John Forster, Dickens's first biographer, reflected in 1873 that his friend had ‘identified himself’ with Christmas, and noted that ‘its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest of places, he had made his own’. From the earliest days of his writing career, Dickens had lighted upon Christmas as a season of good cheer and fellow feeling. In his youthful collection of journalistic pieces, Sketches by Boz (1836), he had celebrated the pleasures of Christmas thus:

In the ‘good-humoured Christmas Chapter’ of The Pickwick Papers Dickens similarly venerates Christmas as a ‘brief season of happiness and enjoyment … How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!’ (ch. 28).

Writing to his friend John Hobhouse from Italy in 1820, Byron commented on the term 'radical' that it was entirely new to him: 'Upon reform you have long known my opinion - but radical is a new word since my time - it was not in the political vocabulary of 1816 - when I left England - and I don't know what it means - is it uprooting?' Byron’s etymological understanding of the term is spot on, and in an abstract way tells us a great deal about the political force of nineteenth-century radicalism. The political temperature was running high in England in 1820: the 'Peterloo Massacre' of the previous year in which eleven peaceful demonstrators were killed was still fresh in the memory, and William Cobbett led a vanguard of popular protests in support of the exiled Queen Caroline. In this fevered political climate the journalist Thomas Wooler gave a characteristically witty account of the meaning of the term 'radical' in his trial parody, 'TRIAL EXTRAORDINARY: MR CANNING VERSUS THE RADICAL REFORMERS':

‘Ibsenism’ and Ibsen are not synonymous. Whilst George Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Marx and other Ibsenites in late- Victorian London hailed the Norwegian playwright as honorary spokesperson for their various socialistic causes, Ibsen himself was politically uncommitted, never joining any political party or supporting unequivocally a particular political faction. As Michael Meyer has wryly noted, the one political demonstration in which the Norwegian took part involved the defiant cheering of an elderly German, Havro Harring, who was deported from Christiania in May 1850 for writing a radical play. Living in Italy in 1867, the strongest feeling provoked in Ibsen by Garibaldi's invasion of Rome was a sense of irritation that the trains were no longer running on time. Never a sectarian in politics, he was, in his plays, essentially a liberal individualist, with Nora Helmer as his dramatic archetype (and this partly explains his appeal to late- Victorian feminism, which was very much a product of nineteenth- century Liberalism). Despite his often-cited speech to a workers’ procession in Trondheim on 14 June 1885, in which he had predicted that ‘The transformation of social conditions which is now being undertaken in the rest of Europe is very largely concerned with the future status of the workers and of women’, it is I think difficult to appropriate Ibsen's work for socialism in quite the way the Shavian Ibsenites of the 1880s and 1890s did. Ibsen was very much of the avant-garde in as much as that he wished to disrupt and overturn the social, political and aesthetic status quo and to enable the birth of a new order of things. But his was a completely non-aligned avant-gardism which cannot readily be identified with either the political ‘left’ or the political ‘right’. Whilst in The Pillars of Society (1877), for example, the object of attack is an extreme right-wing figure, in An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen turns on those mealy-mouthed liberals who had joined in the general condemnation of his naturalist play, Ghosts (1881), in the previous year.

The savage satire of An Enemy of the People is directed against the moral timidity – as Ibsen saw it – of the supposedly ‘progressive’ liberal press in Norway.

One hundred years after Ibsen's death, his plays remain as popular in Britain as when they first arrived on the London stage in 1889. He is, too, the most frequently televised dramatist after Shakespeare. Both the realism of Ibsen's middle drama – the stifling drawing-room settings of A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler – and the more existential modernity of the late plays such as John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, continue to appeal to twenty-first century theatre audiences accustomed equally to theatrical naturalism and to modernist experimentation. That Ibsen's dramatic realism retained its power at the end of the 1990s was amply demonstrated by London's Playhouse 1997 production of A Doll's House, starring Janet McTeer. The ‘prop-rich’ conventions of the nineteenth-century stage, along with Ibsen's detailed and painstaking mise en scène, were faithfully reproduced – there was nothing remotely avant-gardist about the production. And yet the tension in the theatre was palpable, with a significant proportion of the audience visibly moved by the final dialogue between Nora and Torvald Helmer in which the wreckage of their marriage is surveyed with a quiet agony. Into the twenty-first century the Greenwich Playhouse's production of A Doll's House (December 2004–January 2005) was equally faithful in its naturalistic recreation of the late-nineteenth century bourgeois household, with its delicately decorated Christmas tree and close attention to costume detail. Alice Grace's stunning performance as a beautifully complex Nora, whose fragility and seeming subservience only thinly veil her exceptional strength and moral fibre, was complemented by Martin Beere's moving rendition of Dr Rank's hopeless love for the unhappy young wife.

The intense theatricality inherent in Ibsen's plays is the source of their continued vigour and variety in production. The ascendancy of the modernist aesthetic in the early-twentieth century, which continued to influence late-twentieth century theatre, has meant that avant-gardist directors have sometimes tried to re-invent Ibsen's realism along modernist lines, emphasizing the psychological and existential dimensions of his work rather than the social and material relationships through which wider human issues are explored in the plays. One example of a number of such productions was Ingmar Bergman's 1964 production of Hedda Gabler in the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.

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:

That Henrik Ibsen should have become one of the giants of modern European drama is little short of astonishing. Born in a small Norwegian town, Skien, before the start of Queen Victoria's reign, Ibsen, the son of a merchant fallen on hard times, had a relatively thin literary tradition on which to draw. The national literature of nineteenth-century Norway was quite slender, the only writer with a ‘high-cultural’ reputation – Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) – being long dead. Norway's main literary project when Ibsen was a young man was a nationalistic reclamation of old Norwegian ballads and folktales. It was Ibsen's involvement with this project which would delay his reinvention of European drama.

On his arrival in Christiania (now Oslo) in 1850 as a 22-yearold student, Ibsen quickly got to know the young Björnstjerne Björnson, who would become both a friend and a rival. For both men, the mid-century proved to be an uninspiring time for would-be playwrights. In 1851 Ibsen took up the post of ‘dramatic author’ at the Bergen Theatre, where he was to spend six years of poverty and artistic depression. He assisted in the production of many popular mid-century plays, but there was (for example) no classical drama, no Shakespeare, and no Molière; nothing, in short, that Ibsen could learn anything new from. High tragedy, comedy, farce and melodrama dominated the Bergen Theatre in the 1850s, and such a dramatic diet was common across much of Europe at this time. ‘Serious’ drama was never written in prose, and it was always concerned with people of high estate. The idea that a tragedy could be written in prose, or that it could be about ordinary nineteenth-century people, was unheard of. Any such play would not have been considered ‘art’ by either actors or audience. The theatrical status quo which reigned in the mid-century European theatre would, eventually, be radically dismantled by Ibsen; but this was many years in the future.

Ibsen's first few plays had historical settings and drew on well-worn dramatic traditions. Of his early work, Catiline (1849) is a tragedy set in ancient Rome, and is written in rhymed verse.