar to most theatrical people and to many others' through the publication of this essay (My Lifetime, 1895; Vol. I, p. 33).

      The 'two views' offered are of the audience and bill of fare at a Saturday night pantomime ('Needles and Pins. The Spirit of Liberty') and melodrama ('The Mysterious Unknown; or, The Maid and the Mirror'), and of the audience the following Sunday evening, when a sermon was preached. Dickens's correspondence shows him planning to make these expeditions on 28 and 29 January 1860, in the company of Wilkie Collins and Edmund Yates on the Saturday, and of Collins alone on the Sunday. An instructive parallel to Dickens's paper can be found in Yates's bland essay 'Preaching in Playhouses,' clearly based on the same experience, reprinted in the volume After Office Hours (1861, pp. 193–99). In his letter to Collins, Dickens asks him to '...Observe. I have said nothing to Y. of the reason of the visit, or of the Sunday notion. Nor shall I mention the latter, even to Mr. Lane the proprietor' (Pilgrim, Vol. IX, p. 201). Dickens's caution is perhaps because of the politically-sensitive nature of his publishing an account of the Sunday service. Only a few weeks earlier, the newly-formed United Commission for Special Services (whose Committee included Lord Shaftesbury and members of the London City Mission) had opened five London theatres for 'special services' in the hope of spreading the basic Gospel message beyond the confines of conventional church congregations. In Parliament, the event had not gone unnoticed, and only the day before Dickens's account was published, Viscount Dungannon had condemned the scheme in the House of Lords, stressing the danger to orthodox religion posed by dubious theatrical mores (Hansard, 3rd Series, 24 February 1860, Vol. CLVI, p. 1663). When Dickens's narrator speaks out against the 'slangs and twangs of the conventicle', and in favour of the preacher's 'renunciation of all priestly authority', he is on the one hand, as Norris Pope observes, 'aligning himself with the United Committee' and (unusually) supporting a missionary enterprise, but, on the other hand 'attacking an old foe: the social irresponsibility and conservatism of the Church of England' (see Dickens and Charity, 1978, pp. 143–51).
      According to the ultra-evangelical Low Church journal The Record, which reported Dickens's presence at the Britannia on 29 January and his 'commendable attention' to the service, the preacher that evening was the Reverend Newman Hall, Sabbatarian incumbent at Surrey Chapel ([London], 30 January 1860, p. 3).

Literary allusions

• 'like guilty things upon a fearful summons': Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601) Act 1, Sc. 1; 
• 'the Death's head pipes were like a theatrical memento mori' echoes Henry IV Part I, Act 3, Sc. 3 ('a death's-head or a memento mori'); 
• 'I am the son of a Prince! My father is the King of Kings...': Revelation 17:14; 
• 'work out their salvation if they could': Philippians 2:12; 
• 'you have the widow's son to tell me about, the ruler's daughter, the other figure at the door when the brother of the two sisters was dead': Luke 7:12, 8:49; John 11:28.