1. For more on the development of music hall, as well as on issues of audience and class, see Penelope Summerfield, “The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music-Hall in London,” in Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914, edited by Eileen and Stephen Yeo (Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1981), 209–40; and Peter Bailey, “Custom, Capital and Culture in the Victorian Music Hall,” in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by Robert Storch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982). The scholarly essays collected in Peter Bailey, ed., Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986); and J. S. Bratton, ed., Music Hall: Performance and Style (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), are essential reading. For specific studies of music-hall song and lyrics, see Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974); Peter Davison, Songs of the British Music Hall (New York: Oak, 1971); J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975); and Lawrence Senelick, “Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975–76): 149–60. Peter Bailey’s Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) is a sustained effort to bring cultural studies perspectives to the phenomena of music hall. Dagmar Kift’s The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) provides a thorough account of the marketing and commercial history of the music hall throughout the century; it details shifts in the composition of the music-hall audience. Kift also gives necessary attention to provincial music halls. For a comprehensive bibliography of the music hall, see Lawrence Senelick, David Cheshire, and Ulrich Schneider, editors, British Music-Hall, 1840–1923 (London: Hamden Press, 1981).
2. Eric Lott observes that the multiple entertainments combined in the minstrel show are still familiar to anyone “who has seen American television’s ‘Hee Haw’” in his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. The capsule summary of the form that Lott provides here also describes British music-hall entertainment. Readers who recall American TV’s long-running Ed Sullivan show also have a ready analogue to variety theater.
3. There is another justification for my focus on the London halls. The nation’s major metropolis was and remains a synecdoche for the nation. Interpreters of the London music hall often overlook the local nature of the entertainment in order to highlight its universal—i.e., national—meaning. See my reading of Percy Fitzgerald’s Music-Hall Land below and of Henry Nevinson’s short tale “Little Scotty” in chapter 4.
4. Like Lawrence Grossberg, I understand cultural studies as constituting a body of work that originated in debates within British Marxism; cultural studies insists, in Grossberg’s words, that “much of what one requires to study culture is not cultural”; see Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21. Cultural studies work attempts to provide a social context for artistic practice, without indulging in the illusion that context makes for absolute knowledge. The practice of cultural studies accepts the impure, uneven working conditions that impact the production of art and scholarship. Grossberg again: “[Cultural studies] does [not] attempt to smooth over the complexities and tensions; it chooses instead to live with, to see any historical struggle as neither pure resistance nor pure domination but, rather, as caught between containment and possibility” (21–22). My understanding of cultural studies also draws on the rich, contextual work of Raymond Williams, including The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), and Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). I owe a considerable debt to the work of Stuart Hall as well, especially his generous and insightful accounts of debates within cultural studies. Such work includes “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 115–47, and “Cultural Studies and Its Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Nelson Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991). In a manner suggestive of the syncretism of cultural studies, Hall includes debates within cultural studies as constitutive of the field.
5. Hall argues against interpretive modes that essentialize popular culture and substantiates his case by specific recourse to British culture in the years between 1880 and 1920, in a landmark essay, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–40. Morag Shiach’s Discourse on Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989) also underscores the fabricated character of the popular. Shiach details how rhetoric of the popular, developed in state discourse and later applied to the notion of the culture, distinguished the interests of the nation or state from the specific interests of working-class people. Discourse on popular culture fostered tension between the construct of the popular and the working class. Professional discourse, too, evidences a similar, rhetorically productive tension between its categories of the public and the expert. As with the discourse on the popular, professional discourse is subject to various formulations and can express a range of political positions. The rhetoric that governs relations between professionals and their public can variously emphasize differences between groups or emphasize commonality.
6. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 72–111. Simon Frith offers similar objections to the fetish of authenticity in popular music. In his review of Bruce Springsteen’s Live—1975–85, Frith argues that authenticity claims are built on a shaky foundation of binaries: “Firstly, authenticity must be defined against artifice: the terms only make sense in opposition to each other” (Music for Pleasure [New York: Routledge, 1989], 98).
7. Peter Bailey’s Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City constitutes a sustained attempt to bring cultural studies perspectives to the British music hall, and evinces a canny suspicion of essentialist class analysis. I am greatly indebted to his judicious reading of music-hall cultural practice and his effort to sound out signifying practices in music hall that exceed the “culture of consolation” label Gareth Stedman Jones pins on the halls. See also Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 179–239. Bailey also presents a strong argument against evaluating the representation of working-class culture within the music hall solely by contemporary standards of political correctness; see Popular Culture, 130.
8. Typically, the relation between the professional and various publics gets cast in the starkest terms of class hegemony and expropriation. The notion that the rise of the professional changes some protocols of capitalist culture, or that professional protocols might be revised in the face of public demand, often gets overlooked. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, for example, conclude that the managerial class functionally commits “overt and sometimes violent expropriation” of knowledge and skills that originate among the working class; see “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labor and Capital, edited by Pat Barker (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 5–45.
9. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (New York: Routledge, 1989), and Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1976) remain classic studies of the rise of modern professions. I claim that “the professional ideal, based in trained and certified expertise” (4) that Perkin details inflected status and prestige claims made in the cultural realm. For recent studies of the links between professional culture and domestic ideology, see Monica Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I discuss the rise of the professions and some of their contemporary critics in regard to Arthur Symons and the problem of cultural expertise in chapter 2.
10. See W. Macqueen-Pope’s The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall (London: Allen, [1950]) for more on the rise of the commercial music hall and successful Victorian/Edwardian music-hall managers like John Hollingshead or Oswald Stoll, who helped make music hall respectable enough to attract polite and prosperous crowds. Writing on late-Victorian painter Byam Shaw’s sketches of the Coliseum, a variety theater managed by Sir Oswald Stoll, Tim Barringer details Stoll’s ambitions as music-hall owner to draw to the hall “a mass audience with a range of socially improving theatrical entertainments” and transform music hall into “a highly capitalized and sanitized middlebrow forum”; see “‘Not a “Modern” as the Word Is Now Understood’? Byam Shaw, Imperialism and the Poetics of Professional Society,” in English Art, 1860–1914, edited by David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 76. In “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound,” Lawrence Rainey also invokes the Coliseum as representative middlebrow entertainment; see Modernism/Modernity, 1.3 (1994): 195–220. In Rainey’s words, the Edwardian music hall “was already a corpse that was experiencing a brief but spurious afterlife through its incorporation into the ‘Palace of Variety,’ the new institution of an advancing consumer society” (209). Interestingly, the commercial music hall still elicits Rainey’s most scathing rhetoric, suggesting a personal disappointment that exceeds the bounds of historical overview.
11. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 7.
12. My book expands on many incidents and music-hall partisans touched on in John Stokes’s discussion of the social history of music hall, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Like Stokes, I argue that music-hall performance challenged traditional aesthetic categories of high culture; we both read Arthur Symons for a glimpse at how a representative literary intellectual negotiated the challenge to elite aesthetic values. I have a broader interest in how music hall fostered a Victorian discourse of expertise, a topic necessarily subordinated in Stokes’s more compact account of the music hall.
13. Eric Lott could claim with some justice that the study of American minstrelsy (also a part of the English music-hall tradition) unduly emphasized “the printed record (songsters, playlets and so on) of what was in fact a negotiated and rowdy spectacle of performer and audience”; see Love and Theft, 9. Such a charge has less purchase on music-hall scholarship, in which song sheets have not been a sole focus of scholarly work for many years now. Convincing efforts to historicize music hall have been made by social historians such as Gareth Stedman Jones (1974) and Penelope Summerfield (1981). John Stokes (1989) situates fin-de-siècle halls within English literary and cultural history, and Peter Bailey’s Popular Performance in the Victorian City (1998) focuses on performance/audience dynamics in late-Victorian theater and music hall, analyzed from cultural studies perspectives.
14. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, “The Pedigree of the Music Hall,” Contemporary Review 63 (April 1893): 583.
15. M. L. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 24.
16. See Geoffrey Russell Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) for a study of public resistance to Victorian professionals. Searle contends that the medical profession at least largely succeeded in convincing the public that uniform standards of training and licensing were not special privileges or exemptions but necessary for the commonweal as well as for the practitioner, and that doctors legitimately required protection from competition in the marketplace (85).
17. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Penguin, 1989), 37. Subsequent references to this edition of Mayhew will be noted parenthetically.
18. For a useful account of Mayhew’s ambivalence to bourgeois norms as well as vernacular culture, see Andrew Tolson’s essay “Social Surveillance and Subjectification: The Emergence of Subculture in the Work of Henry Mayhew,” in The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (New York: Routledge, 1998), 302–15.
19. Common anxiousness is evident in James Grant’s penny gaff tale in Sketches of London (London: Saunders and Otley, 1839) and in Mayhew’s later chronicle. Grant’s concerns about the potential for social unrest in working-class group assemblies suffuse his account of the entertainment. It is worth noting that such fears are less prominent in Mayhew’s study, perhaps allowing him a clearer view of the autonomous and competitive nature of the gaffs information culture.
20. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat (New York: Norton, 1989), 114.
21. Bailey’s essay begins with Mayhew’s brief reconstruction of penny gaff song as evidence of music hall’s productive function in broadcasting the experience and significance of city life to the urban poor; see Popular Culture, 139.
22. Keith Wilson, “Music-Hall London: The Topography of Class Sentiment,” Victorian Literature and Culture 23 (1996): 23–35.
23. See Wilson, “Music-Hall London,” 57.
24. I owe the analogy between cultural knowingness and hazing to W. T. Lhamon.
25. The odd copyright disclaimer contributes to the surreal effect of Fitzgerald’s text, in which he transcribes song lyrics and details audience reaction to songs, then observes that “the songs in this little book have not yet been sung in Music-hall Land, but they are at the service of its ‘sweet singers,’” thus placing in question the documentary status of his book. I am indebted to Scott Banville for this and other observations on Music-Hall Land.
26. Percy Fitzgerald, Music-Hall Land (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 2. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically.
27. T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 172–75.
28. Walter Frith, “The Music-Hall,” Cornhill 60 (July 1889): 68.
29. Ibid., 79.
30. Eric Lott makes a similar point in relation to the American mass culture entertainment of blackface minstrelsy. While conceding that popular culture sometimes enables social control, he desires (as do I) to maintain a cautious optimism about the relative autonomy of pop culture forms. This is his measured assessment of the politics of the minstrel show “popular”: “Because the popular is always produced, capitalized, it is hardly some unfettered time-out from political pressures, a space of mere ‘leisure.’ . . . But as Stuart Hall has insisted, neither does it passively mirror political domination taking place in other parts of the social formation, as though it were only epiphenomenal . . . or, in the Frankfurt School scenario, wholly administered and determined”; see Lott, Love and Theft, 17.
31. As Harold Perkin observes, “[A] professional society is not merely the old class society fitted out with a new ruling class. It is a society structured around a different principle,” namely the “competition for public resources”; see Rise of Professional Society, 9. Accordingly, an imagined public is articulated and hailed in middle-class music-hall accounts. The public central to these proclamations of professional identity is variously cajoled, criticized, and counseled. By turns, the public is to be feared and persuaded: yet it remains a constant imaginative presence for the serious music-hall interpreter.
1. T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 172. All subsequent references are to this edition.
2. George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968) 2:162.
3. Colin Maclnnes’s Sweet Saturday Night resurrects the world of music-hall song in response to the first stirrings of an English popular song industry, modeled on the marketing of rock to teenagers in America. The Beatles resurrect music-hall styles on both Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capital, 1967) and The Beatles (Capital, 1968); these songs serve as homage to the English musical past and as marks of the band’s ironic distance from these traditions. They provide a sense of the band’s regional identity that might be gainsaid by their global success. Similarly, the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society (Pye, 1968) yokes rock with Englishness by name checking the music hall and taking many of the old musical arrangements into the new setting of the four-piece beat group. These efforts to knit English rock to English identity react against the emergent narrative of a global (i.e., Americanized) pop music.
4. Linda Dowling emphasizes the collective character of the intellectual predilection for music hall; see Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 238. Max Beerbohm’s essay “The Blight on the Music Halls” (1899) suggests music-hall partisanship followed a group dynamic: “Everyone had seen Mr. Sickert’s paintings. Soon other painters began to frequent the Halls. Mr. Arthur Symons cut in, and secured the Laureateship. Mr. Anstey wrote satires. Mr. Frederic Wedmore began to join in the choruses with genteel gusto”; see “The Blight on the Music Halls,” in Works and More (London: Bodley Head, 1952), 201. Interestingly, Dowling neglects the purposive cast of the assembly, reading their fandom as a cult of the irrational, while Beerbohm credits the music-hall cognoscenti with too little, while blaming them for too much. “The Blight on the Music Halls” insinuates that music-hall partisans were largely unthinking advocates of the form, and hints that their enthusiasm only hastened the halls’ assimilation into genteel culture.
5. Beerbohm, “Blight,” 201.
6. I take the debate over the music hall as a controversy between, first and foremost, members of a privileged class of culture makers. My account follows a trajectory similar to that of Joel Pfister, who reads the cultural prominence attained by Eugene O’Neill’s drama as a reflection of the desire of the burgeoning professional-managerial elite for artistic work that privileges depth models of subjectivity compatible with their self-image. See Staging Depth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), especially chapter 2.
7. See Andrew Ross, No Respect (New York: Routledge, 1989).
8. Convinced that the consensus as to what constitutes true culture had been lost, Archer often discoursed at length on the different values manifest in cultural objects; he surely must have realized that such elaborate discussions troubled his argument for universal cultural standards. In “The Indictment of the Music-Hall” (Living Age 292 [Fall 1917]: 313–16), he asks, “By what principle can we allow ourselves to laugh at Rabelais or Sterne and refuse to laugh at Mr. George Robey and Miss Marie Lloyd? Is the physical basis of life a fit subject for laughter? If it is, where are we going to draw the line?” (316). Archer must be aware of the concession he offers his opposition simply by framing the comparison; the distinction between Sterne and Lloyd is best preserved by avoiding the analogy. Raising the issue compels Archer to provide his readers reasons for his selections, turning the assured statement of taste into special pleading. Reflecting on cultural distinctions may not overturn them, but it inevitably makes matters of taste seem less matter of fact, less natural. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) for an account of the contradictions that arise when Enlightenment intellectuals like Hume and Kant elevate taste preferences into philosophic axioms.
9. William Archer, “Theatre and Music-Hall,” in The Theatrical World of 1895 (London: Walter Scott, 1896), 96–97. All subsequent references are to this edition.
10. Archer’s argument that music hall encouraged its middle-class patrons to abandon their critical reserve is not groundless; music-hall song, early and late, broadcast the message to its mass audience that it was good to stop thinking, to relax, and to loosen up. The popular song “It’s Nice to Be Common Sometimes,” sung by Daisy Hill (1935), itemizes the virtues of living at a remove from middle-class formalities and constricted behavioral codes. See Peter Gammond, Best Music-Hall and Variety Songs (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1975), 410–11.
It is worth noting that some music-hall acolytes suggested that the appreciation of the form demanded a new kind of attention on the part of its truly discerning spectators. To the casual observer, variety theater may have seemed chaotic or fragmented; yet Arthur Symons asserted, “[You] will find a queer kind of unity in the midst of all this seemingly casual variety, and in time—if you think it worth the time—you will come to understand the personality of the music-halls”; see Symons to the Star, June 18, 1982, in Arthur Symons: Selected Letters, 1880–1935 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988), 85–86. His statement is tentative, and hesitating, and demands to be read with the same sly attention it advocates. Symons hints that he has developed a heightened form of attention that can extract sense from distraction. When the National Vigilance Association attacked the Empire music hall, and temporarily closed the promenade on grounds of solicitation, Symons wrote on behalf of the Empire. He retained the aficionado’s confidence that the distractions of the promenade would not prevent the true devotee from realizing the real reason for the Empire’s success: “the excellence of its entertainment”; see Selected Letters, October 15, 1894, 108. Archer suggests that music-hall patrons were stupefied by the entertainment; in contrast, Symons intimates that the form elicited a heightened concentration of cognitive faculties.
In chapter 4, I touch on other reasons for Symons’s public defense of the Empire—namely, the respect of an aspiring cultural expert for a well-regulated urban space. The entrepreneur and the aesthete find common ground in their desire for a properly managed music hall. Countering the charges made against solicitation in the halls, Symons asserts, “Vice, unfortunately, cannot be suppressed; it can only be regulated”; see Selected Letters, 108. Lurking in this laconic claim is the admiration of the aficionado for public spaces managed by professionals.
11. Ross, No Respect, 101.
12. In Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), Bruce Robbins provides an exceptionally supple account of professional gestures; he conceptualizes professional ideology dialectically. I return to Robbins’s account of professional decorum in the following chapter.
13. Krishan Kumar, “‘Englishness’ and English National Identity,” in British Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kevin Robins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 51.
14. Philip Dodd, “Englishness and the National Culture,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 10–11.
15. Archer’s 1895 essay “The County Council and the Music Halls” cites Pennell as proof that the music hall is not new, but timeless. “In one sense,” Archer writes, “it has been always with us; in another it is a creation of yesterday” (317). “Broadly speaking,” he continues, “the art of the music hall is simply art of vulgarity.” His own version of the historicist apology for music hall shifts from an apology, however, to a final verdict on the real value of the contemporary music hall. Archer writes, “Is it not an appalling thought that, while thousands of songs are written every year for the music halls, and have been for the last half-century or so, not one song of them . . . has passed into literature?”; see “The County Council and the Music Hall,” The Contemporary Review 67 (March 1895): 326. For Archer, the value of popular culture resides solely in its ability to hatch more complex culture forms worth esteeming.
16. Archer fends off the argument that music hall “reflects the life of the lower middle-classes” by denying the main tenet of the partisan faith: namely, that music hall stood in authentic relation to its audience. In “The County Council and the Music Halls,” Archer contends that the music hall has been irredeemably vulgarized by commerce, and that consequently it is more debased than its audiences. Appropriated by business interests, the form no longer represents its working-class and lower-middle-class patrons, or does so partly and therefore misleadingly. The music hall, Archer writes, “reflects” its audiences “affectations, their snobberies; their superficialities—in brief, their vulgarities; but of the serious side of lower middle-class life, its real joys and sorrows and crimes and heroisms, it conveys scarcely a hint” (327).
17. Elizabeth R. Pennell, “The Pedigree of the Music Hall,” The Contemporary Review 63 (April 1893): 575.
18. Ibid., 576.
19. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1996), 3.
20. Ibid., 4.
21. Before “Demos’ Mirror,” Max Beerbohm relied on similar analogies in the review/essay “In a Music Hall”: “[T]he entertainments in Music-halls are the exact and joyous result of the public’s own taste. . . . There is no compromise, no friction, between the form and the audience. The audience is the maker of the form, the form is the symbol of the audience”; see “In a Music Hall,” in More Theatres (1899; reprint, New York: Taplinger, 1969), 397. All subsequent references are to this edition.
22. Beerbohm, “Demos’ Mirror,” 273.
23. Beerbohm’s essay “The Blight on the Music Halls,” included in More Theatres, also tries to make sense of such a perceived change.
24. Beerbohm, “The Older and Better Music Hall,” in Around Theatres (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 384, 382.
25. As the title of “The Blight on the Music Halls” suggests, the earlier essay already sounds the note of cultural pessimism that resonates through the later essay, “The Older and Better Music Hall.” Both essays produce an authentic culture/commercial culture binary that relies on essentialized notions of “the people.” As Beerbohm puts it, “In its early stage, the Music Hall was a very curious and interesting phenomenon, a popular art”; he also claims that “vulgarity is an implicit element of the true Music Hall” (203). The essay is full of contradictions on the working of cultural co-optation. At one point, the critic complains that he, and his middle-class readers, were directly to blame and, like “fools,” drove “[vulgarity] from its most convenient haunt” (203). Yet Beerbohm initially suggests that the appropriation of music hall was an inevitable, if apparently unplanned, result of commercial enterprise: “One must not marvel that those days are over. With sumptuous palaces erected in the heart of London, and with the patronage of fashion, new modes were bound to come in, sooner or later” (200).
26. Beerbohm, “Older and Better,” 383.
27. Ibid., 383–84.
28. Pennell, “Pedigree,” 383.
29. John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 61.
30. Arthur Symons, letter to the Star, June 18, 1897. Cited in Selected Letters, 87.
31. It is my claim that Symons achieved a more exemplary self-consciousness in his essay on the famous Leicester Square music hall, the Alhambra; see chapter 2.
32. Pierre Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 84.
33. See Dick Hebdige, “In Poor Taste: Notes on Pop,” in Hiding in the Light (New York: Routledge, 1988), 116–43, for a similar reading of the unsettling strategies of pop art intellectuals. Hebdige reads pop “as an inspired move in the culture game, the object of which is to fix the shifting line between . . . ‘low’ and ‘high,’ ‘art’ and ‘non-art’” (120).
34. For an argument about the resistant potential that can accompany the assiduous observance of established rules, see Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1983): 124–33.
35. Archer, “Theatre and Music-Hall,” 96–97, 100.
36. Ibid., 98–99.
37. Ibid., 102.
38. Ibid., 103.
39. William Archer, “The Music Hall, Past and Future,” Living Age, 8th ser., 4 (Fall 1916): 102.
40. Archer’s “The Indictment of the Music-Hall,” published in 1917, voices a similar distaste for, and impatience with, popular “vulgarity.”
41. Archer, “The Music Hall,” 104.
42. G. H. Mair, “The Music Hall,” English Review 9 (August–November 1911): 124.
43. Christopher Ricks’s notes in his edition of early and unpublished poetry of Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), suggests that Eliot knew much of Symons’s poetry and even criticism by heart.
44. Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24.
45. David Chinitz, “Reading Marie Lloyd” (unpublished manuscript, 1998).
46. Ibid., 22.
47. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” 173.
48. Ibid., 174.
49. Ibid., 173.
50. Or, as Alan Marshall suggests, Eliot may be thinking of Eastern religion; the language of sympathy and understanding, of course, suffuses the end of The Waste Land. See Marshall, “England or Nowhere,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104.
51. I claim Arthur Symons gains a quite different insight in his visit to the Alcazar, a Spanish music hall: that neither performer nor music-hall patron is in thrall to difference, or fully determined by class status. See chapter 2.
52. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” 174.
53. Ibid., 175.
1. Arthur Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” in Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (New York: Brentano’s, 1919), 145.
2. For a provocative and wide-ranging study of the rise of the expert in England, see Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989).
3. Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” 146.
4. Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, “In Conversation: Doxa and Common Life,” New Left Review 191 (January/February 1992): 111–21.
5. Bruce Robbins levels this charge of reductionism against Bourdieu in Robbins’s Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), 208.
6. John Stokes examines Symons’s relation to music-hall culture, recognizing that music hall revised Symons’s attitudes to culture and aesthetics; see Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 53–95. Stokes also realizes that Symons’s pose as aficionado or self-styled amateur assumes a complex relation to cultural values, although he does not place Symons’s stance within the broader framework of professionalism. Peter Bailey’s fine essay “Conspiracies of Meaning” connects music-hall fandom to camp; his emphasis on working-class communities at the music hall leads him to pass over the singular case of Symons. See Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 138–70.
7. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 275. There is much to learn about camp from Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Diva’s Mouth (New York: Penguin, 1989): for example, Koestenbaum’s awareness that camp transforms both the camp spectator and the character of the object of affection. A narrative digression on camp in Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening (New York: Ballantyne, 1967) is also wonderfully suggestive. Isherwood sees camp as both double consciousness and catalyst: something that liquefies conceptual categories—or, more precisely, dialecticizes them. Isherwood’s mouthpiece, Stephen Monk, proclaims: “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance” (106).
8. Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” 145.
9. Andrew Ross, No Respect (New York: Routledge, 1989), 146.
10. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123.
11. Mark Booth, Camp (New York: Quartet Press, 1983), 183.
12. In Secular Vocations, Robbins elaborates on Pierre Bourdieu’s contradictory assessment of intellectuals (208). As an example: in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Bourdieu argues that intellectual populism amounts to little without a prior or ongoing redistribution of social and cultural capital: “We must—I have never stopped repeating it—work to universalize in reality the conditions of access to the sensibility and subjectivity present in the faux universal of the aesthetic experience” (84–85). Bourdieu leaves unanswered how this universalized culture is to come into being without experts, institutions, and even the “slumming” intellectuals whom he mistrusts.
13. I am arguing that Symons attains reflective distance from his spectator practice; like Roland Barthes, I equate achieved reflection with theoretical stances. Barthes extols “an attitude of reflexivity (we were speaking just now of theory, to me it’s the same thing),” and suggests the stance has a “real effect on culture,” since it facilitates “the extremely vigilant perception of one’s own position in language.” See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962–1980, translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 154.
14. Robbins, Secular Vocations, 34. Robbins stresses that professionalism carries a theoretical component with it that can potentially curb the elitism of experts. It is the possession of theory that simultaneously distinguishes the professional and produces the possibility for ethical practice. “Theory” enables a reflection on aims and ends, in which the public emerges as a felt pressure within the expert’s otherwise private deliberations; it can also ensure, ideally, that the public is never fully marginalized by expert deliberation. In Robbins’s words, “The original sense of profession was a declaration of belief made upon entry into holy orders; to enter into membership was to announce a shared theory. If what discriminates professions from other crafts and occupations is the necessary possession of theory, associated with a potential (even if unrealized) for the overcoming of self-interest . . . then a door opens in professionalism for a scrutiny of values and ends”; see Secular Vocations, 34.
15. Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” 146.
16. Ibid., 146–47.
17. Ibid., 148.
18. Ibid., 151.
19. Ibid., 152.
20. Examples include Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, even Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra as camp cult figure. I owe the suggestion to Stephen Shapiro’s unpublished work on Gramsci and Paris Is Burning, “Social Historians Study the Vagaries of Women’s Fashions: Gramsci, Drag, and the Wars of (Subject) Position.”
21. Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” 153.
22. Ibid., 154–55.
23. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, and Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 182.
24. Ibid., 181.
25. See W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 1. Lhamon’s analysis of New York circa 1830 stresses that modern concepts of rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, and alienation had their vernacular expression prior to its formalization at the hands of the educated but deracinated artist. Different idioms developed to express the same affective intensities: of alienation, fury, love, and displacement. Symons and Villaclara speak fundamentally the same language.
26. I may seem to be doing handsprings to establish that Symons’s treatment of Villaclara is somehow egalitarian. Like many others, I am largely persuaded by T. J. Clark’s masterful The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984; rev. ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), which emphasizes the darker consequences of bourgeois fascination with the lower middle class they encountered in urban leisure spaces. Clark suggests that the bohemian artist found in petit-bourgeois entertainers “alter egos of the avant-garde,” but adds that the avant-garde inserted these liminal figures back into a class hierarchy through their own representations of performers (142). In Clark’s words, a painting of the petit-bourgeois, Manet’s Olympia for example, “in some sense described these people’s belonging to the class system.” Clark adds the disclaimer that the painter’s heightened class consciousness “only happened occasionally”; one further assumes that such higher consciousness was not shared by the subjects of these paintings.
My quarrel with Clark lies in my different understanding of the consequences of bourgeois representations of the subaltern. For while I agree with Clark’s argument that representations of the petit-bourgeois stirred middle-class artists into recognizing their difference from members of the lower middle class, I do not believe this was the only consequence of these productions. Such representations are built on interclass encounters and reallocated cultural capital, albeit in partial, incomplete ways. The Symons/Villaclara exchange discloses how representations might change how relations between spectators and performers are framed.
Representations inevitably function as transactions. Symons recognizes Villaclara and isolates in her performance and stance certain skills that suggest the observer and observed perform similar labor in different venues. Both strive to manage the attention of others, albeit in different mediums. The encounter entails the recognition of shared labor and the assignation of surplus value: preconditions for the redistribution of cultural and other forms of capital. The recognition of labor enhances the value ascribed to both labor and laborers.
27. Symons, “A Spanish Music-Hall,” 155.
28. Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning,” 150.
29. Ibid., 169.
30. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Diva’s Mouth (New York: Penguin, 1989), 81.
31. Symons to Herbert Horne, c. March 1893, in Arthur Symons: Selected Letters, 1880–1935, edited by John Munro and Karl Beckson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 101.
32. Symons, “At the Alhambra,” Savoy 5 (September 1896): 81.
33. Ibid.
34. A description of Aladdin is provided in Ivor Guest’s book on Alhambra ballet. It was staged with the most elaborate light show possible, with, in Guest’s words, “a delicate curtain of ‘crystal lacework’ made of 75,000 glass facets that were held together by twenty-four miles of wire and illuminated by lights of many different colours”; see Ballet in Leicester Square: The Alhambra and the Empire (London: Dance Books, 1992), 47. Guest quotes the Era, which adds that “streams of silver ‘rain’ . . . fringed the curtain above, and the view through its network, of a beautiful central figure, with a branch of electric lights on each side of it” closed the show. While Mlle. Marie played Aladdin, actor/dancer Fred Storey is recalled as moving the house with the “splendid looseness of his trips and flings.” All told, Aladdin seems to have put its various means to a particular end: to free bodies from their moorings in gender.
35. Symons, “At the Alhambra,” 83.
36. Ibid., 82.
37. In other words, Symons relies on parataxis to narrate the ballet; “the Princess enters” is a cue, “and then” something else happens. We are told “there is another transformation” followed by a series of “enchantments”: then abruptly, “there is another transformation” (ibid.).
38. Ibid., 75.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 78.
41. Ibid., 79.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 77.
44. I take heart, though, from Steven Connor, whose brand of cultural phenomenology parallels Symons’s approach to the ballet so neatly I must remind myself that Symons never in fact read it (although Symons did read an early version of a similar stance in that celebrated paean to luminous surfaces, Walter Pater’s conclusion to his Studies in the Renaissance). The phenomenologist, Connor observes, works to attain a sense of how observers “always already” inhere within a given scene. Symons’s relations to music hall and the ballet assume his location within a specific place and situation. See Connor’s provocative online manifesto, “CP, or a Few Don’ts by a Cultural Phenomenologist,” November 7, 1998 (www.hbk.ac.uk/Departments/English/skc/Cp/notman.htm).
45. Symons, “Alhambra,” 73.
46. Ibid., 80.
47. Ibid., 83.
1. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1990), 35. He also observes that female prostitution was less a constant object of state regulation at the turn of the century than “subject to a peculiar ‘compromise’ that sought neither outright repression nor formal state regulation”; see “Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Janes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth Century,” in Hidden from History, edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 200. Weeks offers the straightforward view that “advocates of social purity did reach toward straightforward repression.” I challenge the claim that Chant, and purity workers in general, exerted a single-minded disciplinary power over the urban poor.
2. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 134.
3. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 245.
4. Judith Walkowitz complicates this judgment of purity reformers in The City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Having criticized the social purity legacy “for reinforcing women’s subordination and sexual fear,” she now recognizes that “these campaigns also opened up new heterosexual expectations for middle-class women, even as they set into motion repressive public policies, mostly directed against working-class women on the streets” (7).
5. Karl Beckson’s account of “Prostitutes on the Promenade” in London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1993) notes that the hostile reaction to Chant challenges stereotypes about puritanical Victorians: “[T]he reaction to the campaign against the Empire reveals the ferocity with which the presumably staid Victorians often resisted the attempts of the anti-vice reformers to regulate places of public amusement” (118). This chapter suggests some reasons why a purity reformer’s protest over public sexuality failed to gain hegemonic status in the culture, despite repressive tendencies at large in the culture.
6. Detailed information on Chant outside of the controversy over the promenade is relatively sparse; there does not yet exist a full-length study of Chant’s long history of work as a reformer, lecturer, and woman of letters (she wrote a novel entitled Sellcuts’ Manager [1899], as well as poetry). Phillipa Levine mentions Chant’s activity on the executive committee of the National Society for Woman’s Suffrage in passing, but Chant’s life and work have been undervalued and neglected by cultural historians; see Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitments (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 93. Edward J. Bristow’s Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Boston since 1700 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977) details the work of the “prudes” in the historical context of purity movements, but from a liberal perspective that denies complex motives to antilibertarians. E. S. Turner’s Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (London: M. Joseph, 1950) devotes an entire chapter to the Empire controversy; I follow Turner in paying careful attention to newspaper accounts in the disputes. In Madonnas and Magdalens (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), Eric Trugdill mentions Chant’s encounter with the Empire in passing (192–93); Tracy Davis mentions it in passing in Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991), 154–57. More recently, Judith Walkowitz discusses Chant’s polemics in the Pall Mall Gazette in defense of women’s unhampered access to leisure and labor in urban spaces; see “Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassments, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London,” Representations 62 (1998): 1–30.
A crucial step toward Chant’s “canonization” was taken when Karl Beckson gave the controversy over the Empire a full narrative account in his chronicle London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. John Stokes’s account of the Empire controversy is concise, useful, and balanced. It stands, I believe, as the very first fully judicious treatment of Chant’s protest in literary critical or belles-lettristic accounts of music hall; see In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
7. See Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 193–218, for a fuller discussion of how late-Victorian sexual scandal established social consensus.
8. George Bernard Shaw complained in the Pall Mall Gazette about Chant’s recklessness in making information she obtained about the earnings of prostitutes public; the Daily Telegraph’s drama critic, Clement Scott, attacked the reformers harshly as “a lot of ignorant busybodies, unwomanly women and unmanly men, prudes and prowlers, citizens and citizenesses with morbid consciences, vigilants and purists sworn not to correct pleasure but to put down all pleasure whatsoever, as their forefathers did of old” (Era, October 27, 1894, 3). For Scott, the general progress and refinement of the music halls, largely the work of sturdy entrepreneurs, was endangered by meddlers and androgynes. Arthur Symons argued that the women who spoke against the halls lacked the expertise to recognize the importance of the Empire promenade’s aesthetic qualities: “By closing the promenade, you take from the Empire . . . its privileges as a music-hall, and reduce it to the level of constraint and discomfort of an ordinary theatre” (Pall Mall Gazette, October 25, 1894, 3). I discuss Symons’s responses at greater length in this chapter. For more on Churchill and the Empire, see Churchill’s My Early Life (London: Reprint Society, 1944), 60–68.
9. Sketch, “The Empire,” October 31, 1894.
10. See Walkowitz, City, 187–89, on the highly aestheticized nature of male professionalism. Professional behavior was defined in ways contrary to the norms of the marketplace; public service and disinterested behavior were valorized in professionals. Again, see Harold Perkin’s The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (Routledge: New York, 1989) for a helpful overview.
11. Chris Waters, “Progressives, Puritans, and the Cultural Politics of the Council, 1894–1934,” in Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 1889–1965 (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 61.
12. Cited in Waters, “Progressives,” 62.
13. Ibid.
14. Joseph Donoghue, “The Empire Theatre of Varieties Licensing Controversy of 1894: Testimony of Laura Ormiston Chant before the Theatres and Musical Hall Licensing Committee,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 15 (Summer 1987): 50–59.
15. Information on the Empire and a transcript of Chant’s own testimony are both available in Joseph Donoghue’s helpful account of the licensing controversy, “Empire Theatre.”
16. Times (London), “Music, Dancing and Theatre Licensing,” October 11, 1894, 7.
17. In Actresses as Working Women, Tracy Davis draws attention to the testimony of D. Wilton Collin before the London County Council’s Theatres and Music Halls Licensing Committee. Collin witnessed the same prostitutes at St. James Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus and in attendance at the Alhambra and the Empire music halls on the same evening (145).
18. Qtd. in E. S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (London: Michael Joseph, 1950), 210.
19. Many such testimonies are provided in E. S. Turner’s account of the Empire controversy. Music-hall historian Archibald Haddon labeled the Empire’s promenade “vicious”; qtd. in Turner, Roads to Ruin, 1. Seymour Hicks called the Empire “the annexe of London’s smartest clubs” with a “scented-sachet demi-[mondain]” who were “ladies of distinction in their unfortunate profession”; see Seymour Hicks, The Vintage Years (London: Cassell, 1943), 152. Cf. James Agate on “The Passing of the Empire” in My Theatre Talks (London: Arthur Barker, 1933) for more gilded accounts of prostitution in the hall. (Agate, however, met and admired Chant herself.)
20. To-Day, “Letters of a Candid Playgoer,” November 17, 1894, 337.
21. Sketch, “Notes from the Theatres,” November 7, 1894, 3.
22. See Symons, Pall Mall Gazette, October 25, 1894, 3. As John Stokes writes, “Symons knew full well that the halls were the scene of sexual encounters, a secret he kept badly by endlessly celebrating his own assignations in poems and essays”; see In the Nineties, 60. See Beckson, London in the 1890s, for a reading of Symon’s “Maquillage” (1891), a poem that celebrates the upscale glamour of the “representative” Empire prostitute (113–14).
23. Donoghue, “Empire Theatre,” 54.
24. Music Hall and Theatre Review, “Babble,” October 12, 1894, 4.
25. Cited in Turner, Roads to Ruin, 211. Seymour Hicks’s description of the Empire also marks it as a masculine enclave, an “annexe of London’s smartest clubs, frequented by the best-known Men about Town, who scanned strange faces somewhat critically”; see The Vintage Years, 152. According to Hicks, “the Empire Lounge was known throughout Britain and her Dominions as a place where soldiers and sailors back from foreign service, or travellers who had not been in England for many a year, could make almost certain of meeting someone with whom they had been acquainted in the old days, and in this they were seldom disappointed” (153).
26. Qtd. in Turner, Roads to Ruin, 211.
27. See “Meeting of Protest,” Daily Telegraph, October 22, 1894, 3, for a sense of the popular outcry against Chant.
28. Davis notes that the prices of West End theaters and halls favored the middle class; see Actresses as Working Women, 142. In “Empire Theatre” Donoghue gives the Empire’s prices for admission as 1–3 guineas for private boxes; 7s. 6d. for box stalls; is. for the pit; 6d. for the gallery (55).
29. W. Macqueen-Pope, Twenty Shillings in the Pound (New York: Hutchinson, 1951), 275.
30. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), 250.
31. W. Macqueen-Pope, The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall (London: Allen, [1950]), 233.
32. The Empire also boasted a fairly wealthy clientele; H. G. Hibbert notes it was the first music hall Prince Edward attended casually; see Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1916), 88.
33. Stokes, In the Nineties, 59.
34. For the definitive reading of Victorian collectivist politics, see Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz’s “State and Society, 1880–1930,” in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, by Stuart Hall (New York: Verso, 1988), 95–123. The account stresses the Foucauldian aspects of this statist turn, as bureaucrats took up “the positive role of producing and accumulating new knowledge about the specific subjects and categories which came under their disciplinary regimes” (108).
35. Donoghue, “Empire Theatre,” 55.
36. Ibid., 56.
37. See also Times (London), October 11, 1894, 3.
38. Judith Walkowitz notes how crucial interviews with the urban poor were for female philanthropists. Charity workers often relied less on statistical knowledge and more on informal discussion, and Walkowitz labels these accounts as “incipient urban ethnography”; see City, 56.
39. Donoghue, “Empire Theatre,” 57.
40. For more information on Chant’s methods, see L. N. Sawyer, “Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant and the Empire Theatre,” Lend a Hand 14 (1896).
41. Walkowitz, City, 55.
42. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 320.
43. Cited in Sawyer, “Laura Ormiston Chant,” 338.
44. Elizabeth Langland, “Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel,” PMLA 107 (March 1992): 294.
45. For Chant, the streets allowed for dramatic encounters with dangerous men. In the Pall Mall Gazette, July 19, 1887, Chant relates chasing “a well dressed man of middle age” away from a girl of twelve, and asserts the rights of womanhood to London’s streets and public places (3).
46. The phrase is Chant’s; see Donoghue, “Empire Theatre,” 59.
47. Times (London), “Promenade to Be Closed,” November 2, 1894.
48. Chant’s class antagonism and solicitude for women working the promenade are more fully expressed in her interview in the Westminster Gazette, October 15, 1894, 3; her statements complicate John Fiske’s generalizations about music-hall spectatorship, offered in Understanding Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Observing that “middle- and upper-class men visited some of the more respectable halls in order to meet working-class women,” Fiske concludes that “it is not surprising . . . that when such activities attracted social discipline it was directed toward the work of the women rather than the leisure of the men” (77). Chant’s critique of male privilege was clearly understood by the angry men who responded to the protest in the Daily Telegraph.
49. Music Hall and Theatre Review, October 12, 1894, 4.
50. Walkowitz observes that most journalism agitating against the “traffic in women” gravitates toward melodrama; W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette is the locus classicus of these cultural uses of melodrama (July 1885). Stead’s account of the Maiden Tribute, in Walkowitz’s words, circulated one of the most “popular themes of nineteenth-century melodrama, street literature, and women’s penny magazines”: “the seduction of poor girls by vicious aristocrats”; see Walkowitz, “Male Vice and Feminist Virtue: Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain,” History Workshop 13 (Spring 1982): 83. Melodramatic values also inflect Chant’s interpretation of events at the Empire.
51. Our Day, “A Noted English Reformer: Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant; An Interview,” 16 (1896): 431.
52. Pall Mall Gazette, “Aim of the Purity Crusaders,” October 23, 1894, 7.
53. Davis defends Chant’s complaint that ballet costumes provoked desire; however, Davis’s assertion that “the contiguity of behavior in the promenades to the performance on stage . . . preoccupied the witnesses” requires a slight qualification in Chant’s case (156). Chant seemed unwilling to conclude that onstage performance was responsible for the corruption of women in the promenade; rather, it was the presence and visible success of solicitation that might dispirit women and seduce them to a life of vice. In the Westminster Gazette, Chant contrasts crowd reaction to the Living Pictures portrayal of “The Lost Chord” and the excitement of the crowd with “an indecent remark, in a strident voice, from a painted woman behind me.” “The enthusiasm of the house and the conduct of this woman in the promenade are a significant object lesson,” Chant concludes, thereby contrasting a proper mode of spectatorship with improper kinds of response. This defense of music-hall performance, it should be noted, is one of the few occasions in the controversy in which Chant is on record as blaming women for the plight of women, rather than the upscale men of the lounge.
54. The letter and editorial pages of the Daily Telegraph served as a fractious public sphere for a month; the Telegraph’s letter column and editorials previously had allowed two months of response to Mona Caird’s attack on marriage in the August 1888 Westminster Gazette, the skirmish producing twenty-seven thousand letters; see Trugdill, Madonnas and Magdalens, 241.
55. H. A. Bulley, Pall Mall Gazette, October 18, 1894, 3.
56. Freedom, Times (London), October 19, 1894, 2
57. Pall Mall Gazette, October 26, 1894, 3.
58. Arthur Symons, “The Case of the Empire,” Saturday Review, November 10, 1894, 501–2.
59. Since the 1850s, expert accounts of prostitution considered it an inescapable fact of urban life. W. R. Greg called it “a constant fact—a social datum which we have to deal with—an evil inseparable from the agglomeration of large numbers in one locality”; cited in Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 117. William Acton suggested that prostitution was, as Steven Marcus puts it, “an inevitable, almost an organic, part of society”; see Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 4. Acton’s solution to the social evil was “the intervention of government in a regulatory but minimal capacity” while preserving “personal liberty and laissez-faire.” Of course, Chant disrupted the consensus of medical experts like Acton on these points regarding prostitution.
60. “A. B.,” Daily Telegraph, October 16, 1894, 2.
61. T. Werle, Daily Telegraph, October 19, 1894, 2.
62. Daily Telegraph, October 27, 1894, 2.
63. Daily Telegraph, October 19, 1894, 2.
64. The Sketch claimed that the last word on the entire debate belonged to Raven Hill’s sketchbook, The Promenaders, with its twenty-two full-page drawings concerning the dispute. “Of the great fight over the Promenade,” the Sketch concludes, “perhaps the only relic which will be left of it is Mr. Raven Hill’s album.” Such a statement indicates that a professional aestheticism provided the last word on a debate that, for some, simply concerned matters of amusement.
65. Punch 107 (October 1894): 194–95.
66. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), for analysis of the many caricatures of the feminist prevalent in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, 160–70.
67. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 20.
68. Punch, 107 (October 1894): 195.
69. “Another Englishman,” Daily Telegraph, October 16, 1894, 3.
70. Daily Telegraph, editorial, October 15, 1894, 3.
71. Daily Telegraph, editorial, October 18, 1894, 3.
72. Music Hall and Theatre Review, October 12, 1894, 3.
73. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200.
74. Daily Telegraph, editorial, October 18, 1894, 2.
75. Sketch, October 31, 1894, 4.
76. Qtd. in Daily Telegraph, October 18, 1894, 3.
77. “A Londoner,” Daily Telegraph, October 18, 1894, 2.
78. “Persecuted,” Daily Telegraph, October 21, 1894, 2.
79. Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), 89.
80. Jerome K. Jerome, editorial, To-Day, October 20, 1894, 337.
81. The phrase is from Beatrice Webb; it is her description of female charity workers in the 1880s, cited in Walkowitz, City, 57.
82. “A. B.,” Daily Telegraph, October 16, 1894, 2.
83. Daily Telegraph, “Meeting of Protest,” October 22, 1894, 2.
84. Sketch, “The Empire: The Decline and Fall,” October 31, 1894, 3.
85. Stokes, In the Nineties, 9.
86. Jerome, To-Day, October 27, 1894, 369.
87. Walkowitz emphasizes the pleasures of fulfilled power indulged in by some middle-class women in charity work; the belief that philanthropists enjoyed their labor made their labor doubly suspicious to some, and these doubts were exposed in the correspondence elicited by the Empire controversy; see City, 57.
88. Waters, “Progressives,” 70.
89. Turner, Roads to Ruin, 221.
90. Pall Mall Gazette, “Aim of the Purity Crusaders,” October 19, 1894, 7.
91. Levine, Feminist Lives, 13.
92. Judith Walkowitz also provides a fascinating account of the Men and Women’s Club, formed in 1885, that demonstrates the attraction that positivism and secularism had for trained, intelligent men and women with managerial aspirations; see City, 135–69. Chant’s millennial expectation of the full redemption of working-class streetwalkers was keyed into religious traditions that no longer exclusively motivated those born into the trained, professional classes. Still, there remained viable, and vital, links between progressive feminism and millenialist religion in this period. At the World’s Congress of Representative Women, which Chant attended in Chicago the year before the Empire controversy, African American intellectual Francis Harper, the author of Iola Leroy, addressed the power of reforming women with chiliastic fervor. Harper assured her audience that they were “on the threshold of woman’s era,” when “Eden would spring up in our path, and Paradise be around our way”; see Harper, “Women’s Political Future,” in World’s Congress of Representative Women, edited by Mary Wright Sewall (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 433 and 437. Harper also spoke of the special role that women would play in ameliorating the “social evil” of prostitution (436). For more on Harper and the persistence of residual Judeo-Christian ideology among progressive African American women, and for a useful supplement for understanding Chant’s own intellectual background, see Hazel Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 262–77.
93. Beverly Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997), 8.
94. Pall Mall Gazette, “Concerning a Council of Morality,” October 19, 1894, 4.
95. Waters, “Progressives,” 70.
96. The coincident rise of professionalism and consumerism is detailed by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Bruce Robbins challenges the argument that these emergent forces entail the necessary demise of humane and democratic possibilities in Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), 51.
97. Robbins, Secular Vocations, 52.
98. I discuss some reasons to reconsider and embrace our professional identity at length in the chapter on Symons (who is portrayed negatively in this chapter, since he uncharacteristically insisted on his music-hall expertise as a mode of privilege during the Empire controversy).
99. The promenade of the Empire was eventually closed, but not until World War I hysteria mounted over the spread of syphilis; see Beckson, London in the 1890s, 127. For an example of how Chant’s allegedly power-mad personality was read into the historical record, see Colin Maclnnes’s otherwise essential reconstruction of music hall, Sweet Saturday Night (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967). In most respects, Maclnnes’s probing eye for the social circumstances behind popular forms makes his book a precursor to the best work of the Birmingham Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture. However, Maclnnes’s analytical skills falter in the case of the Chant controversy. He (inaccurately) blames Chant for closing the promenade (for more than a brief time), insinuating that she “killed” the hall as a going concern and lively social venue. The charm of imagining oneself as a flaneur on the promenade is real enough seventy years on to entice Maclnnes to provide a loving evocation of the space and issue a spirited tirade against Chant the meddler. In his imaginative recasting, the “Empire was famous for its Promenade, from which you could see the show and, from closer to, courtesans who spent the evening there waiting for you to offer them a b. and s. or some bubbly” (142). The passage invites the reader to join the author in the role of aspiring dandy. He adds with some indignation that this “delightful and harmless place came to be thought by moralists . . . scandalous,” a state of affairs for which he fully blames “the indefatigable machinations of one Mrs. Ormiston Chant.”
100. Music Hall and Theatre Review, October 19, 1894, 3.
101. Tony Bennett’s study The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995) indicates how rare Chant’s attitudes were among individuals with a managerial inclination. While many within the professional classes were optimistic that public spaces accommodating art, museums, and art galleries could play a role in tutoring and transforming working-class patrons, most intellectuals refused to believe that mass culture arenas might serve a pedagogic function; see Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 66. Newspaper editorials that touched on this issue during the Empire controversy voiced their concern over the pernicious effects of the music-hall “vulgarity” that Chant countenanced, even appeared to embrace, in her press comments on the entertainment. The Western Daily Press shared some of Chant’s open-minded tolerance toward patrons who chose to spend time and money on London music halls rather than frequent the city’s opera or museums, but also displayed a significant condescension toward them. One editorial states, “[T]he young man who returns to lonely lodgings after a heavy and, perhaps, a disappointing day’s work, is not necessarily badly disposed because if, as a choice of entertainments, he is offered a lecture on Moabite inscriptions or a seat in a music-hall, he prefers the latter. Nor need he be absolutely brainless if there are times when he would rather sit in a music-hall, and listen to songs with a swinging refrain and see graceful dancing, and have a quiet smoke and think of nothing in particular, than follow with intellectual strain a Lyceum performance of Lear, or a Haymarket version of Hamlet”; qtd. in Why We Attacked the Empire (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1895), 31–32. This is certainly a timid defense. The Echo also tolerated, and patronized, the “men and women of all classes, . . . whose mental calibre is such that . . . ‘Knock ’em in the Old Kent Road,’ appeals far more pleasantly than one of Bach’s fugues, and the rhyme of ‘Daisy and Bicycle Made for Two’ is infinitely more fascinating than the immortal story of Dante and his sweet Lady Beatrix”; qtd. in Why We Attacked, 26–27.
102. Era, October 27, 1894, 1.
103. Arthur Symons, “Imperium Et Licentia,” Pall Mall Gazette, October 25, 1894, 3.
104. Ibid.
105. Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 90.
106. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 28–30.
107. The Sketch, October 31, 1894, 4.
108. Grant Richards, Memoirs of a Misspent Youth (London: Heinemann, 1932), 324.
109. Ibid., 326.
110. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 11.
111. Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, 90.
112. Ibid., 92.
1. The end of this hegemony is amply demonstrated in the comprehensive case studies that comprise Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See especially chapter 2, “Contested Terrain: New Social Actors,” 41–81.
2. For a helpful discussion of gender and performance at the halls, see Jane Traies, “Jones and the Working Girl: Class Marginality in Music Hall Song, 1860–1900,” in Music Hall: Performance and Style, edited by J. S. Bratton (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986). For a provocative analysis of the metaphors that gendered mass culture upon its emergence in the nineteenth century, see Andreas Huyssen’s “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–65. Huyssen argues that working-class culture, unlike mass culture forms such as popular magazines, best-sellers, and serial novels, was never stigmatized as “seductive” spectacle by critical observers within the middle class. This argument would appear to exclude the music hall from being conceptualized as seductive, since the halls were, for most of the nineteenth century, a metonym for working-class culture and conviviality. Nonetheless, the gender categories that Huyssen suggests were mobilized in debates over cultural value and hierarchy touched the debate over the halls themselves. For example, gender categories allowed observers to periodize the form, and abetted in the creation of middle-class patrons who could imagine themselves true curators of the entertainment. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the rise of large-scale variety theaters that, as Gareth Stedman Jones observes, attracted “a new audience” to the form, including “sporting aristocrats . . . military and civil officials on leave from imperial outposts, clerks and white-collar workers, . . . university, law and medical students”; see Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 194. The variety theater became, in the eyes of some, the home of class interlopers, who can be imagined and marginalized as undesirables. Jones characterizes the variety theater as “a natural focus of jingoism, upper-class rowdyism and high-class prostitution.” Henry Nevinson’s depiction of the music hall presents the “old,” downscale, East End music hall as the repository of healthy culture, in comparison with its tradition of robust homosociality.
3. The “discovery” of East London by middle-class chroniclers and journalists is detailed in Peter Keating’s The Working Classes in English Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). Walkowitz speaks of the convergence of “high and low literary forms, from Charles Booth’s survey of London poverty, to the fictional stories of Stevenson, Gissing, and James, to the sensational newspaper stories of W.T. Stead and G.R. Sims,” in encouraging a “geographic division of London into a hierarchical separation, organized around the opposition of East and West”; see City, 17. The inherent difficulties faced by middle-class representations of the working class also organize Regenia Gagnier’s careful study of the many Victorian discourses of self-writing and self-disclosure, Subjectivities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4. Walkowitz, City, 60.
5. Walter Besant’s most notorious text in this regard is The Revolt of Men (London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1882), which imagines women taking over all of professional society.
6. Walter Besant, Dorothy Wallis: An Autobiography (London: Longman’s, Green, 1892), 67.
7. The “domestication” of London theater dominated the 1890s, Mary Jean Corbett argues in Representing Femininity, yet the possibility of theater becoming an exclusively feminine space troubled the male intelligentsia well into the twentieth century. In 1933, Irish playwright St. John Ervine sounded the alarm that “[t]wo dangers at present threaten the theatre. . . . One that it may become womanized; the other that it may become a machine for party propaganda. . . . The first [danger] is graver than the second. The man’s Theatre became the recreation of the community; the woman’s Theatre is likely to be the recreation of a single sex, and that will kill it”; see Ervine, The Theatre of My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933), 136.
8. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, v.
9. Ibid., ix.
10. Ibid., 53.
11. W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant,” in Literary and Social Judgments (Boston: James Osgood, 1873), 306.
12. Actress and suffragette Cicely Hamilton claimed a Besant heroine served as her role model and her introduction to the difficulties faced by women in a male-dominated workplace. Hamilton recalled how she was moved by the “unsophisticated maiden” in Besant and James Rice’s The Golden Butterfly, who visited London’s business district and “[gazed] round with eyes of wonder,” asking, “Where are all the women?. . . . Why is there nothing but men in this part of London?” See Cicely Hamilton, “The Working Women,” in Wonderful London, edited by Almey St. John Adcock (London: Fleetway House, 1935), 190.
13. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 311.
14. Ibid., viii.
15. Besant recalls in his autobiography founding a Woman’s Bureau of Work, an endeavor that tied philanthropic impulse to a desire for controlled surveillance of working-class women. In Besant’s words, the bureau offered “offices all over the country and in the colonies, where women who want work, and places which want women workers, might be registered, classified, and made known”; see The Autobiography of Walter Besant (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), 93. The impulse to empower women and discipline them is casually intertwined in Besant’s scheme.
16. See Mary Jean Corbett’s careful reading of Irene Vanbrugh’s autobiography in Representing Femininity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145–46.
17. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, vi.
18. Madge Kendal, Dramatic Opinions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890), 196.
19. Dorothy’s cousin Daniel is an avid patron of the Empire music hall, and even considers taking to the stage himself. When Dorothy, Rachel, and Oney subsequently tour with a theatrical troupe, Oney wonders aloud if an absent Daniel “went on the music-hall stage” instead (188). Even as variety theaters gained the patronage of working-class audiences, both Besant’s fiction and his more sociological chronicles of city life suggest how difficult it was to extricate the music hall from working-class culture—and criminality. In Besant’s chronicle of East London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901), the writer details the habits of East End hooligans, stressing that they inhabit East End halls but routinely go “farther afield, and may be found in the galleries of even West End music-halls to see a popular turn” (181).
20. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 62.
21. Ibid., 63.
22. Ibid., 68.
23. Ibid., 69.
24. Ibid., 230.
25. Ibid., 109.
26. Ibid., 281.
27. Ibid., 77.
28. Ibid., 282.
29. Ibid., 283.
30. Kendal, Dramatic Opinions, 80.
31. Ibid., 82.
32. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 307.
33. Ibid., 306.
34. Besant, East London, 65.
35. Martha Banta stresses the contradictory advice offered to women such as Dorothy and an American contemporary, Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, in current periodicals. In Ruth Batchelder’s “The Country Girl Who Is Coming to the City,” young women are advised not to leave home for a job. In contrast, in James Montgomery Flagg’s Adventures of Kitty Cobb (both were published in the Delineator, edited by Dreiser from 1906 until 1910), the heroine marries the right man, just as Besant suggests Dorothy will eventually, and attains lifelong happiness after her initial struggle. As Banta remarks, “if young women followed Flagg’s version of ‘The Country Girl’ they would hasten to the city as quickly as possible”; see Banta, Imaging American Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 781. These conflicting narratives of Batchelder and Flagg lie cheek by jowl in the run of the same literary magazine. Besant’s novel expresses both ideologies: the promise of success for ambitious women and the likely consequences of compromised femininity and lost respectability.
36. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 172.
37. John Stokes provides a fine discussion of the new journalism and the then-novel interview, which fostered belief that public events might be explained through the analysis (and representation) of individual motives. The interview bolstered late-Victorian concepts of individual agency; see In the Nineties, 19–21.
38. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 202.
39. The Bookman speculated that “so capable a person will not always wait for her sluggish and dilatory lover,” and suspected that Dorothy’s career would resume; see A. C. Deane, Bookman 2 (1892): 121. The Dial meanwhile criticized the absent Alec for his near-criminal neglect of Dorothy and for his delay in placing Dorothy under his husbandly care: “[W]e suppose he will provide for her eventually . . . but we cannot forgive [him] for permitting her to lead for so long a life of so great privation and suffering” (309). Of course, Dorothy’s misfortunes prove not only her virtue, but also her innate professionalism as Besant sees it.
40. Deane, 121.
41. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 202.
42. Ibid., 9–10.
43. Walter Besant, “At the Music Hall,” Longman’s Magazine 22 (June 1893): 163.
44. Ibid., 164.
45. Ibid., 165.
46. Besant, Dorothy Wallis, 191.
47. Ibid., 168.
48. Ibid., 169.
49. Hall Caine, The Christian (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), 75.
50. Judith Walkowitz’s account of the “Maiden Tribute” controversy in City details how the various narratives surrounding Victorian sexual scandal circulated by the Victorian press could be mobilized in favor of “the people” and against the rakish aristocrat. In Walkowitz’s words, these narratives established and activated “political potentialities for action for men and women” (120).
51. Walkowitz, City, 57.
52. Ibid., 59.
53. Caine, Christian, 280.
54. Ibid., 320.
55. Ibid., 539.
56. Beerbohm’s comment on Caine’s novel comes from his review of the stage adaptation; see Beerbohm, “Greeba in London,” Saturday Review, October 21, 1899, 515.
57. Caine, Christian, 228.
58. Caine’s portrayal of music-hall performers provoked indignant responses from those in the profession. T. Brock-Richards worries that “Mr. Hall Caine’s book will be read by thousands who are entirely ignorant of the profession, and who will therefore get an altogether wrong idea of those within its circle . . . you will not find a class of people more hardworking, taking them en masse, or more worthy of our admiration”; see Era, September 4, 1897, 19.
59. Caine, Christian, 184.
60. Ibid., 232.
61. Ibid., 283.
62. Ibid., 284.
63. Ibid., 323.
64. Idler, “Two at the Play,” 16 (August–January 1899): 629.
65. The Era’s reviewer was clearly interpellated by the scene in which Glory nearly becomes a fatal victim of Storm’s righteous anger. The struggle between male rectitude and a feminized weakness and vice was clearly integral to the popular success of both the novel and play; see Era, February 17, 1907, 23.
66. Caine, Christian, 535.
67. Keating, Working Classes, 198–99.
68. Margaret Nevinson, Life’s Fitful Fever (London: A. and C. Black, 1926), 80.
69. Martha Vicinus provides a useful history of the forces that led to the founding of Toynbee Hall and the attempts of settlers to “civilize” Whitechapel; see Vicinus, Independent Woman: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 211–46. An example: for Canon Barnett, the working class constituted a “dull undifferentiated mass, devoid of culture,” that nonetheless might benefit from the trickle down of culture (215). To this end, Barnett brought young students at Oxford and “the finest in contemporary culture” to an impoverished area. The characters in “Little Scotty” demonstrate a thorough mistrust of philanthropists who impose moral codes and culture from on high. Many male settlers at Toynbee Hall shared Nevinson’s apparent misgivings. By century’s end, most of the men at Toynbee Hall had moved on to professional occupations, leaving women to supervise slum work.
Judith Walkowitz argues that the desire of men to renounce charity work in favor of professional opportunities masked their envy of the success that women charity workers had, comparative to men, with reaching working-class women. The philanthropy subplot of Caine’s novel bears out this charge of ressentiment aimed at successful women philanthropists; see Walkowitz, City, 60.
70. Keating, Working Classes, 201.
71. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 127.
72. Henry Nevinson, “Little Scotty,” in Neighbours of Ours (New York: H. Holt, 1895), 126.
73. Ibid., 120.
74. Ibid., 124.
75. Ibid., 125.
76. Ibid., 129.
77. Ibid., 126.
78. Walkowitz, City, 26.
79. J. A. Hobson’s The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901) codifies such charges, accusing music hall of fostering a dangerous, excessive nationalist fervor.
80. Nevinson, “Little Scotty,” 134.
81. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 326.
82. Roger Henkle, “Morrison, Gissing and the Stark Reality,” Novel 11 (Spring 1992): 312.
83. Walkowitz, City, 44.
84. Nevinson, “Little Scotty,” 134.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 136.
87. Ibid., 138.
88. Ibid., 141.
89. Ibid., 142.
90. See Dagmar Hoher’s “The Composition of Music-Hall Audiences, 1850–1900,” in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, edited by Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), 73–93; and more generally Dagmar Kift’s book The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict, translated by Roy Kift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
91. Walkowitz, City, 45.
92. Ibid., 47.
93. Jones, “Working-Class Culture,” 232.
94. Huyssen, “Mass Culture,” 9.
95. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking (New York: Methuen, 1985), 65.
96. Banta, Imaging American Women, 654.
97. Ibid., 641.
1. Susan Pennybacker, “The London County Council and the Music Halls,” in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, edited by Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), 120–41.
2. Ibid., 130.
3. Ibid.
4. See Judith Walkowitz’s discussion of the 1885 Maiden Tribute and its various “cultural consequences” in The City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 121–35.
5. Susan Pennybacker’s essay “London County Council” indicates how difficult it was to draw lines of propriety either in the content of songs or with the tableaux vivants. Tableaux vivants were in effect halted by the LCC in 1907, when the Bishop of London acted in concert with the National Vigilance Association to stop London exhibitions; see Times (London), August 7, 1907 12.
6. From Theatres and Music Halls Committee, Presented Papers, Palace Theatre of Varieties (August 23, 1894), unsigned letter from MP; cited in Pennybacker, “London County Council,” 130.
7. Pennybacker, “London County Council,” 130.
8. John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 77.
9. Andrew Ross, No Respect (New York: Routledge, 1989), 5.
10. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57–62; 67.
11. My reading of tableaux vivants is influenced by Joy S. Kasson’s analysis of the complicated reaction Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave elicited among nineteenth-century American viewers in the 1840s and 1850s. Kasson details how Powers worked to make the depiction of a nude young Greek girl in chains acceptable by providing not only visual cues but a written narrative commentary that tried to foreclose erotic readings of the statue. The complex response to Powers’s statue—which sometimes incited political meditation, at other times sexual reverie—illustrates how disorderly the presentation and reception of the female nude could be in the nineteenth century; see Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave,” in Marble Queens and Captives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 46–73.
Likewise, Robert C. Allen’s study of American burlesque explores Linda Williams’s suggestion that female display before the cinema needed to be situated in various contexts, to be narrativized; see Allen, Horrible Prettiness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See for example Allen’s reading of stereographic renderings (in which two photos set side by side and seen through a special camera produced a 3-D composite image) of burlesque jokes (259–62). Allen finds the tendency to narrative Williams locates in Muybridge already evident in the spectacular dramas of captive sexuality staged by the celebrated burlesque performer Mazeppa (263).
12. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 62. Mulvey’s picture of male-dominated cinema in her 1975 essay is monolithic enough to ensure that, in Tania Modleski’s words, “feminists were stymied”; see The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988), 9: Janet Bergstrom, Gaylyn Studler, Teresa de Lauretis, Linda Williams, Tania Modleski, and Mulvey herself (in 1981’s “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’”) have all endeavored to think about male and female spectatorship more tolerantly than Mulvey’s initial foray into the matter permitted. This revisionary thinking about spectatorship is collected in Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988). However, as Modleski observes in The Women Who Knew Too Much, many of Mulvey’s critics follow her in speaking of a distanciated response to cinema as the proper one; in so doing, they replicate Mulvey’s initial dichotomy between critical viewers and passive spectators (9).
13. Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (New York: Methuen, 1987), 12.
14. Laura Kipnis argues that bringing class into debates of pornography breaks down “the theoretical monolith of misogyny” that dominates feminist analysis of libidinal entertainments; see “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Nelson Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 374.
15. Here I rely on Jody Berland’s inventory of changes in the halls taken from her essay “Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space,” in Grossberg and Treichler, Cultural Studies, 42. But see also Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974) or Bailey’s Music Hall for more on capitalist development of the halls during the 1890s.
16. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).
17. For prudent criticism of Debord’s tendency to totalize, see Thomas Richards’s introduction to his The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially 15–17.
18. Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 659.
19. In The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), T. J. Clark famously argues that the female nude of Manet’s Olympia signified class difference to male bourgeois spectators of the work. Manet’s female nude is no longer the classless courtesan existing outside of time and place, but a figure who fits comfortably in modern Parisian society. The representation of the modern prostitute broke with traditional ways of framing the female nude, made classic and standardized by earlier portraits such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The painting shattered the myth of the classless courtesan while breathing life into a new urban myth of the city’s takeover by women workers like the prostitute. In the Paris of 1865, Clark asserts, all this added up to “unpopular art” (100). Clark’s reading of Manet’s painting suggests links between female nudity and the otherwise-invisible working class; it also provides a more sophisticated account of the shock value associated with tableaux vivants than recourse to the cliché of Victorian propriety offers.
I argue that, in a fashion similar to Manet’s Olympia, London tableaux vivants “altered and played with identities the culture wished to keep still”: the nude, the bodies of working-class women, the prostitute, and the notion of high art. That in midcentury Paris, Olympia represented unpopular art to the middle class, while in 1894 London, the tableaux vivants performance represented edgy mass culture itself suggests the growth of a professional criticism capable of absorbing cognitive shock and cultural transgression.
20. Jack McCullough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 7.
21. Johann Goethe, Italian Journey: 1786–1788, translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Schocken, 1958), 340.
22. Banta, Imaging American Women, 661.
23. See McCullough, Living Pictures, 6.
24. Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 340.
25. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 193.
26. Kipnis, “(Male) Desire,” 373–92.
27. Ibid., 377.
28. Advertisements for Madame Pauline’s performance at the Coal Hole promised that her troupe would faithfully reproduce “gems of art” from the “pictures from the Manchester Art Treasures”; see McCullough, Living Pictures, 39.
29. George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859).
30. Ibid., 178.
31. See Thomas Richards on the “spectacular” nature of commodity display in the Crystal Palace and similar exhibits.
32. Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, 177.
33. Ibid., 177–78.
34. Harold Scott, The Early Doors (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1946), 42.
35. James Greenwood, The Wilds of London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), 100.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 163.
38. Ibid., 164. In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu speaks for Greenwood’s brand of cultural criticism when Bourdieu remarks on the crucial role visceral disgust can play in aesthetic evaluation: “In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance . . . of the tastes of others. . . . Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes” (56).
39. Greenwood, 243.
40. Ibid., 106.
41. In Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), Julie Holledge observes that the 1870s marked the return of the middle class to the London theater (4).
42. Saturday Review 38 (December 5, 1874): 726.
43. Ibid.
44. See Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), 219.
45. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 191.
46. McCullough, Living Pictures, 104.
47. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 121–22.
48. McCullough, Living Pictures, 116.
49. Linda Williams, Hardcore (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 41.
50. The belief that Kilyani’s Living Pictures offered a technological improvement on previous tableaux was widespread; typical is this reaction from the New York tabloid Police Gazette when Kilyani’s troupe reached New York halls: “[A]ll attempts [that] have been made hitherto to produce the living pictures” were “flat, tawdry and uninviting.” Until Kilyani, “the electric light had not reached its present stage of perfection.” As a result such displays had been previously only “the vehicle for suggestiveness that approached the border line of indecency” (September 15, 1894, 7). Readers of Linda Williams’s Hardcore will recognize much of what I say about the impact of ideology on the formation of cinema. In Horrible Prettiness Robert Allen uses Williams’s account of film’s prehistory to contextualize fin-de-siècle burlesque.
51. Encomiums such as this one from the Era were typical: “In tableaux vivants the smallest discord is sufficient to spoil the effect. Every hue and every contour must follow correctly the scheme of the original pictures, so that the harmony already secured by the artist may be attained. Canvas, costumes and the human form divine should be all in accord, and the trouble necessary to attain such a result must be enormous” (February 24, 1894).
52. Toward a genealogy of MTV: the rapid changes between Kilyani’s individual tableaux obviously anticipate the quick cuts gained in film montage. The aims of Kilyani’s tableaux were fulfilled by the apparatus of cinema. W. Macqueen-Pope saw the pictures as an obvious precursor to cinema; he notes that the successor to the Living Pictures was a “new sensation, pictures of another kind, pictures that moved . . . called The American Bioscope, or Biograph”; see The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall (London: Allen, [1950] ), 196. H. G. Hibbert suggests the biograph was the real successor to the Living Pictures at the Palace: “It was many months ere the living pictures lost their attractiveness, if they ever did. And, so far as the Palace was concerned, another attraction was immediately forthcoming—cinematograph pictures of curious excellence.” The Palace introduced animated pictures in March 1897; they immediately became a continuous feature of this variety theater. The Music Hall and Theatre Review observed in 1901 that “so far from [the Biograph’s] popularity being exhausted, it is a greater attraction than ever, and Papa Morton’s patrons would kick up a rare hullabaloo if the pictures were ever absent from the bill” (August 23, 1901). And it is no wonder: a Palace patron at this point was prepared to expect new feminine spectacle provided by novel technologies.
53. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 56.
54. Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 102.
55. Ibid., 103.
56. Stage 26 (October 1893): 13.
57. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 13, 1894.
58. W. Macqueen-Pope, The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall (London: Allen, [1950]), 202.
59. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 2, 1894.
60. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 13, 1894.
61. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 18, 1894, 34.
62. Music Hall and Theatre Review, June 29, 1894.
63. H. G. Hibbert, Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1916), 165.
64. Music Hall and Theatre Review, August 17, 1894.
65. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 11, 1894.
66. See Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
67. Richards, Commodity Culture.
68. Frederick Wedmore, “The Music-Halls,” Nineteenth Century 40 (July 1896): 128–36, 131.
69. Ibid., 130.
70. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 4.
71. Richards, Commodity Culture, 56.
72. Era, December 16, 1893.
73. Macqueen-Pope, Melodies, 201.
74. Ibid., 221.
75. Music Hall and Theatre Review, August 24, 1894.
76. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 24.
77. Times (London), June 26, 1907.
78. Music Hall and Theatre Review, July 6, 1906.
79. Peter Bailey, “Custom, Capital, and Culture,” in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by R. Storch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 180–208, 198.
80. Ibid., 199.
81. Stokes, In the Nineties, 62.
82. Ibid., 85.
83. Bourdieu, Distinction, 34.
84. Arthur Symons, “To a Dancer,” in London Nights (London: Leonard Smithers, 1897).
85. Arthur Symons, “Behind the Scenes at the ‘Empire,’” Sketch 12 (March 1894): 389.
86. Theodore Wratislaw, “At the Empire,” in Orchids (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896).
87. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats (New York: Anchor, 1958), 146.
88. Pall Mall Gazette 13 (September 1894).
89. Lady Henry Somerset, “The Living Pictures: To the Women of England,” Woman’s Signal, August 2, 1894, 1.
90. Qtd. in Woman’s Signal, August 7, 1894.
91. Somerset, “Living Pictures.”
92. Woman’s Signal, August 14, 1894.
93. Somerset, “Living Pictures.”
94. Reverend Carlile of Eastcheap sermonized on the pictures, complaining that the exhibition would have repercussions overseas: “It was time for the country, and especially for the County Council, to awake to the danger. Soon it would be too late. The grit and fibre of our English character will gone, our Colonies would desert us, our forces would be defeated by water and by land . . . then the name of London would be added to the long and mournful roll of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Babylon and Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah”; see Westminster Gazette, September 10, 1894.
95. Holdsworth, “Footlights,” Woman’s Signal, December 20, 1894.
96. Ibid., 39.
97. Ibid., 40.
98. Qtd. in Woman’s Signal, August 16, 1894.
99. Gossamer, “Waftings from the Wings,” Fun, August 21, 1894, 34.
100. George Bernard Shaw, “Pictures at the Palace,” Saturday Review, April 1894, 442–44, 443.
101. Ibid., 444.
102. Ibid.
103. Wedmore, “The Music-Halls,” 130.
104. Westminster Gazette, August 27, 1894.
105. Ronald Pearsall observes that “by and large the profession of model was an unholy one” for Victorians, even when they were Royal Academy models; see Worm, 107. However, George Du Maurier’s Trilby, published the same year the controversy over the Palace raged, endeavors to rehabilitate the profession.
106. Qtd. in McCullough, Living Pictures, 135.
107. Sketch, March 28, 1894.
108. Symons, New Review 11 (November 1894): 461–70, 465.
109. Qtd. in New York Police Gazette, January 12, 1895.
110. New York Herald, August 19, 1894.
111. Ibid., 3.
112. New York Tribune, August 29, 1894.
113. As this performer playfully hints, conservative critics of the tableaux vivants feared the pictures were ideal masturbation fodder. Reverend Carlile of Eastcheap, for example, expressed the fear that “thousands of young men and boys, too, who formed the chief worshippers in this idolatry of the ‘Living Nude’ were being directly led on to that silent sin which usually ended either in open debauchery or in the fearful scourge of suicide”; see Westminster Gazette, September 8, 1894.
114. This is not to say that more sexualized images of these models no longer were available: only that they were occasionally complicated by competing images, such as that of the professional worker. The Living Pictures appear, as Robert Allen notes in Horrible Prettiness, in the stag Mutoscope films often shown in penny arcades at the turn of the century. (Mutoscope shorts were distributed by the Biograph Company to music halls and vaudeville theaters, with more risqué shorts sent to saloons, penny arcades, and amusement parks [266].) Allen describes one short, discovered in the Library of Congress copyright deposit building in the late 1960s, entitled “The Pouting Model,” originally from June 1901. In the film, two woman pull back curtains “to reveal a nude adolescent girl standing with her back to the spectator and posing for a bearded artist seated in the background of the image.” In true tableaux vivants style, the artist and the model are static until the film ends with the two women closing the curtain again (267).
115. Although I can fairly claim that Living Pictures were not exclusively a male entertainment, the material I have seen—particularly in the New York Police Gazette—allows me to generalize that they primarily were.
116. The Era records on March 18, 1893, that Sandow began to add “some novel features” to his performance at the Palace: “Coming on the stage in evening dress he immediately retired behind some plush curtains, which, when drawn aside, disclosed him bared to the waist on a pedestal posing as a statue” (16). Next followed “a display of the biceps, the muscles that cover the ribs, the abdominal muscles, the different muscles of the back.” After Kilyani’s success, Sandow’s forays into tableaux increased, with scenes from the life of Hercules and Apollo added to his act; see McCullough, Living Pictures, 126.
117. Music Hall and Theatre Review, September 21, 1894.
118. Thomas Richards analyzes the construction of “a specifically female consuming subjectivity” in the 1890s in his chapter on the image of the “seaside girl” that would preoccupy the public imagination of England and America well into the next century; see Commodity Culture, 205–9. One can refer to Richards’s study of how advertisers “became specialists not only in constituting discourse but in constituting selves—especially female selves—to take up positions within commodity culture” to get an idea of what Somerset’s campaign competed against in the public sphere (210).
119. Pennybacker, “London County Council,” 125.
120. Theatre historian Ernest Short draws attention to the Palace’s role as a primary home for scandalous, modernist dance by women, observing that “Maud Allan, with her Salome dance; the triumphs of Pavlova and Mordkin, particularly in Galzounoffs ‘Bacchanale’; and the classic dances of Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, are Palace memories”; see Sixty Years of Theatre (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951), 226.
121. This tendency toward star turns was in keeping with the stars performers—the Terrys, Irvings, Farrs, Vanbrughs—who dominated English theater in the 1890s. It is interesting to note that the publicity surrounding the Living Pictures in New York led to a celebration of the individual performers in the troupes more quickly than in London. The New York Police Gazette, one of the nation’s first tabloids, was obsessed with certain individual stars in the pictures; the paper’s in-depth story on Esther Gaab, the “German Venus,” is one of many stories on individual picture models during this time (January 5, 1895, 6).
122. Music Hall and Theatre Review, March 12, 1906.
123. See Short, Sixty Years of Theatre, 213. Because of copyright laws, newspapers refused to sketch the tableaux vivants, so little visual evidence of how these tableaux were performed remains. It is difficult to imagine, however, how La Milo’s performance as “The Rokesby Venus” could have had any but a voyeuristic appeal for the audience at the London Pavilion. In Velasquez’s painting a nude woman gazes with her back turned to the audience into a mirror; as Griselda Pollack has described the work, “the mirror is murky, her own face vague, unrecognizable, oblivious to the viewer’s voyeurism and imposing no demand for recognition of individual identity” (124). Whether the set design for La Milo interfered with the scenario for scopic pleasure that Velasquez established, I have not been able to discover.
124. Music Hall and Theatre Review, July 6, 1906.
125. W. T. Stead, qtd. in Music Hall and Theatre Review, September 14, 1906.
126. La Milo (Pansy Montague), qtd. in Music Hall and Theatre Review, June 21, 1907.
127. This is E. J. Hobsbawn’s ironic term for the proliferation of state and civic pageants in England in the years between the passage of the second Reform Bill and the close of World War I.
128. La Milo (Pansy Montague), qtd. in Sketch, August 14, 1907.
129. A contemporary observer, theater historian Ernest Short, believed that Allan’s uniqueness resided in her ability to aestheticize her own physical display: “Maud Allan showed how lovely the human body can be in a yard or two of crepe de Chine, with bare legs and arms”; see Sixty Years of Theatre, 228. Allan’s artistic credentials were partially borne on her body: Short stresses Allan’s appearance as “a shy, serious-looking young girl.”
130. Era, February 16, 1907.
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170.
2. Arthur Symons, “Cyrene at the Alhambra,” Sketch, April 5, 1893, 610.
3. Cf. Raymond Williams, who characterizes the 1880s and 1890s as marked by “the integration and consolidation of bourgeois cultural institutions,” evident most clearly in the “fully extended bourgeois press”; see Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 261–62. But it is the very reach of bourgeois culture that creates the slippages I adduce between the categories of professional and amateur.
4. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 270.
5. This approach is typified by John Fiske’s Reading the Popular (Cambridge, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), which characterizes popular culture as essentially oppositional.