So wrote George Bernard Shaw in an 1890 Fabian Lecture on Ibsen, claiming the Norwegian as the leader of a vanguard of ‘modern’ Victorians who at the fin de siécle championed socialism, feminism and new forms of artistic expression. And yet Ibsen, as a Scandinavian, was no Victorian. Astonishingly, given the profound cultural influence he exerted on late-nineteenth- century London, the Norwegian playwright never set foot on British soil. Despite his bodily absence, Ibsen's impact on Victorian cultural modernity in the 1880s and 1890s was immense. On 7 June 1889, the first unbowdlerized production of A Doll's House was performed at London's Novelty Theatre. It was attended by a dazzling array of bohemians and intellectuals including Bernard Shaw, who was subsequently to become one of the Norwegian's most significant publicists in England. Eleanor Marx (the daughter of Karl), one of the first to translate Ibsen's plays into English, and other metropolitan feminists and novelists such as Olive Schreiner, Edith Lees Ellis and Emma Frances Brooke, were also there. This was not the usual London theatre audience which would have attended the mainstream productions of comedies, romances and melodramas which had dominated the English theatre throughout much of the Victorian period. Writing thirty years after the London premiére of A Doll's House, the writer Edith Lees Ellis wrote how: