The popular repertoire of the 19th-century English theatre may seem remote to us today, although it shouldn’t: the real-world plots, melodramatic entanglements, and abundant special effects resemble the cinema of the 20th century. Within this 120-year tradition, in which music proved essential for a variety of functions, the more imaginative actors, managers, and orchestra leaders strove to make the forms more dramatically compelling, using affective music to a greater or lesser degree in accordance with the melodramatic sub-genre. This essay examines music in the context of several plays that would have been known to any mid- to late-19th-century English playgoer: John Buckstone’s Luke the Labourer, Charles Selby’s The Mysterious Stranger, R. J. Raymond’s The Old Oak Tree, Tom Taylor’s The Serf, George Sims’s The Lights o’ London, and Robert Buchanan’s A Man’s Shadow. Thanks to the theatre collections that have preserved a variety of crucial documents such as music plots and orchestra parts, we are able to reconstruct the music that played so crucial a role in these plays alongside the larger-than-life style of acting and spectacular enhancements in scenic design and effects.