In order to lend the novel veracity Leroux pulls in references to actual events and people and to the details of the lighting and water effects, scenery mechanisms and construction of a theatre which was built above underground water. A fruitful base for a thriller based on fact. It was also rumoured at the time that a ghost lodged in the cellars. It is a fact that a chandelier broke from its anchorage in the ceiling and fell on a packed audience, killing one person and injuring several more. The story is set in the Paris opera house of Palais Garnier, which itself lends exoticism, (as does a mysterious ‘Persian’ who pops up from time to time in the early part of the story,) and it is true that this theatre did actually have a lake, or an aquifer, beneath it with an access onto the Rue Garnier. Leroux was a music critic and uses his knowledge of the musical cannon and the behind the scenes workings of a theatre to frame his story which he tells through a narrator. In essence a pot-pouri of a novel, part drama, part gothic horror romance, murder mystery, fairy story, comedy. Suffice it to say that the original novel is packed not only with all the elements for which M & S became famous/notorious – romance between a junior aristocrat and a poor girl forced to earn her living in the theatre, danger, mystery, adversity and the final triumph of love, but it also includes comedy, exoticism, gothic horror, the supernatural, a fairy godmother figure, a wicked witch and historical fact. Most of you will have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical (1986) based on the story, or an earlier film version (1925, illustrated above), so I won’t go into the story. After much ado trying to find a title which I could verify was actually published first by M & B and which was not exorbitantly expensive, I lit upon Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I wanted to source an early title for the session on books produced by Mills & Boon publishers at the beginning of their existence.
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