SOURCE: "Representing Empire: Class, Culture, and the Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century," in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and Performance, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, Routledge, 1995, pp. 132-47.

In the following excerpt. Hays discusses the way Reade 's play It is Never Too Late to Mend reflects the newly developing ideology of harmony between the social classes in England based on exploitation of the colonies.

[If] we turn to the melodrama of the early 1860s, we can do so with the sense that the discursive unity [Edward] Said discovers in the age of Conrad had not only not (yet) prevailed earlier in the century, but that it was held in abeyance by an active struggle for cultural dominance, both in the public realm (forcefully manifest in the Chartist and Corn Law conflicts) and in the "aesthetic" realm. Indeed it is only with the plays...