Adapting Austen

Yesterday evening I ventured out to watch the invited dress rehearsal for my school's performance of Pride and Prejudice. There were many things I liked and many things I didn't, although I did understand why it was done. 
I appreciated the simplified set and how professional the actors were in moving props and reacting to mistakes. 
However, this particular script was so simplified that it was almost an entirely different play than the novel we read. Obviously turning a full length novel into a two act school performance is difficult. However, I think that the timing of the play was a huge issue. While some important scenes were sped up and chopped down some of the slower scenes were drawn out. It made sense to get more actors on stage, but it made sitting through parts almost unbearable. I think overall the performance was well done. I thought the roles of Caroline Bingley, Mr. Charles Bingley, Mr. Collins, Miss Jane Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, and Mr. Wickham were particularly well cast and played. All of the actors did a remarkable job and the play was successful in reenacting a early nineteenth century novel. 

The Air is Cleaner on the Other Side

In the midst of the industrial revolution the British poets were devil's advocate reminiscing on cleaner air and simpler times. From dirtied streets to dying children there were atrocities on every street corner, and unfortunately, within every home. Poet William Blake was courageous enough to place blame and point fingers at the church for their treatment of children. But he didn't pardon society for what it had let itself become. A society with young boys going up into chimneys, with fires being lit below them to force the children to speed up and climb faster towards their death, and the alternative for young girls to become harlot's, life was not all that it had been romanticised to be.
With the rise in technology came the rise in cities. As population density increased so did the demand for menial tasks like prostitution and chimney sweeping. The constant presence of people became so much that poet Wordsworth went as far as to write a poem in which the narrator is hoping to wander in solitude.
Life in urban cities was not the beautiful sunlit emporium it had been romanticised to be. The Romantic poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were already reminiscing for the cleaner air and bluer skies.
Poetry had quickly evolved from a hope of change to a plea to return to better times. This trend is continued through literary history. People often want to be wherever they are not, there is always the hope that the alternative is better than the hell that society has created.