Through a proliferation of theatre in a range of cultural forms, the London of Elia's time represents a bona fide example, or historical actualization, of what has perhaps become a clichéd and over-abstracted association between the city and the theatre. Attempts at evoking the quintessential urban experience through the image of theatre can be easily undermined by the argument, deriving from the Freudian idea of the ego, that all human interaction involves performance of some description. The difference with early nineteenth-century London, however, is that beyond hypotheses on the historical prevalence of theatre in the city, a behavioural cult of ‘theatricality’ has been identified. Not only did theatre in this period arguably spawn the prototype for modern celebrity in the shape of Edmund Kean – a larger-than-life actor the fame (and infamy) of whose performances and personality alike rivalled that of those other subjects of the town's talk, Beau Brummel and Lord Byron – but it seems to have permeated metropolitan society as social discourse.

In the last chapter Elia was read in the context of a stylistic and abstract concept of theatre, as a literary mode of representing the city distinct from and unrelated to the actuality of the theatre in 1820s London. Some more broadly cultural studies, however, have described theatricality in terms of social behaviour and political activity derived from precisely that actuality, as instinctually appropriated from the model of stage and audience specific to early nineteenth-century London. Theatricality in the present study combines both notions, in proposing a cultural discourse emanating from the contemporary stage and articulated in the periodical text.