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Drawing Rooms, Second Floor, and Attics: A Farce, in One Act cover

Drawing Rooms, Second Floor, and Attics: A Farce, in One Act

Chapter 3: Transcriber’s Note
By John Maddison Morton
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About This Book

The one-act farce follows the chaotic preparations for a house party in a crowded London lodging, where servants, retired tradesmen, young women, and prospective suitors collide in a succession of comic mishaps. Rapid entrances, physical humor—including chimney-climbing and a crushed hat—and mistaken identities create escalating confusion that drives brief, tightly staged scenes. The play trades on social pretension, domestic disorder, and romantic misunderstanding, using cramped spaces (attic, second floor, drawing rooms) for sight gags and verbal sparring. Designed for a short, lively performance, it emphasizes pace, character types, and situational comedy over psychological depth.

Transcriber’s Note

This transcription is based on images digitized from a microform copy made available by the University of California, Davis. These images have been posted on the Internet Archive at:

archive.org/details/ MortonDrawingRooms

Because of the quality of the images, this transcription has been compared with the text posted by the Victorian Plays Project at:

victorian.nuigalway.ie

In general, this transcription attempts to retain the formatting, punctuation and spelling of the source text, including variant spellings such as “miliner,” “exhilirating,” and “govenor.” No attempt was made to make the character titles consistent. A few errors have been corrected.

The following changes are noted:

  • p. 6: under the inflluence of these exhilirating sweetmeats—Changed “inflluence” to “influence”.
  • p. 13: I’ll atter her a bit.—Changed “atter” to “flatter”.
  • p. 22: BUNNY. I ask you again, where is “our dear—— Added a question mark and close quotation mark to the end of the line.
  • p. 23: (goes to th sideboard and begins helping himself—Changed “th” to “the”.
  • p. 25: I should say he must be a hosier on a a large scale.—Deleted the second “a” after “on”.
  • p. 26: COCKLE. I repeat, very hard; ain’t it. sir?—Changed the period after “it” to a comma.