In the Nineteenth Century, it was common practice for popular novels to be adapted to the theater. In the absence of any distinguished playwrights in English between Sheridan and Shaw, the novel was the most flourishing middle-class literary entertainment, and the theater-going public found compensation for the dearth of original drama by seeing their favorite fictional characters on stage. Novels by Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain were dramatized with varying degrees of success, together with plays from such popular favorites as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Under Two Flags, Ben-Hur, The Prisoner of Zenda, If I Were King, and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.