Politics, performance and popular culture: Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain 9781784997151

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Politics, performance and popular culture

STUDIES IN

POPULAR CULTURE General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards Christmas in nineteenth-century England  Neil Armstrong Healthy living in the Alps: the origins of winter tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914  Susan Barton Working-class organizations and popular tourism, 1840–1970  Susan Barton Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850–1945  Brad Beaven Leisure and cultural conflict in twentieth-century Britain  Brett Brebber (ed.) The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and film, 1890s–1960s  Alan George Burton British railway enthusiasm  Ian Carter Railways and culture in Britain  Ian Carter Time, work and leisure: life changes in England since 1700  Hugh Cunningham Darts in England, 1900–39: a social history  Patrick Chaplin Relocating Britishness  Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John Walton (eds) Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain: packaging pleasure Sandra Trudgen Dawson History on British television: constructing nation, nationality and collective memory  Robert Dillon The food companions: cinema and consumption in wartime Britain, 1939–45 Richard Farmer Songs of protest, songs of love: popular ballads in eighteenth-century Britain  Robin Ganev Heroes and happy endings: class, gender, and nation in popular film and fiction in interwar Britain  Christine Grandy Women drinking out in Britain since the early twentieth century David W. Gutzke The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–53  Thomas Hajkowski From silent screen to multi-screen: a history of cinema exhibition in Britain since 1896  Stuart Hanson Juke box Britain: Americanization and youth culture, 1945–60  Adrian Horn Popular culture in London, c. 1890–1918: the transformation of ­entertainment  Andrew Horrall Popular culture and working-class taste in Britain, 1930–39: a round of cheap diversions?  Robert James The experience of suburban modernity: how private transport changed interwar London  John M. Law Amateur film: meaning and practice, 1927–77  Heather Norris Nicholson Films and British national identity: from Dickens to Dad’s Army Jeffrey Richards Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 1920–1960  Jeffrey Richards Looking North: Northern England and the national imagination Dave Russell The British seaside holiday: holidays and resorts in the twentieth century  John K. Walton

Politics, performance and  popular culture Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain Edited by P ETER YEA N DLE , KATHER I N E N E W E Y and JE FFR E Y R I C HAR D S

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both  author and publisher.. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 9169 8 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Supported by

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STUDIES IN

POPULAR CULTURE There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture Jeffrey Richards

Contents

List of illustrations page ix Contributors x Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: the politics of performance and the performance of politics  Peter Yeandle and Katherine Newey 1 I  Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

1 ‘To the last drop of my blood’: melodrama and politics in late Georgian  England  Robert Poole 21 2 The platform and the stage: the primary aesthetics of Chartism Mike Sanders

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3 Bubbles of the day: the melodramatic and the pantomimic Katherine Newey 59 4 Theatrical hierarchy, cultural capital and the legitimate/ illegitimate divide  Caroline Radcliffe 75 5 Performance for imagined communities: Gladstone, the national theatre and contested didactics of the stage  Anselm Heinrich 96 6 Women’s suffrage and theatricality  Sos Eltis 111 II  Politics in performance 7 English pantomime and the Irish Question  Jill A. Sullivan 131 8 ‘Executed with remarkable care and artistic feeling’: popular imperialism and the music hall ballet  Jane Pritchard and Peter Yeandle

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9 Drury Lane imperialism  Jeffrey Richards 174

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III  The performance of politics 10 ‘Love, bitter wrong, freedom, sad pity, and lust of power’:

politics and performance in 1820  Malcolm Chase

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11 Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist  Richard Gaunt 216 12 The performance of protest: the 1889 dock strike on and off the stage  Janice Norwood 237

13 Class, performance and socialist politics: the political campaigns of early labour leaders  Marcus Morris 259

Illustrations

1 Illustration from the second edition of Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of  Mystery (1802). Author’s collection. page 25 2 James Gillray, ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’, 1 September 1798 (image © The Trustees of the British Museum) 32 3 Black Dwarf handbill. Author’s collection. 34 4 ‘The Last Scene of the Triumph of Reform or the Fall of the Boro’mongers’ (image © The Trustees of the British Museum). 38 5 John Tenniel, ‘The Rivals’, Punch, 13 August 1881. Reproduced with permission of Punch Limited. 140 6 Programme for Le Bivouac (Alhambra, 1885), dated 7 March 1886. Pritchard Collection. 153 7 ‘“Round the Town”: The New Ballet at the Empire Theatre’, Black and White, 8 October 1892. Pritchard Collection. 159 8 Promotional poster for A Life of Pleasure (1893). Courtesy of the Michael Diamond Collection. 179 9 ‘Manager Peel Taking his Farewell Benefit’, Punch, 11 July 1846, p. 25. Editor’s collection. 228 10 Map showing East End theatres and music halls producing strike-related material. 239 11 ‘Mr. John Burns Addressing the Men on Strike at the Gates of the East and West India Docks’, Graphic, 7 September 1889. Author’s collection. 246 12 Carte de visite of the Boisset Troupe, c.1878. Author’s collection. 247 13 Scenes from a procession supporting the strike, Illustrated London News, 7 September 1889. Author’s collection. 251 14 ‘Dockers’ Children Waiting for Breakfast in West India Dock Road’, Penny Illustrated Paper, 7 September 1889. Courtesy of Museum of London. Author’s collection. 252 15 ‘Parade of Coal Heavers on Strike’, Graphic, 7 September 1889. Author’s collection. 253

Contributors

Malcolm Chase, Professor of Social History at the University of Leeds, has published widely on Chartism, protest movements and the formative years of trade unionism. His most recent book is Chartism: Perspectives and Legacies (Merlin, 2015). A new edition of his book 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom was published by Manchester University Press in 2015. Sos Eltis is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Brasenose College, Oxford University. She is the author of Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (1996) and Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford University Press, 2013), and of numerous articles on Victorian, Edwardian and modern theatre, gothic fiction and Oscar Wilde. Richard Gaunt works on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British history, with a particular specialism in the political and electoral history of the age. Research interests encompass work on national political figures such as Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington and Benjamin Disraeli, with especial focus on visual culture and sources for egohistory, with ongoing writing projects in the area of British Conservative politics. He is co-editor of the journal Parliamentary History. His revisionist biography Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (I. B. Tauris, 2010) met with critical acclaim. Anselm Heinrich is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He researches German and British theatre history, especially regional and national theatres, audiences and repertoires, issues of funding, censorship and propaganda. He is the author of Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2007) and essays on Gladstone and theatre in wartime. He is currently working on a project on European theatre under German occupation during the Second World War for Routledge, supported by the

Contributors

Royal Society, Edinburgh, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst and the Harvard Theatre Collection. Marcus Morris is working on a book-length study of the British socialist and labour movements and their relationship with the idea of internationalism. He lectures in history at Manchester Metropolitan University and is interested in the intersection of popular politics and visual culture, especially links between varying notions of performance. Katherine Newey, Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter, is the director of the AHRC-funded project on Victorian pantomime. She has published widely on nineteenth-century theatre, visual culture and women’s writing, and most recently on John Ruskin and the theatre (with Jeffrey Richards). Her books include Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and a volume on Fanny Kemble in Pickering & Chatto’s Lives of Shakespearian Actors (2012). Janice Norwood is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. She is co-editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (Manchester University Press), and edited the volume on Lucia Vestris in Pickering & Chatto’s Lives of Shakespearian Actors (2012), as well as publishing on Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, and on theatre and sport. She is currently writing a book about a Victorian working-class theatre, the Britannia, and theatre in London’s East End. Robert Poole is Guild Research Fellow, University of Central Lancashire. His principal work is on radicalism in the age of reform, particularly the Peterloo massacre of 1819. He co-edited the diaries of the radical Samuel Bamford with Martin Hewitt. He is currently working on the British Academy–Leverhulme project ‘The English Reform Movement of 1816–17: Understanding the Home Office Disturbances Papers’. He works as a historical consultant for television and stage productions, including Elegance and Decadence – the Age of the Regency (BBC, 2011), Lancashire Witches 400 (2012), How they Built the North (ITV, 2013), Manchester Sound – the Massacre (Library Theatre Company, 2013) and The Masque of Anarchy (Manchester Histories Festival, 2014). Jane Pritchard is Curator of Dance at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her exhibition at the V&A, ‘Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes’ (2011), met with universal praise and travelled the world. Jane has published several essays on Victorian dance, including histories of music halls, choreography and ballet training.

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Contributors

Caroline Radcliffe, of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, works on Victorian popular theatre. She has published on Dan Leno, music hall, stage technology and sensation drama, with recent essays on remediation and Victorian exhibitions. She is a musician, performing contemporary, old and world music in new contexts. She also teaches and performs Lancashire clog dance, has published on the topic, and has appeared as a dancer on Dancing Cheek to Cheek (BBC, 2014). Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. He has published widely on aspects of popular culture, including film, music, ballet, sport, radio and juvenile literature. He is co-director of the AHRC-funded pantomime project and author of The Golden Age of Pantomime: Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Mike Sanders is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth Century Writing at the University of Manchester. His recent monograph The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge University Press, 2009) met with critical acclaim. He has also edited a four-volume collection of primary materials, Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2001), as well as writing articles in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Literature and Culture and Women: A Cultural Review. Jill Sullivan, of the Bristol Theatre Collection, is an expert on popular entertainments, particularly in the regions of Great Britain. She is author of The Politics of the Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011), and co-editor, with Joe Kember and John Plunkett, of Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Peter Yeandle is Lecturer in History at Loughborough University. He has published various essays on the relationship between Christian socialism and the performing arts and on Ruskin, Victorian education and empire. He co-edited a special issue on ‘De-Colonizing Imperial Heroes’ for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2014). His book Citizenship, Nation, Empire: The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930 was published by Manchester University Press in 2015.

Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in a project on the cultural politics of English pantomime. As part of the project, three major conferences were held, each of which broadened focus from the pantomime specifically to popular theatre more generally. The first conference focused on sensory histories of nineteenthcentury theatre. Our theme of ‘the “sister arts” in the nineteenth-century theatre’ brought together historians of popular culture and theatre historians with performance studies scholars, musicologists, art historians, dance scholars and textile historians. The object was to promote cross-disciplinary discussion on sensory histories of nineteenth-century theatre. The third conference, on ‘race, nation and empire on the Victorian stage’, similarly sought dialogue across disciplines and firmly located the theatre as a site within which images and ideologies of nineteenth-century imperial culture were transmitted, received and mediated. The second conference – held in Lancaster in July 2011, and from which this volume emanates – worked with the title ‘Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain’. This collection, however, is much more than a series of conference proceedings. We have met several times since July 2011 to share extended papers, discuss ideas and debate the crossovers and correspondences in our research. We aimed to generate an engaged and continuing cross-disciplinary conversation between different types of historians: scholars of the nineteenth-century theatre and historians of nineteenth-century politics. We challenged each discipline to take on the other’s frames of reference. It is our hope that this has been brought to bear in this collection of essays and that the essays provoke further discussion. We thank our contributors for taking the plunge into unfamiliar territories and travelling with us so generously, particularly Sos Eltis, who responded heroically to a late editorial decision to incorporate an essay specifically on

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suffrage performance. We also thank our postgraduate students working on the pantomime project, Claire Robinson and Ellen Couchman Crook. Our gratitude goes to all our speakers and participants at the three conferences we ran as part of this project, with special thanks to the presiding genii, David Mayer, John MacKenzie, Jim Davis and Tracy C. Davis. With such generous and wise colleagues, our annual meetings in Lancaster and Birmingham were occasions of wonderful fellowship, as well as scholarship; the geniality and fun of pantomime was always present, although it was hot July (even in Lancaster) rather than snowy December. The project has interested many colleagues in other fields: Cathy Haill and Kate Dorney at the Victoria and Albert Museum have been supporters; Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, whose invitation to Peter and Kate to participate in a theatre panel at the North American Victorian Studies Association inspired some fruitful statistical research; and Rohan McWilliam, a historian whose generous interdisciplinarity has been hugely helpful. We were awarded a major research grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Without this funding, the project could not have happened in the mode of generous scholarship that we hope we achieved. The editors extend their gratitude to Emma Brennan and her team at Manchester University Press in general and to Fiona Little, the copy-editor, in particular. During the project, the editors have worked in four institutions, principally the Universities of Lancaster and Birmingham, and Manchester and Exeter latterly. In each place, colleagues have been supportive and generous. Kate Newey wishes to thank her Birmingham colleagues, in particular Russell Jackson, whose enthusiasm for the curiosities of arcane research is inspiring, and her new Exeter colleagues, who have welcomed a northerner into the West Country. Peter Yeandle wishes to thank Marcus Risdell and Anne Witchard, for their personal interest in and assistance with this project. Peter Yeandle, Kate Newey, Jeffrey Richards

Introduction: the politics of performance and the ­performance of politics Peter Yeandle and Katherine Newey

T

his book aims to create a space for historians and theatre scholars to continue a dialogue about the relationship between representations of politics in the theatre and the theatricality of politics itself in the long nineteenth century. Our aim is to provoke as much as to synthesise. The period of our investigation, from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the early twentieth century, resists synthesis. This is not a unified period, spanning the years from the agitations and suppressions of democratic culture in Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution to the jingoism of late Victorian and Edwardian nationalism. By spreading across the boundaries of the Romantic and the Victorian, these essays examine a series of debates and conflicts in the development of industrial modernity, united by the manipulations and uses of performative strategies to engage with structures of political and cultural power. The terms in which we have staged the discussion – ‘performance’, ‘politics’, ‘history’ and ‘theatre’ – are contingent. Our contributors engage with these key concepts in part to problematise them. If we can take it for granted that the problematisation of key concepts is an important component in driving debate forwards, then we will succeed insomuch as the essays in this book represent the debate, and offer views with which to argue. In drawing together scholars from political and social history, literary studies and theatre history, we were immediately aware of the problem of the arbitrary identification of disciplinary divides. Political historians are joined by those who draw their methodologies from social history and cultural studies; theatre studies scholars by those working in English departments and those with research interests in textual analysis. This book seeks to do more than to demarcate relationships between politics and performance in the nineteenth century. As will be seen below plenty of studies have accomplished that task

2

Introduction

already. Rather, the original motive of our investigation – the exploration of ways in which different scholars understand and use the analytical category of ‘performance’ – has morphed into a collection of theoretical position papers and case studies which tussle both with the relationship between politics and performance itself, and with the nature of that relationship as a historiographical matter. If historians of class have struggled with the problematic demarcation of ‘social history’ and ‘cultural history’, then the turn to performance makes possible the uptake of methodologies drawn from both. The ‘performative turn’ in political history Recent years have witnessed a surge in the historiographical use of performance as an analytical category – what Peter Burke has called the ‘performative turn’.1 Burke’s essay explains the development of the notion of performance (as an analytical category) from the dramaturgical model of social and political interaction of the 1940s and 1950s. We have reached a point since the mid-1980s, Burke argues (he was writing in 2005), in which ‘instead of drawing analogies between society and the theatre, the new approach dissolves the boundaries between them’.2 We now take for granted the need not only to analyse concrete historical occasions such as festivals, rituals and customs in their study of past politics but also to deconstruct abstract concepts – for example gender, class and identity – as performed categories. Burke’s observation on the historiographical dissolution of the boundaries between society and the theatre is important: the uptake of theatrical language in scholarship is borne out by a brief survey of recent research into nineteenth-century political history. Boyd Hilton’s catchy formulation is worth repeating: ‘if the theatre was political, it is equally the case that politics was theatrical … if public life was a stage, so too was the society it mirrored’.3 Hilton’s argument – that the spectacular and unregulated nature of early nineteenth-century society was a reflection of the topsy-turvy world-turned-upside-down of Regency theatre, giving way to a mid-century age of moral, economic and political equipoise – is one that draws, in part, from the work of theatre scholars. Among others, Hilton cites the research of David Worrall and Jane Moody on the radical and illegitimate theatrical cultures of the Georgian period.4 For further evidence he might well have drawn from the seminal work of David Mayer that similarly argued in his formative study of Regency pantomime for the confluence of politics and theatre.5 Likewise, the welter of research on the use of melodrama as a framework for thinking about Georgian politics substantiates the claim

Introduction

for a vital correlation of politics and the stage.6 Hilton’s book – and argument – is an effective example of how scholars have drawn from interdisciplinary approaches; or, better put, exemplifies the adoption of the performative turn.7 Examples abound. ‘Political’ histories have sought to recover nineteenthcentury politics as cultural formation. Recent biographical work has emphasised the importance of visual and performance culture: see, for instance, Richard Gaunt’s revisionist research on Sir Robert Peel (and his essay, Chapter 11 in this volume, which takes analysis further into political society as theatrical space).8 More recently, Jonathan Rose’s biography of Churchill establishes the crucial importance of the theatre to both his writing and the formation of his approach to political decision-making.9 John Belchem’s and James Epstein’s thoughts on the cultural representation of the ‘gentleman leader’ invoke ideas of the individual’s self-identification as performer.10 Marcus Morris’s essay (Chapter 13), similarly, seeks to uncover the ways in which early leaders of the labour movement characterised themselves through costume and pitched their political performances according to their perception of audience. Indeed, the appropriation of the visual dynamics of nineteenth-century politics is evident in studies into the commodification of politicians. Henry Miller, for instance, has taken advances in the study of portrait culture and applied it to concepts of political literacy: his study seeks to investigate how the visual and the performative shaped public perceptions of politicians but also how politicians, in turn, negotiated their relationships with political imagery.11 Janette Martin traces the use of elocution and gesture manuals in the training of public speaking – an acknowledgement that those addressing crowds were aware of the need not only to perform but to present themselves in visually arresting ways.12 If research has focused on how politicians conceptualised themselves as performers, and their constituents as audience, several studies have focused on the dynamics of performance space in which political debate took place. Several studies of the street, or town square, as performance space have problematised Habermasian notions of the public sphere, arguing – in general – for a contemporary awareness of everyday life as theatrical: thus street preaching, public hangings and promenades have all been historicised as dramatic sites.13 If Habermas’s emphasis was upon the delineation of a bourgeois public, then recent work has emphasised not only how actors and audiences constructed themselves but the blurred differentials between the performed and the performed to. Work on the mass outdoors meetings of radicals, socialists and suffragists has emphasised the spectacular, visual and visceral dynamics of nineteenth-century politics: see, for instance, Mark Harrison’s research into

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Introduction

the ‘crowd’ in history and Barbara Green’s notion of the suffrage movement as both ‘performative activism’ and ‘visibility politics’.14 Martin Hewitt’s important work on platform culture, similarly, attests to the importance of locating public speech as a relationship between orator and audience best understood in performative rather than textual terms.15 Jon Lawrence has shown how politicians – and electorate and those yet to be enfranchised – conceptualised the nineteenth-century hustings as a space presupposing both codes for would-be politicians as performers and audience as constituency.16 Rohan McWilliam and John Garrard have both examined Victorian concepts of citizenship and concluded that the prerequisite of citizenship was the conscious act of political participation – in other words, citizenship was to be performed.17 Scholars of political protest have been keen to incorporate notions of performance into their work: from Chartists to late-century socialist activists, the protest is well understood in the sense of a staged grievance, performing a collective claim for change to a preconceived audience. Charles Tilly’s concept of ‘contentious performances’ has been particularly useful: Tilly identifies, through quantitative analysis, how social movements unite across nominal divisions in seeking to claim something – justice, retribution, enfranchisement – through making communal and public ‘claims’ to a third party that draw from ‘repertoires of dissent’. Who forms that third party, and how that claim is performed, is contingent on historical context and class.18 In this context, Janice Norwood’s essay in this volume (Chapter 12) offers a performance analysis of the strike and the socialist march as forms of collective political expression. Mike Sanders’s reassessment of Chartism in the light of the theatre (Chapter 2) moves from performance analysis of political actors to a wide-ranging assessment of the necessity of the theatrical and the performative in providing the framework for political action. Performances could go indoors too. For Thomas Dixon, the Victorian courtroom was a dramatic arena offering theatrical context in which we might read more into Victorian histories of the emotions.19 Similar claims have been made for museums, memorials and the church.20 This list could go on, but three big questions are raised by this convergence of political history and the performative turn. First: from where did such developments originate? Second: what are the implications of these developments for theatre historians and performance studies scholars? Third: have historians and others borrowed the concept of performance with insufficient rigour and, in the identification of theatrical language and theatrical metaphor, neglected the attention due to the full range of meanings inhered by ‘performance’ as an analytical category?

Introduction

Part of the answer to the first question relates to the aftermath of the cultural turn. To put it simply, until the 1980s historians studying nineteenthcentury politics might well have positioned themselves as either ‘traditional’ or ‘revisionist’: the traditional would focus on constitutional, legislative, electoral and parliamentary history, while the ‘revisionist’, drawing from Marxist determinism, would seek to understand politics as an expression of class relations and especially relationships of power between classes. The cultural turn, led in British scholarship by those previously at the vanguard of Marxism, challenged both approaches.21 As James Epstein outlines, the influence of the cultural turn on political history has led – via the work of scholars such as Patrick Joyce, James Vernon and Gareth Stedman Jones– to the complicating and muddying of concepts of class.22 The turn to ‘performance’ reflects developments in cultural history that call for analysis of visual culture as well as the discursive treatment of documentary sources. Yet the performative turn, in the context of the new theatre historiography, permits the resurrection of class as an analytical category. Performance: a category for the analysis of political culture? It is to the development of ‘performance’ as academic praxis that we now turn. If, as Peter Burke argues, the performative turn is a development of the historical approach of ‘society as theatre’,23 then where better to start the investigation than with the history of the theatre? That is, with theatre history as history rather than as an addendum to the literary study of dramatic texts. Aye, there’s the rub. This apparently straightforward question contains within it a number of complex historiographical matters. In this formulation, the theatre is a useful metaphor, rather than a model used for exploring the social practices of a culture. The framing of society ‘as theatre’ ‘theatrical’ or performative can too quickly move away from a serious consideration of the material practices of the theatre. Concepts of performance and the performative have generated significant new insights into social and political practices, and alerted us to the performances practices of the quotidian, rather than the virtuosic or ‘extradaily’, as the performance anthropologists Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese call theatrical or aesthetic performance.24 However, such approaches tend to glide over the complexities of recovering past performances, which are lost as soon as they are made, surviving as a myriad of traces which are often neither collected nor coherent. In writing about past theatrical performances, we can feel that we are writing into a void, entering a territory of unknowns. For social

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Introduction

and political historians, trained in the use of documentation, material archives and careful textual analysis, work on performance in the theatre requires a historical imagination which can perhaps be unsettling. The difficulty is compounded when investigating the theatre of the nineteenth century. Until the 1980s, the history of this busy and productive industry has been framed in almost entirely literary terms, or historicised through anecdote on the one hand and fact-gathering antiquarianism with little analysis or theorisation on the other. When considered as a branch of literature, the orthodox narrative of the theatre in the nineteenth century is that of the ‘decline of the drama’.25 The literary critical focus has been almost entirely on theatre as it survives through its dramatic literature, and the judgement has been that that literature was not worthy of study. Between Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the late eighteenth century and George Bernard Shaw at the end of the nineteenth century, so the literary critical orthodoxy runs, dramatic literature was a wasteland. The theatre was dominated by star actors and indulgent actor-managers; its playwrights produced what were regarded as literary ephemera drawn from the illegitimate culture of the early century: pantomime, melodrama, farce, burlesque and comedietta. The few attempts at the ‘legitimate’ or high cultural drama of the poetic tragedy (the work of Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or Mary Russell Mitford), or the witty comedy of manners (such as plays by Sheridan Knowles or Catherine Gore) failed, being undermined by overly large theatres, rowdy audiences and commercial imperatives. The views of contemporary theatre practitioners, commentators and critics which throughout the nineteenth century emphasised the divisions between high and popular culture, and their judgements of aesthetic value, have been largely accepted by historians and critics in the twentieth century. However, another narrative, counter to this story of decline and aesthetic failure, has emerged in the last three decades. The ‘new theatre history’ aims to place British theatre in the long nineteenth century – that period from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the eve of the First World War – as part of a much broader social and cultural move of the nation towards modernity. It is possible to place the theatre within accounts of industrialisation and urbanisation in Britain, and particularly in studies of the large urban centres of London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. Indeed, the theatre makes an excellent case study for industrial nation-making, in the debates and battles over its regulatory and economic structures.26 Theatre scholars have made clear connections between the idea of a National Theatre and the idea of the nation;

Introduction

Loren Kruger opens her study of national theatres in Europe with the statement that The idea of representing the nation in the theatre, of summoning a representative audience that will in turn recognize itself as nation on stage, offers a compelling if ambiguous image of national unity, less as an indisputable fact than as an object of speculation.27

Anselm Heinrich’s discussion of Gladstone’s advocacy for the theatre as a national institution (Chapter 5) offers a specific case study of the interrelationship between theatrical politics and constructions of national identity. Sos Eltis’s discussion of women’s suffrage and performance in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Chapter 6) reminds us of that half of the nation whose status as citizens was occluded, and the study of which reminds us that their use of the theatre and theatricality to represent and make visible specific political demands requires analysis. The theatre has been recognised as an often rough and rowdy part of the democratising process, and historians are alert to the ways in which theatre reflected and represented national political feeling. Some scholars make further claims for the influence of theatre policy and performances on the business of party and parliamentary politics.28 There is a longer argument here about the ways in which theatre offered a model for thinking through the idea of the nation: the theatre as a machine for thinking and imagining alternative possibilities for personal, social and national life could be powerfully transformative. In order to achieve change, the argument goes, we need to be able to imagine that changed world, and theatre is one of the most immediate ways of representing such imagining. Here, the fundamental ‘liveness’ of theatre is crucial, as is its utilisation of ‘presence’ and its affective power. Whatever else it may be, and however else it is framed or mediated, performance is an exchange of understandings and meanings within one physical space, in which actor and spectators are both engaged. In this respect, the theatre is not just an aesthetic object, but a social practice which appears to have considerable potential as a conduit for action and change. Yet, for the most part, in social and political histories of Britain, the theatre has been relegated to marginal discussion as entertainment, or as a symptom of other social and political events and practices, rather than as a potential actor or agent in them. At the same time, as Burke points out, concepts of the ‘theatrical’ and the ‘performative’ have become central in contemporary historiography. There is a point, however, as Burke cautions, when the concept of public action as ‘performance’ might be so loosely or broadly applied as to

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8

Introduction

become meaningless.29 What do these terms mean, and how might they be made to do real analytical and intellectual work in thinking about both the politics of performance in the nineteenth century and the performance of politics? McWilliam has noted the way in which such analyses have moved quickly from the consideration of the theatre itself to that of the consequences of theatricality, and has cautioned against the overuse of the term ‘melodramatic’.30 Yet the cultural impact of melodrama, particularly in the first half of the century, was significant: the first three chapters in this book (by Robert Poole, Mike Sanders and Katherine Newey) explore instances of the impact of the generic characteristics, material and textual practices and structures of feeling of melodrama on oppositional political movements, and investigate the mechanisms for exchange between the stage and the platforms of public debate. We owe the turn to the performative to the sociologist Erving Goffman, in his foundational The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), and the linguist J. L. Austin, who in How to Do Things with Words (1962) argued for certain forms of speech as performative. In speech-act theory, Austin argued, certain types of speech become action. Goffman and Austin offered different disciplinary approaches to a central observation that human behaviour can be seen (or ‘framed’ in Goffman’s terms) as performance in both interpersonal and public exchanges. With this comes the recognition that the self – the human subject – may be framed or performed in different ways in different situations, and that the human subject is a constructed self, rather than a ‘natural’ or ‘sentimental’ self. And in those situations, the power of speech to do things can make things happen, thus opening the Habermasian public sphere to influences other than those of reason and Enlightenment rationality. As Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick remind us, Austin’s ‘performative utterances’ have the potential to go wrong.31 The subject as citizen is not always rational, and may adjust his or her performance in public and political life to manufacture and influence public opinion; and public opinion may result in excess, or anti-rational affect. The concept of ‘performativity’ has been taken up in many areas of social theory and cultural studies. The language is broadly theatrical, drawing also on older concepts of homo ludens, although Johan Huizinga’s foundational study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938) is rarely recalled in more recent discussions of play and performance as cultural or sociological phenomena. The idea that the human subject is constructed and performed in a series of social ‘scripts’ has been highly influential in theorising the relationship of the individual to power, arguing that identity is produced by discursive

Introduction

means. In this model, self or subject status is produced by hegemonic structures and power relations, and behaviour is scripted, or performed. One of the most influential of these formulations is Judith Butler’s use of the concept of the performative utterance as a foundation for her analysis of gender performativity, and her contention (in Parker and Sedgwick’s summary) that ‘identities are constructed iteratively through complex citational processes’.32 Butler’s work has given rise to what is perhaps the most controversial contemporary debate over the performative and the political to emerge in the early twentyfirst century, and one which highlights dramatically (and sometimes violently) the potential for contradiction and paradox in post-structuralist notions of performativity and identity. Butler’s use of performativity to challenge the feminist distinction between sex (biological female or male body) and gender (the social roles of femininity or masculinity) seeks to interrogate the oppressive nature of gendered identity. Instead, Butler argues, we should recognise that the body itself is ‘shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex’.33 But in an ironic reversal of concerns over the denial of individual agency in the concept of a social script, Butler’s use of the social constructivist position of performativity in theorising sexual and gender identity has been co-opted into broadly neo-liberal and individualist identity politics, particularly by some transgender and queer activists. Contemporary debates between these ‘transactivists’ and radical feminists over the apparent denial of ‘[biological] woman’ as a category or class available for political analysis throw into high relief possible consequences of performativity as a way of approaching the politics of identity and power. This debate reminds us that deconstruction is not always aligned with collectivist versions of radical or oppositional politics.34 So the idea of the performative, or, as Burke puts it, the performative turn, is not without its debates and perils, particularly in seeing it as always a route to a progressive or liberationist politics. For theatre scholars in particular, the dangers of moving too far away from the material practices of the theatre mean that the terms may lose some of the cogency and power which make them useful as tools of cultural analysis in the first place. If all that is scripted and rehearsed is performative, then what is particular about what theatre can do in culture? Conversely, if all social behaviour can be analysed as performative, then how does that enable us to make distinctions between types of behaviour, and the situations in which action occurs? If reiterative social scripts produce identity, then how is such ‘citation’ to be regarded in relation to the valuation of liveness and presence in the performer–spectator exchange? Furthermore,

9

10

Introduction

while the performative model of social interaction is useful for understanding the reproduction of hegemony, it is open to critique for its closing off of the agency of individual actors in particular. The essays in this book, however, are part of a growing cross-disciplinary conversation in which historians of politics, political literature and the theatre of the nineteenth century are engaged, in order to investigate the intricate workings of both the individual subject and class in relation to social structure and hegemonic power. These essays scope out common ground in method and material, using the theatre and performance, theatricality and the performative, as tools to analyse the specific places and conditions where the individual and the group meet, and where individual agency and social power work in exchange – be that an exchange characterised by resistance, complicity or a combination of responses. Popular culture and public opinion In 1883, Blanchard Jerrold – playwright, journalist and son of Douglas Jerrold, the radical playwright and one of the original writers for Punch – ruminated on the question of what shaped ‘public opinion’: The manufacture of public opinion remained long in its infancy but it has made extra-ordinary strides of late years ... Since public opinion has become the motive power by which ministries are sustained and overthrown; since legislation answers to it as the electric bell answers to the pressure of a button; it is important to mark how this dominant force may be created, influenced, or directed.35

The Victorians were by turns excited by, proud of and anxious about the force of popular opinion in public life. The existence and expression of robust public opinion were valued as evidence of the progress of science, education and thought – the modernity of Victorian civilisation – as well as a clear demonstration of the superior nature of British liberty of thought and expression. Yet popular opinion was also considered dangerous. In Blanchard Jerrold’s observation that popular opinion ‘may be created, influenced, or directed’ is the tacit understanding that popular opinion is malleable, and thus can be influenced or directed to malign as well as benign ends. The theatricality of this ‘manufacture’ of popular opinion was recognised by Victorians themselves, with the negative connotations of artifice which that term implies. While contemporary historiography has embraced the performative turn, concerns in the nineteenth century about the theatricality of public life were of a piece with the deep vein of anti-theatricality in Western, Christian Europe which focused on the nature of mimesis in the theatre as a specific form of

Introduction

representation. Writing about anti-theatricality, Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait note the difficulties that arise from a form of art which focuses our attention on the uncomfortable idea that we perform our social behaviour, suggesting that ‘theatre and life are inseparable’.36 If feeling, character and speech could be convincingly feigned by actors in the theatre, then how could authenticity of public or private character be assured? Karen Halttunen’s study of the anxieties around social interaction in mid-century America holds true for Britain as well when she argues that the construction of ‘the skilled performance of middle-class gentility’ undercut the sentimental investment in authenticity and sincerity. So the ‘quest for sincerity of form thus inevitably turned and destroyed itself, for when sincerity became a matter of style or fashion, sentimental typology was rendered meaningless’.37 There is overwhelming evidence (including many examples discussed in this book) that public opinion, expressed in popular terms and forms, was the object of anxiety and control, particularly through attempts to control and influence popular opinion expressed by working people. Of particular concern was the ‘knowingness’ (as explored by Peter Bailey) in relation to liveness in popular performance. Knowingness was part of a culture in which, writes Bailey, social dramas are, … more often situational, improvisatory and individualised. This is a culture that trades in carnivalesque echoes of excess and inversion, grand utopian conceits of a permanent democracy of pleasure and the emotionalised myths of melodrama in which the good and the true prevail. 38

Attempts at control and censorship of this live ‘knowingness’ abounded in relation to popular culture; in the theatre they were folded into the very legislative and regulatory structures of the industry. The survival of Charles II’s Royal Patent from 1660 until 1843, when the Theatres Regulation Act removed the monopoly of the Theatres Royal, indicates that, however much the Patent monopoly was ‘honour’d in the breach’ in the minor theatres’ staging of melodrama and even versions of Shakespeare, the symbolic status of the legitimate theatre was worth fighting for. The 1843 Act, while ‘throwing open’ the drama (rather as Dickens’s Mr Wopsle longed for the throwing open of the church in Great Expectations), established the much more long-lasting state censorship of the dramatic text through the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and his deputy, the Examiner of Plays, which was removed only in 1968. As several of the essays in this book demonstrate, there was considerable debate in the public sphere about divisions and distinctions between high or elite culture, and popular or mass culture. These essays interrogate the popular

11

12

Introduction

as radicalism but also turn the spotlight on populism itself, as Malcolm Chase demonstrates in Chapter 10, in an approach which complements Poole’s use of melodrama to explore political activism. The performance sites range from Sanders’s (Chapter 2) and Norwood’s (Chapter 12) studies of the use of the street and the common as a political theatre to the theatre itself as a site of mass popular culture and the dissemination of political ideology, be that imperialism – (Jane Pritchard and Peter Yeandle in Chapter 8, and Jeffrey Richards in Chapter 9) – or topical referencing of the Irish Question (Jill Sullivan’s essay in Chapter 7) and to the study of theatre and politics as participating in a common politics of affect, as Newey explores in Chapter 3. Our contributors investigate popular performance genres – music hall ballet, melodrama, pantomime and spectacle, and interrogate the vitality and legitimacy of all kinds of performance; we are not concerned with theatrical hierarchies, except in so far as they dramatise (or make theatrical) social hierarchies and the stresses and tensions of the power relations which maintain them, as Caroline Radcliffe explores in Chapter 4. The realignment of the hierarchies of cultural production (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) in the nineteenth century is one of the dominant narratives of modernity in the period. A study of the theatre and its performative elements – both on and off stage – offers considerable evidence for studies of popular opinion and its manufacture and influence in the nineteenth century. It is in the study of the mainstream nineteenth-century theatre that aesthetic and disciplinary divisions between high and low and between elite and popular culture are challenged, and boundaries blurred. The theatre was both one of the most important cultural institutions of the nation – felt to represent the nation in so many ways – but also an industry, increasingly founded on a model of speculative capitalism, but enmeshed within older oligarchic structures of regulation and custom.39 In the wake of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the doubleness of ‘liquid modernity’ – its desire for order and its constant radical reordering of that order – and the economic precarity of its practices,40 we might see the theatre of the nineteenth century as offering a case study at large for the transformation of the public sphere. While high cultural critics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries engaged in a constant re-erection of the barriers protecting high culture against the manufacture and influence of popular opinion, the essays in this book deliberately work across such boundaries. Their study of the theatre and the theatrical, performance and the performative in public life, with a due scepticism towards hierarchies of aesthetic and social value-judgements, makes possible a wider range of reference and a fruitful cross-disciplinary exchange between history and culture.

Introduction

Notes 1 Peter Burke, ‘Performing History: The Importance of Occasions’, Rethinking History, 9 (2005), pp. 35–52. 2 Burke, ‘Performing History’, p. 41. 3 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 33 and 36. 4 David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5 David Mayer, Harlequin in his Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). 6 See, for example, Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Anna Clark, ‘The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848’, in Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance: the Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 47–72; Rohan McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’, Radical History Review, 78 (2000), pp. 57–84, and Katherine Newey, ‘Reform on the London Stage’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 238–53. Robert Poole surveys the literature in his chapter in this volume. 7 The same could be said for a number of other studies. Marc Baer’s Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), for instance, seeks explicitly to expose the blurred boundaries of theatrical and political cultures. So, too, does Julia Swindells in Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8 Richard A. Gaunt, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 9 Jonathan Rose, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 10 See also Gaunt’s chapter in this collection. John Belchem and James Epstein, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited’, Social History, 22:2 (1997), pp. 174–93. 11 Henry Miller, Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, 1830–1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 12 Janette Martin, ‘Oratory, Itinerant Lecturing and Victorian Popular Politics: A Case Study of James Acland (1799–1876)’, Historical Research, 86:231 (2012), pp. 30–52. 13 Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, c.1790– 1845 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2010); Della Pocock (ed.), Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For case studies, see Matthias Reiss, ‘Marching on the Capital: National Protest Marches of the British Unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Matthias Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–68;

13

14

Introduction Steve Poole, ‘“Till Our Liberties be Secure”: Popular Sovereignty and Public Space in Bristol, 1780–1850’, Urban History, 26:1 (1999), pp. 40–54; and Tom Grimwood and Peter Yeandle, ‘Church on/as Stage: Stewart Headlam’s Rhetorical Theology’, in Claire Maria Chambers, Simon du Toit and Joshua Edelman (eds.), Performing Religion in Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 97–116. 14 Mark Harrison, The Crowd and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Barbara Green, ‘From Visible Flaneuse to Spectacular Suffragette: The Prison, the Street, and Sites of Suffrage’, Discourse, 17:2 (1994–95), pp. 67–97. 15 Martin Hewitt, ‘Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 29:1 (2002), pp. 1–32. 16 Jon Lawrence, Electing our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 17 John Garrard, Democratisation in Britain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform since 1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Rohan McWilliam, ‘The Performance of Citizenship’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 362–80. 18 Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 19 Thomas Dixon, ‘The Tears of Mr Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17:1 (2012), pp. 1–23. 20 See, for instance, the introduction in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2013); Joshua Edelman, Claire Chamber and Simon du Toit (eds), Performing Religion in Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); John Shelton Reed, ‘“Ritualism Rampant in East London”: Anglo-Catholicism and the Urban Poor’, Victorian Studies, 31:3 (1988), pp. 375–403. 21 Geoff Eley, ‘Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later’, in Gabrielle Spiegel (ed.), New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 35–61; Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 22 James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) – chapter 13 of which, ‘Stages of Class: Popular Theatre and Geographies of Knowledge’, is particularly important for this book; see also his The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 23 Burke, ‘Performing History’, p. 35. 24 They define extra-daily techniques as ‘techniques which do not respect the habitual conditionings of the body’. Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer (London: Routledge, 1991), p.  9.

Introduction 25 For an overview of this historiography, see chapter 2 of Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26 See Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chapter 1; Katherine Newey, ‘The 1832 Select Committee’ and Jim Davis, ‘Looking towards 1843 and the End of the Monopoly’, both in David Francis Taylor and Julia Swindells (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 140–55 and 156–75 respectively. 27 Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 1; see also chapter 3, ‘“Our National House”: Patronizing the English National Theatre’. 28 For example, David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 29 Burke, ‘Performing History’, p. 43. 30 Rohan McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’; Katherine Newey, ‘Victorian Theatricality’, in Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World, pp. 569–84. 31 Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Introduction: Performativity and Performance’, in Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 3. 32 Parker and Sedgwick, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 33 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, rev. edn (London and New York: Routledge), p. 164. 34 The debate over ‘woman’ as a category also has a historiographical life, in an intense scrutiny of the concept of ‘experience’ by Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17:4 (Summer 1991), pp. 773–97. A good summary of the refutation of Scott’s argument can be found in Laura Lee Downs, ‘If “Woman” is Just an Empty Category, then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35:2 (April 1993), pp. 414–37. 35 Blanchard Jerrold, ‘On the Manufacture of Public Opinion’, The Nineteenth Century, 13 (January–June 1883), p. 1081. 36 Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (eds), ‘Theatricality: An Introduction,’ in Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11. 37 Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 189. 38 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 11. 39 Tracy Davis offers an account of the ways in which the ‘theatre as an entertainment industry … struggled in a continuum of laissez-faire and government interventions’. Economics of the British Stage, p. 7. 40 ‘Was not modernity a process of “liquefaction” from the start?’ wrote Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity, rev. edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012; 2000), p. 2.

15

PART I Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

T

he essays in this section span the century chronologically, and cover the principal genres of popular entertainment in the nineteenth century: melodrama and pantomime. They take us from Manchester in the early nineteenth century, after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, to Gladstone’s advocacy for a National Theatre at the end of the nineteenth century – and beyond, into the performative ferment of the campaign for female suffrage. In all these essays, theatre and the theatrical are placed in relationship to political activism, often of an oppositional nature. Taken together, the essays offer a demonstration of Peter Burke’s ‘performative turn’, as they investigate the ways in which political events outside the theatre buildings of England, and political and topical commentary on English stages, can be read against each other. Rohan McWilliam has written elsewhere of the ‘melodramatic turn’ in cultural and social histories of the nineteenth century. Robert Poole charts the historiography of this approach, using the concept of melodrama as a cultural script to tease out the nuances of feeling in post-Waterloo Manchester radical culture. He argues for the explanatory role of melodrama in this ­political environment, seeing melodrama as a structuring of the experiences of the struggle against class, rather than the struggle between classes, in a classic Marxist sense. While attentive to Marx’s and Engels’s observations – particularly of Manchester – Poole’s approach is complementary to Caroline Radcliffe’s use of the concept of hierarchy to analyse the organisation of mid- and late-century society, and its approaches to entertainment, in its recourse to early nineteenth-century structures of feeling. Poole demonstrates the ways in which melodrama – that ‘illegitimate’ form which has long been the butt of theatrical jokes – is connected to what is arguably the grand narrative of the nineteenth century in Britain: the struggle for democracy, and freedom from economic deprivation and ­oppression.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

Mike Sanders’s essay pushes this parallel further, arguing that theatre – a ‘primary aesthetic’ form – and principally melodrama within that theatrical culture, contributed to the very conditions which made possible the articulation and communication of the Chartist project. Sanders draws on the defamiliarising model adapted for the twentieth-century theatre by Bertolt Brecht, known as the Verfremdungseffekt (mistranslated into English as the ‘alienation effect’). In the course of his essay, Sanders reminds us that Brecht did not invent the V-effekt, but was drawing on pre-Naturalist approaches to the representation of the subject-citizen. Sanders’s focus on the role of the melodramatic frame in making political protests visible and intelligible to their audiences offers rich possibilities for further work on ideas of reception and spectatorship, using models drawn from performance and theatre studies. While Poole and Sanders concentrate on melodrama and the melodramatic, Katherine Newey’s essay suggests that pantomime is the necessary complement to the heightened emotional world of melodrama. Pantomime thrived on satirical and topical commentary – indeed, it was expected that the annual Boxing Day entertainment would offer a satirical compendium of the year’s events. Newey continues Poole’s and Sanders’s investigations into a politics of affect in the first half of the nineteenth century, arguing for the inclusion of the knockabout and often violent humour of pantomime clowning in broadening understandings of the political impact of popular entertainment. Caroline Radcliffe steps off stage to examine the frameworks of value and hierarchy within which theatrical and popular entertainment existed. The nineteenth century was a period of internecine conflict in the entertainment industry, between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ species of popular performance. Looking at the struggles between the theatre and the music hall in the second half of the century, Radcliffe argues that these offer a case study of the operation of hierarchy as a tool of social organisation. Her eschewal of a social analysis based mainly on a Marxist model of class conflict reminds us of the variety of oppositional and radical political activities in the nineteenth century, and of Gareth Stedman Jones’s caution in Languages of Class about viewing nineteenth-century class conflicts uncritically through a post-Marxist lens. As we argue in the Introduction to this volume, there are moments throughout the nineteenth century when the British theatre stands in for the nation. Anselm Heinrich’s essay offers a detailed account of one such moment, instigated by a personage no less than the Prime Minister, William Gladstone. Heinrich continues Radcliffe’s analysis of British social hierarchy and its role in establishing cultural and aesthetic values. Heinrich’s essay offers an insight

Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

into a ‘top-down’ instrumentalist view of cultural value in promoting national unity and order, which might still feel current in early twenty-first-century neo-liberal times. Gladstone’s support of a National Theatre is of a piece in its time with other progressive moves towards universal education, and the general improvement of the working classes. However, it is not difficult to see in this work a tense relationship between such uses of culture and the moves towards universal suffrage after the 1867 Reform Bill. Heinrich’s essay uses the focus of a major reforming Liberal premiership to tease out what are still tensions and conflicts around national cultural policy in the United Kingdom today. In focusing on the other moment of high drama at the end of the nineteenth century – the continuing struggle for female suffrage – Eltis connects theatricality and politics, exploring political action as performance, and performance as politics. By reading suffragists’ involvement in the New Drama, alongside an understanding of the connections between suffrage and spectacle, Eltis makes the case for a highly complex engagement of late Victorian feminism with theatre and public politics. The efficacy of this potent mix of spectacle, energy and creativity is demonstrated when, as Eltis tells us, the wartime government of 1915 engaged the suffragists to stage one more march, claiming female space in public for their ‘right to serve’ in that most spectacular of all theatres, the First World War.

19

1 ‘To the last drop of my blood’: melodrama  and politics in late Georgian England Robert Poole

Men … in periods of revolutionary crisis anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of the world in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language. Karl Marx1

M

elodrama was the dramatic signature of the nineteenth century. In 1965 the theatre historian Michael Booth described it thus:

Melodrama presents an ideal world of courage, love, loyalty and virtue triumphant, a world of starkly elemental morality, a few fundamental, ­ strongly felt emotions, gross humour, and half a dozen sharply differentiated, superficial character types which had to be instantly recognizable. The whole is set in an atmosphere of broad physical action, emotional extremism, and spectacular stage effects.

For Booth, melodrama was ‘romantic and escapist’, offering working-class audiences ‘a dream world inhabited by dream people and dream justice’.2 ‘Melodrama, like the poor, will no doubt always be with us’, sighed the Birmingham Shakespearean Allardyce Nicholl.3 Louis James’s 1977 essay ‘Taking Melodrama Seriously’, however, argued that ‘melodrama was not only the prevailing form of popular entertainment, it was also the dominant modality of all nineteenth-century British life and thought’.4 Other scholars have followed this thread, culminating in Elaine Hadley’s argument for a ‘melodramatic mode’ that rivalled the romantic in scope: Melodrama’s familial narratives of dispersal and reunion, its emphatically visual renditions of bodily torture and criminal conduct, its atmospheric menace and providential plotting, its expressions of highly charged emotion, and its tendency to personify absolutes like good and evil were represented

22

Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

in a wide variety of social settings, not just on the stage. Indeed, a version of the ‘melodramatic’ seems to have served as a behavioral and expressive model for several generations of English people.5

More widely still, Rohan McWilliam writes that ‘the hallmarks of ­melodramatic thinking with its repertoire of extreme emotions, hidden conspiracies and grand gestures could be recognised throughout Europe and North America’. McWilliam identifies a ‘melodramatic turn’ in scholarship but warns that this ‘new grand narrative’ has proved so adaptable that it risks losing its explanatory power.6 If there is one area where melodrama has been accorded explanatory power it is politics. Over fifty years ago Kitson-Clark found that theatricality and politics were particularly closely linked in this period: ‘Contemporary oratory ought … to be compared with what was going on on the stage at the time … passionate, sometimes very noisy, with a great deal of violent gesture and action.’7 Social historians began sniffing around melodrama in the early 1980s as class-based explanations of popular politics ran out of track (if not out of steam). In his influential essay ‘Rethinking Chartism’, Gareth Stedman Jones argued that the radical critique of the people against ‘old corruption’ merged smoothly with the Chartist critique of labour against capital, with parasitic cotton lords succeeding aristocratic drones as villains.8 Patrick Joyce noticed that ‘the plot structure of melodrama concerned virtue extant, virtue eclipsed and expelled, virtue tested (in struggle), virtue apparently fallen, and virtue restored and triumphant’, and argued that this provided popular politics with ‘the moral drama of an unequal society’. Melodrama was more deeply rooted than class conflict. 9 Ian McCalman has described how the radical lecturer Robert Taylor performed twice weekly at Richard Carlile’s south London Rotunda to audiences of over a thousand during the long Reform Bill crisis of 1830–32. ‘Melodrama in general gave him many compelling motifs and stage techniques, including spectre-raising (as in Byron’s Manfred); Manichean contrasts between good and evil, light and dark; the coup de théâtre when evil is exposed and virtue triumphs; the violent and emotional language; and even the use of spectacular mechanical props.’10 Lately Marx himself (quoted in the epigraph to this essay) has been conscripted to the cause of melodrama, with Francis Wheen suggesting that Das Kapital ‘can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the Monster they created … or as a Victorian melodrama’. ‘Capital comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’, wrote Marx, helpfully anticipating his literary biographer (The Guardian, 8 July 2006).

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

Such trends go back to the late eighteenth century, when, writes Betsy Bolton, the English state came widely to be viewed as a stage, with an accompanying trend for ‘spectacular nationalism’ in the theatre. With this, however, came the fear that the lower orders in the gallery could control the house as crowd-pleasing politicians courted popular acclaim. Julia Swindells argued for a ‘startlingly direct relationship between theatre and the political life of the period’ 1789–1833, and wrote of ‘the grand theatre of political reform’.11 It was the historian Raphael Samuel who suggested to Anna Clark that ‘Radical political rhetoric incorporated both the themes and styles of melodrama.’12 Clark has since set out more fully than anyone the melodramatic power of the 1820–21 Queen Caroline affair, and has gone on to argue that in political melodramas ‘the victim could stand for a category of the oppressed’ and so politics could be democratised by scandal.13 David Worrall, in his important book Theatric Revolution, argues that theatricality pervaded Georgian culture, linking the stage, the visual arts and the popular press. ‘By the late 1810s’, he writes, ‘drama was the primary literary form mediating between the British people and national issues.’14 Melodrama exalted the restoration of sundered communities at a time when they were being broken up and supplanted by an unholy combination of free-market individualism and class division. Food rioters, Old Price rioters, supporters of Queen Caroline, anti-poor law rioters and Chartists alike all resorted in different ways to melodramatic rhetoric, historical precedent and staged confrontation to force authority to restore lost rights and heal the body politic. For Marc Baer, anatomising Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London, the fundamentally traditionalist and customary character of theatre riots ran through other social and political disorders, helping to account for the relatively limited challenge posed to the state by popular protest. The rise of the melodramatic mode parallels Peter Spence’s account of the ‘birth of romantic radicalism’ in the Napoleonic wars, when the ideal of an organic national patriotic consensus was taken up by an unstable coalition of paternalists and populists.15 The dominant mode of the age was not the class struggle but the struggle against class. There is, then, a consensus that in the early nineteenth century (as Boyd Hilton puts it) ‘theatre was political … politics was theatrical’, but it is a consensus based largely on metropolitan experience.16 In this essay I offer a provincial case study, with metropolitan links: the campaign for parliamentary reform in 1816–17, which in a series of symbolic staged confrontations sought to move rapidly from petitioning through remonstrating to uprising. First, however, we need to examine more closely melodrama at its point of origin and ask exactly what made it so well suited to pre-democratic popular politics.

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The coming of melodrama Political melodrama begins with Edmund Burke striking a dagger into the floor of the House of Commons in 1792 to dramatise his break from the Foxite Whigs. Fox obligingly burst into tears. This was, suggests Linda Colley, a sign of ‘a distinctively sturm-und-drang quality about British patrician life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that has never been properly investigated, a special kind of emotionalism and violence’; between 1790 and 1820 no fewer than forty MPs either went mad or committed suicide.17 Burke had form. As prosecutor in the long-running trial of Warren Hastings he had cast Hastings as a predatory villain and himself and Sheridan as the bold rescuers.18 His book Reflections on the Revolution in France was notable for its melodramatic prose. Surveying the revolution, he wrote: ‘In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror.’19 This accurately describes melodrama, a decade before the genre was born. Of his first sight of Marie Antoinette, Burke (recalling the old Tory cry of ‘save the queen’s white neck!’) wrote: ‘I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone … All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.’20 Tearing off the drapery was exactly what Thomas Paine sought to do in reply. Monarchy, he complained, was ‘something kept behind a curtain’ to conceal its own absurdity, a kind of ‘political popery’ holding the people in superstitious ignorance.21 If the drapes and screens of power were swept aside it would become clear that ‘what is called the splendour of a throne is no other than the corruption of the state’. Paine used theatrical metaphors not to defend monarchy but to caricature and condemn it. Monarchical government, he contended, was a ‘pantomimical contrivance’, with its ‘scene of perpetual court cabal and intrigue, of which Mr Burke himself is an instance’.22 Democracy, by contrast, was ‘the open theatre of the world’. As a sign of the times, the expensive and florid Burke was outsold by the cheap and plain-spoken Paine, in the same period as periwigs and fancy clothes for men were being ousted by plain black-and-white dress.23 If we follow this line of reasoning, then Burke is theatrical and Paine is anti-theatrical: Burke is the performer and Paine the critic, loyalism is all rhetoric and radicalism all substance. But what Burke is denouncing (albeit in a theatrical way) is melodrama, an embryonic genre that would later be identified by the conservative Coleridge as ‘moral and intellectual Jacobinism’.24 By 1820 it was the radicals who were mobilising

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

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melodramatically in defence of the threatened virtue of a queen, Caroline of Brunswick; it would have been interesting to read Burke’s comments, had he lived to see it. Melodrama was a joint product of the revolutionary 1790s in France and the censored theatre of early nineteenth-century London. The first English melodrama was A Tale of Mystery (1802), written by Thomas Holcroft, a former member of the radical London Corresponding Society who had been tried for sedition in the 1790s (see Figure 1). He moved to Paris, where he viewed the Gothic dramas of the revolutionary period, including Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Coelina: ou, L’enfant du mystère, which used orchestral music as a running accompaniment to the action.25 Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery was a tale of love, abduction, deceit, violence, vice, virtue and remorse, in which hidden family links were revealed. His overall aim, Holcroft declared, was ‘to fix the attention, rouse the passions, and hold the faculties in anxious and impatient suspense’. Ordinary reality was alternated with heightened action, so that (as Joseph Donohue puts it) ‘issues are raised through dialogue and then brought to a crisis or climax by visual means’. The play was advertised as a ‘melodrame’ or mixed drama – mixed, that is, with music, which replaced much of the dialogue originally supplied by Holcroft. Numerous stage directions

Illustration from the second edition of Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802).

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gave instructions about both music and gesture: ‘music to express chattering contention’, ‘music expressive of horror’, ‘music to express disorder’, ‘confused music’, ‘soft and solemn music’, ‘music of sudden joy’, ‘violent distracted music’ and so on. Gestures too were written in: ‘Exit with looks of suspicion. Music of doubt and terror.’ ‘Music supplies the place of language’, observed one contemporary writer. The climactic scene had no dialogue at all. This multi-media assault had a powerful effect on the emotions of theatre-goers used to separate conventions of comedy and tragedy, now freely sampled in this hybrid form.26 The rise of stage melodrama in England has to be understood in relation to the theatrical censorship of the period. Its reach as a popular medium in this period remains the subject of debate. Plays with dialogue (which included melodramas) could be staged only at the two London patent theatres, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and (by special dispensation) at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in the summer season. Every word to be performed had to be approved by the Examiner of Plays in the office of the Lord Chamberlain, as did the texts of any other songs or recitations performed on any stage in London and Westminster. Plays which had previously been approved for London could be staged in the licensed theatres in provincial towns, such as the Manchester’s Theatre Royal, and (under limited conditions) by travelling players at premises licensed for up to sixty days a year. The Examiner routinely refused permission for any plays representing rebellion or defiance of authority, even in a loyalist context. Elsewhere, and particularly in the east and south of London, other institutions such as Astley’s amphitheatre, Sadler’s Wells, the Royal Circus and the so-called illegitimate or minor theatres such as the Surrey and the Coburg, put on stage performances consisting of songs, dances, acrobatics, mock battles, equestrian shows, tableaux and sing-song recitations, but never (at least legally) actual speech. They could not perform stage plays but they all required magistrates’ licences for music and dancing.27 But while performances were censored, play texts were not. Melodrama developed principally in the licensed theatres, but a new genre that told stories, yet achieved its impact largely through spectacle, gesture and music, had obvious appeal to the minor or illegitimate theatres. The minor theatres challenged the censor and the monopoly theatres, pushing at the boundaries of spoken drama by using signs, banners, unscripted asides to the audience and impromptu ‘songs’. Melodrama, alongside pantomime, circus and spectacle, developed rapidly in this period, principally in the patents as

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

they sallied downmarket to compete with the minors, reaching a surprisingly wide audience of artisans, clerks and tradesmen.28 Innovations and successes were constantly being copied and adapted, migrating to and fro between the patents and the minors. Worrall, while doubting the extent of illegitimate drama, sees a wider theatrical culture proliferating in ‘a spectrum of chinagarden theatres, penny “gaffs”, spouting clubs, song-and-supper clubs, and the semi-legal metropolitan private theatres’. The theatres themselves meanwhile became ‘laboratories not only of social activism but also of regulatory tactics’. The Old Price riots at the Covent Garden theatre in 1809 dramatised the issues as fully as any cultural historian could wish. In the end the age of reform took the political heat out of the theatre; a high-profile inquiry in 1833 into ‘free trade in drama’ effectively ended the theatrical monopoly a decade before it was formally abolished in 1843, inaugurating the age of domestic melodrama.29 The stock characters of melodrama were oppressors and their victims: evil aristocrats and tyrannical parents against virtuous maids, steadfast heroes and wronged children. Melodrama was (in Peter Brooks’s words) ‘a mode of high emotionalism and stark ethical conflict’, presenting a ‘Manichaestic struggle of good and evil’. There was always a climactic scene in which the inner workings of corruption, and often the hidden family connections between estranged characters, were revealed. The usual result was a dramatic recognition and reconciliation in which eyes were opened, hearts moved, conspiracy exposed and tyranny dissolved. Crucial scenes were carefully staged and often held for a full minute or more, turning the moment of revelation or reckoning into a memorable tableau vivant. Alternatively (or additionally), as in the ever popular Miller and his Men (1813), there would be a spectacular explosion, destroying the tyrant’s or usurper’s castle and showing (in Jane Moody’s words) ‘the irreducible confrontation between freedom and despotism, good and evil.’30 Theatrical trends tracked political ones. In the autumn of 1789 entertainments depicting the fall of the Bastille dominated the London season, while in the Napoleonic years it was battles and naval spectacles, complete with pyrotechnics. Patriotic melodramas typically featured patriotic virtue menaced by treachery and were peopled by Napoleonic bogeymen and British heroes, such as the resourceful ‘Jack Tar’, who existed beyond factionalism and politics. Such plays reflected the popular consensus over the Napoleonic wars but carried an implicit warning to government to play fair by the people – the theme of Peter Spence’s ‘romantic radicalism’.31 The melodramas of the 1800s were typically set in foreign or exotic locations, outwitting the censor

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with allegory. The first melodramas actually set in England appeared in 1816, just as the post-war radical movement took off.32 In the early 1830s there was a rash of plays dealing with the Swing riots, anti-slavery, factory reform and the new poor law.33 Manchester’s two theatres, the Theatre Royal and the Minor Theatre, moved relentlessly downmarket in the early nineteenth century. The first Theatre Royal in Spring Gardens was fiercely criticised for its poor-quality productions and found itself in a feud with a large part of its audience, accused of ‘setting spies and constables to seize and knock down the first who dares express his disapprobation of the managers’. It surrendered its patent and re-opened as a populist amphitheatre or minor theatre, staging a mixture of equestrian shows, plays, melodrama, naval and military spectacles, ballet, pantomime, variety and pyrotechnics; with a shilling gallery (where tickets were commonly reduced to 6d at the interval) its audience extended well into the working classes.34 Its patent was taken up by a new Theatre Royal in nearby Fountain Street, built by public subscription and initially aiming to stage more ambitious drama. But the new theatre was too big for this to be viable and (again with a shilling gallery) it chased its rival downmarket. A critical contemporary survey of 104 productions staged in 1815–16 (typically two a night, and for runs of a day or two) showed half a dozen familiar as melodramas, such as The Maid and the Magpie, The Miller and his Men and The Blind Boy. ‘Language in these productions is almost unnecessary’, complained a local critic, ‘as the charms of music, the clash of swords, and the grim looks of the ruffians, are the principal machines for popularity.’ But many other productions afforded scope for elements of melodrama, such as Smiles and Tears or The Widow’s Stratagem (evils of seduction), The Woodman’s Hut (a romantic drama with storms, flames and explosions), The Foundling of the Forest (‘improbable … exaggerated’, complained a critic) and the evergreen tragic sensation George Barnwell.35 Conservatives were alarmed by the radical potential of popular theatre, especially melodrama. Coleridge grumbled privately about ‘the right of cultural suffrage … too widely diffused’. George Colman, the playwright turned censor, complained that even outwardly moral plays with ‘gallant heroes’ and ‘hapless lovers’ still managed ‘to preach up the doctrine that government is Tyranny, that Revolt is Virtue, and that Rebels are Righteous’.36 Theatrical censorship, however effective it may have been over details, could not control the way in which the themes of drama were understood and applied by their audiences. Meanwhile, songs, printed texts, radical periodicals and popular literature propagated melodramatic themes and language to audiences who

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

had never seen the inside of a theatre. The melodramatic mode extended to the movement for parliamentary reform, where it had a tangible influence on political behaviour. The theatre of politics The radical reform movement of 1816–17 was nothing if not theatrical. There were various risings and attempted risings: the Spa Fields meetings in London in late 1816, the presentation of massed reform petitions to the House of Commons in January 1817, the march of the Manchester ‘Blanketeers’ towards London on 10 March, the abortive Manchester rising of late March and the Pentridge rising on the Yorkshire–Derbyshire border in June. The often confused details have exercised historians, but all were part of the same basic strategy: to physically confront crown and Parliament in the capital with the massed ranks of the people in a dramatic showdown designed to force a reform of Parliament.37 One source for this scenario was in the central chapters of Volney’s Ruins of Empire, published in Paris in 1791 and in an English translation in London in 1802, in parallel with the emergence of gothic plays and melodrama. Volney imagined a set-piece confrontation between the people and their rulers, conveyed through dramatic dialogues. The people outface nobles, civil governors and priests alike, and soldiers put down their weapons, leaving the tyrants without support and ‘overwhelmed with confusion’. The people promptly convene a ‘general assembly of the nations’ to refashion government anew, in an idealised model of the constitutional conventions of England in 1689, the United States in 1787 and France in 1789. Extracts from this section of Volney were printed in a handbill, melodramatically headed ‘The Secret Discovered!’ It included the words: ‘Nations cannot revolt; tyrants are the only rebels.’ Ruins was possibly the most widely circulated radical work in Britain after those of Paine, but unlike Paine, Volney offered a script for revolution.38 The Manchester Blanketeers of March 1817 imagined themselves to be in the sort of staged dialogue with their rulers described by Volney. The campaign began in earnest on 2 November 1816 when William Cobbett published his mass-circulation address ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland’, designed to mobilise the British and Irish people behind the cause of parliamentary reform. On the same day, the patrician London Hampden Club met and resolved to draw up a bill for taxpayer suffrage – that is, payers of direct taxes – by the first Saturday in March, the draft to be circulated to the provincial societies for their advice.39 The militant Spencean

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radicals in London sought to force the issue through mass meetings at Spa Fields, on the edge of the city, convened through the London trades network. The second of these, on 2 December, addressed by Henry Hunt, was the occasion of a precipitate attempt to plunder weapons from nearby gunsmiths’ shops and march on the Tower of London, in a sort of re-enactment of the storming of the Bastille. Reports from Oldham, Manchester (where a weavers’ strike was under way) and elsewhere show that associates in the provinces planned action of some sort in the event of news that the Tower had fallen.40 The initiative now passed from London to the Manchester region, where a series of delegate meetings in December urged the London Hampden Club to bring forward its reform bill from 2 March to the opening of Parliament in January: ‘The People of Middleton’, it was reported, ‘have determined not to wait till the second of March for say they before that time we shall all be starved to Death even with all the assistance of the Soup Kettle’.41 The London Hampden Club agreed and arranged a national delegate meeting at the Crown and Anchor tavern for 22 January 1817. At the end of the year public meetings at several towns in the Manchester area voted in favour of manhood suffrage, arranged to send delegates to London and then adjourned until the second Monday after the opening of Parliament, when they would reconvene to receive news of the fate of their petitions and decide what to do next. The Crown and Anchor meeting then voted to upgrade the bill from taxpayer suffrage to manhood suffrage. The Lancashire delegate Samuel Bamford made a crucial practical intervention in the debate, arguing that the militia roll could become the electoral roll, thus shifting the grounds of enfranchisement from property to citizenship. The resulting bill for manhood suffrage was triumphantly presented to the Commons at the end of January along with numerous local petitions for reform; each was found objectionable on grounds of wording or procedure and left ‘to lie on the table’. With the rejection of all petitions by the Commons, the strategies of insurgence (as at Spa Fields) and petitioning or remonstrating (as promoted by the Hampden Club) merged. The approach was still constitutional, but it was to be backed by the physical presence of the petitioners. The raft of follow-up public meetings, including the third Spa Fields meeting, fell on Monday 10 February. At all of these the theme was the same: petitioning Parliament had failed, and the last resort was remonstration to the crown. A definitive recitation of grievances (tacitly modelled on the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 which had preceded the civil war) would be presented by the massed representatives of the petitioners to the Prince Regent, accompanied by a demand for

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

parliamentary reform to make it possible for the grievances to be redressed. The government, well informed through its network of agents, was prepared for co-ordinated provincial risings on 10 February, but in the event the move came four weeks later on 10 March in Manchester. A mass public meeting of some ten thousand radicals sent off marchers, known as the Blanketeers, for London, to join up with others from Yorkshire, Birmingham and elsewhere and to arrive in the capital in their hundreds of thousands, there to form a kind of national convention for a Volney-style dialogue with their rulers. By this time, however, habeas corpus had been suspended and the leaders arrested, and the march was successfully intercepted in Cheshire and Derbyshire. The subsequent risings in Manchester and Pentridge were attempts, fatally infiltrated by spies, to repeat the mobilisation through conspiratorial means. Among the Blanketeers arrested was Robert McMillan, aged seventeen, a weaver of Newtown, near Manchester, who had been out of work for four or five months. There is a note by his name: ‘This is a poor ragged half-starved fellow – Nadin [the deputy constable of Manchester] says he is often in the Gallery of the Playhouse.’ This is one of few indications that working-class people attended the theatre in Manchester, but it is suggestive.42 Melodramatic rhetoric was part of the strategy of staged confrontation. On 4 September an unknown speaker addressed a meeting of Manchester radicals: ‘It is idle, said he, to expect any good from so vile and corrupt a House as the British House of Commons. Let us proceed by Force at once. Let us drag the Hydra from her den and expose all her naked Deformity to the public View. To do this we only have to unite and be firm.’ The man was shouted down as extreme, reported the agent; people ‘seemed to entertain a lurking Suspicion that he might be a Spy’.43 The imagery may have owed something to images such as Gillray’s 1798 pro-loyalist print ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’, where a Jacobin figure – half-serpent, half-goblin – is flushed from his lair by Britannia bearing the torch of truth (see Figure 2). At a meeting in Manchester, one of those called to consider moves after the failure of the January 1817 petitions, the young Stockport radical John Bagguley, proclaimed: ‘Petitions are in Vain, I say that rather than sit down, with the Insults we have received, I would lose the last drop of Blood in my Body.’ This line was received with loud shouts of ‘Bravo, We will we will.’44 John Johnston on 24 February urged radicals, like stage heroes, to rescue their womenfolk from oppression: ‘This critical moment is arrived, you must come forward and show yourselves Englishmen. You married men your wifes all exclaim against you by saying, must we and your children be slaves, and you

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single men your sweethearts will exclaim against you by saying you are not worthy of them if you do not assert your rights.’45 On 3 March, a week before the Blanketeers were to leave, Bagguley was greeted with cheers at a huge indoor meeting as he ‘pointed out the curruption [sic] of those infernal diabolical fiends of Hell, Lord Castlereagh and Canning and all their Host of Ministers that coincide with them. He said Castlereagh was a Murderer, and Canning was a Robber.’46 At the same meeting William Benbow looked forward to a march of some twenty thousand people on London the following week, offering the short-lived triumph of the peasants’ revolt as a hopeful precedent: I am ready to go with you, and will lose every last Drop of Blood in these Veins in the cause of Liberty. For what is death to me, while I am a Slave to a lot of People, vulgarly called the Commons House of Parliament, and of that infernal D—l Lord Castlereagh (applause from all sides)47

The same night George Bradbury, addressing a meeting in Manchester, ‘adverted to King John being compelled to sign Magna Charta on one knee and [urged] that it only required unity and courage in the people to accomplish as great objects now as were done in those days’.48 On 6 March, John Johnston explained

2

James Gillray, ‘A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism’, 1 September 1798.

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

the plan to a midweek indoor meeting of some two thousand Manchester radicals: ‘If your leaders can get you through a few towns, you are sure of hosts of recruits. If we could get you as far as Birmingham, the whole would be done, for I have no doubt you will be 100,000 strong. Then Gentlemen it would amount to an impossibility to bring anything to resist you.’49 The response of the audience was reported to be loudest for those speakers using the most extravagant language. After it was all over, the Middleton radical Samuel Bamford spoke to one of the Blanketeer marchers. ‘“What would you really have done,” I said to one of them, “supposing you had got to London?” “Done?” he replied, in surprise at the question; “why iv wee’d nobbo gett’n to Lunnun, we shud ha’ tan th’nation, an’ sattl’t o’th dett.”’ (‘If we’d only got to London, we should have taken the nation and settled all the debt.’)50 On 12 March 1817, shortly after the suspension of habeas corpus and the failure of the Blanketeers, stagecraft met statecraft in another way in the pages of the radical newspaper Black Dwarf, which began a series of satirical sketches entitled ‘State Theatricals … the New Melodrama, called Treason without Traitors’ . The series ridiculed ministers, denounced the suspension of habeas corpus and the banning of seditious meetings, and presented the use of spies’ and informers’ tales as theatrical sleight-of-hand by which spies were made into patriots and liars into truth-tellers. The series lasted for several years.51 T. J. Wooler, the editor of the Black Dwarf, certainly had the right background for political theatre. He was a London printer and publisher, originally from Yorkshire, and would later take over the radical Manchester Observer. He attended London Spencean meetings, and was an associate of the veteran constitutionalist Major Thomas Cartwright and a member of the ‘Political Protestants’ network whose slogan was ‘Magna Charta and the spirit of the Constitution’. He was also from 1814 to 1815 editor of the dramatic weekly The Stage, a background which stood him in good stead in fighting a series of government prosecutions for sedition. As James Epstein has observed, ‘There were parallels between popular notions of a democratic theatre and a democratic courtroom’ (see Figure 3).52 A chance discovery enabled Wooler to make further connections. In February 1817 a London publishing firm, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, managed to get hold of the manuscript of the play Wat Tyler, written in 1794 by the thenJacobin Robert Southey. There had been chapbook-style editions of the Wat Tyler story, one around 1800, but Southey’s was the only one to take the side of the rebels.53 It had been quickly hidden away after being rejected by the Examiner of Plays, who wrote: ‘it appears extremely unfit for representation

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Black Dwarf handbill.

at a time when the Country is full of Alarm, being the story of Wat Tyler the killing of the tax gatherer &C. very ill judgd’.54 Southey was seriously rattled, especially after being denounced for hypocrisy in the House of Commons, and quickly moved in Chancery for an injunction against his own play on the grounds that it was seditious. What better proof could there be (argued his lawyer) than the word of the author? Lord Chancellor Eldon agreed, but

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

ruled that as a seditious publication it was not entitled to the protection of copyright.55 Soon afterwards, as Southey’s regular publisher John Murray noted, ‘as there is no copyright, everyone has printed it’. There were eventually a dozen cheap editions, seven of them in 1817 alone, and it became (after the fable ‘The Three Bears’) Southey’s most popular work.56 Southey’s play told the story of how in 1381 Wat Tyler and the men of Kent rose in rebellion against the poll tax to confront the King in person. There were obvious parallels with the situation in 1817. tyler: King of England, Petitioning for pity is most weak, The sovereign people ought to demand justice … Why is this ruinous poll-tax impos’d, But to support your court’s extravagance, And your mad title to the crown of France? Shall we sit tamely down beneath these evils, Petitioning for pity? … Think you we do not feel the wrongs we suffer? The hour of retribution is at hand, And tyrants tremble – mark me, King of England.57

Tyler’s boldness (backed by the presence of the men of Kent) opens the King’s eyes, and he announces that he will meet their demands and gives a free pardon. The crowd naively cheers the King and starts to disband and go home, only for the King’s offer to be withdrawn under the influence of malign advisors, and the rebellion is bloodily put down. Wat Tyler’s rebellion was cited as a hopeful precedent by the promoters of the Blanketeers’ march. As John Bagguley urged the marchers on their way he told them: If you look through all the annals of history you will not see any like this. In the reign of Richard II. about 40,000 men went to London to demand their rights of the King; & he granted them their rights & they went home again. But they only came a little way from London, they did not go from Manchester.58

This plan recalled Volney’s scenario: confronted with a free people truly assembled in London, the corrupt ministers who had concealed the true state of the nation from the crown would stand exposed, troops would change sides, and the Prince Regent would be forced either to stand down or to consent to parliamentary reform. It also resembled a classic melodramatic denouement in which the hidden links between the characters would be revealed,

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c­ orruption brought to light, despotism defeated, the virtues of the common man rewarded, the national family reunited. The Wat Tyler scenario was explicitly raised again when a secretive network of radicals from Manchester and the nearby weaving districts planned a second rising for 29 March 1817. On the signal of a rocket their supporters would descend on Manchester, fire several public buildings, attack the depleted police station and barracks and seize weapons. This would divert the authorities for long enough to allow a second contingent of marchers to get clear of Manchester and gather support on the road towards London. The whole thing was based on the melodramatic belief in a vast network of sturdy supporters in other districts prepared to emerge from the countryside and march on London – ‘fifty thousand strong by morning’ as the leaders of the Blanketeers had it. There were Arthurian echoes here, but much closer to home was the widespread belief in 1812 in the secret army of ‘General Ludd’, and closer still was Wat Tyler. The circulation of Southey’s play reveals continuing connections between London Spenceans and Lancashire radicals. On 23 March, ‘“Part of the Poem of Watt Tyler” was read out at the Mulberry Tree Tavern, in London’s Moorfields’, one of the Spencean free-and-easies. 59 Extracts from Wat Tyler were reprinted in Wooler’s radical newspaper Black Dwarf on 26 March, and then in Sherwin’s Republican dated 29 March 1817 – the exact day appointed for the Manchester rising.60 Sherwin’s introduction declared that Wat Tyler’s rebellion had ‘a distinguished place’ in history, but warned readers of his fate of being treacherously murdered by the Mayor of London after naively accepting the King’s promise and disbanding. As Bagguley had said, ‘they only came a little way from London, they did not go from Manchester’. At the same time, the paper, significantly hedging its bets, announced a prudent change of title from The Republican to Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register. To print the play under such circumstances was a direct invitation to provincial radicals to march on the capital in the guise of liberators. There is every indication from reports of radical meetings in Manchester during the preceding weeks that many of those involved saw themselves in the same light. So did the hawkish Stockport magistrate John Lloyd, who wrote to the Home Office on 31 March: ‘I wish to have a dangerous character in this town prosecuted, & I have to point out that the last No. of the “Black Dwarf ” abounds in libellous & seditious matter, & I can prove this man uttering & publishing these nos. The last is No. 9 date Wednesday 26th March.’61 The authorities were monitoring everything with spies and informers, and the rising was averted by arrests as the

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conspirators gathered in Manchester. Expectation and reality were so far apart in this episode that only a cultural explanation will bridge the gap. There was a fitting postscript a few weeks later when the London Spencean circle produced a script for a play, Plots and Placemen, which (in the spirit of the Black Dwarf’s ‘State Theatricals’) satirised the exaggerated fears behind the suspension of habeas corpus. It may have been intended for performance at one of the Spenceans’ ‘harmony’ sessions, or just for print publication. The central character was a prisoner-poet who has been identified by David Worrall with the Spenceans’ secretary Thomas Evans. There are plausible parallels. But this aspiring ‘epic Miltonic poet’, wrongfully arrested at home near Manchester among ‘pen, ink and paper’, 62 also sounds like the Lancashire radical leader and poet Samuel Bamford. Bamford had come to London as one of the Lancashire delegates in January 1817, attended a Spencean meeting at a London pub and even leafleted troops in their barracks. He stood apart from the Blanketeers’ expedition and denounced the subsequent plan for a subsequent rising the day it was brought to him, but was arrested anyway by mistake and held for a month in Coldbath Fields prison. It is becoming difficult here to tell where reality ends and drama begins – as difficult for historians as it was for contemporaries, and that is the point. Conclusion In January 1819 the radical Manchester Observer republished Thomas Holcroft’s savagely ironic poem ‘The Hero’: All Hail to the Hero, whom victory leads, Triumphant, from the field of renown, From kingdoms left barren! From plains drench’d in blood! In the sack of many a fair town!

Holcroft’s poem was printed to coincide with the first visit of the orator Henry Hunt to address a public meeting at Manchester. It appeared next to Samuel Bamford’s poem ‘The Welcome’, which praised Hunt as a peaceful popular leader, the antithesis of Holcroft’s titled Norman-Hanoverian conqueror. The same paper printed the Manchester radicals’ latest ‘Declaration & Remonstrance’ to the Prince Regent. Whereas the Ministers of this country, abusing the sacred trust reposed in them for the public welfare, have perverted the high authority assumed by the Prince Regent … to purposes of individual ambition and national oppression – And … have treated the People with every vile indignity and insult

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which their wanton malignity and overbearing intolerance could suggest … and loaded with fetters and cruelly imprisoned in solitary dungeons, some of the best and most worthy characters in the country.63

The language and imagery are pure melodrama, but the connections went deeper. The bold language was the rebellion, part of a preamble announcing that the contract between crown and people was broken. There followed a remonstrance, putting the crown on notice of imminent mass action to enforce the rights claimed. The constitutional manoeuvres of 1817 were being rehearsed again as a preliminary to the mass platform campaign of 1819. That campaign would come to grief in the Peterloo massacre, in which the Manchester authorities enacted the fantasy of slaying the Jacobin goblin in its lair. It was no coincidence that the Manchester Observer should accompany its campaign with verses by Thomas Holcroft, the radical originator of British melodrama. The remonstrance told a gothic tale of a national community or family sundered by secret manipulation, proclaimed a desire for it to be reunited in the struggle against powerful oppressors, and expressed the belief that this

4

‘The Last Scene of the Triumph of Reform or the Fall of the Boro’mongers’.

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England

could be achieved only through an open confrontation in which the arrogant façade of power would dissolve before the massed citizenry. Melodrama was not merely a cultural fad which spread from the theatrical stage to the political one but a Manichean mode of language, posture and values common to both theatre and popular politics. In an age defined by politics without democracy, ritual confrontations between oppressed and oppressors provided a script for popular protest, drawing on the cultural resources of popular theatre and melodrama.64 If the connection between theatre and politics was widely understood in the early nineteenth century, the manner in which it was most commonly understood was that of melodrama. In 1821 the loyalist Exchange Herald described the coronation celebrations in Manchester as a ‘well-constructed drama … a melo-drame on a magnificent scale, in which thousands were at once Performers and Spectators in a Theatre’ (24 July 1821). And when the 1832 Reform Act was finally passed, it was fitting that it should have been presented in a political cartoon as the final scene in a melodrama entitled The Triumph of Reform, endorsed by a standing ovation from the audience (see Figure 4).65 Notes 1 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, chapter 1, at www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (accessed 7 June 2015). 2 Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), pp. 13–14. 3 Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 13. Unattributed epigraph. 4 Robert Corrigan, quoted in Louis James, ‘Taking Melodrama Seriously’, History Workshop Journal, 3:1 (1977), p. 152. 5 Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, p. 3. 6 Rohan McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’, Radical History Review, 78 (2000), pp. 59, 63. McWilliam’s article provides extensive references, to which can be added Jane Moody, ‘The Theatrical Revolution, 1776–1843’, in Joseph Donohue (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2: 1660 to 1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 199–215, and chapter 13 of McWilliam’s own The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London: Continuum, 2007). 7 G. Kitson-Clark, ‘The Romantic Element, 1830–1850’, in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), p. 222. 8 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 121–2, 127–8, 153, 168–71. 9 Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 178, 189; Patrick

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 310–11. 10 Ian McCalman, ‘Popular Irreligion in Early Victorian England: Infidel Preachers and Radical Theatricality in 1830s London’, in R. W. Davis and R. J. Helmstadter (eds), Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 54. 11 Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain 1780–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 10–21; Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change 1789–1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 138. 12 Anna Clark, ‘The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848’, in Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance: the Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 58–9, 69 n. 30. 13 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the English Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Scandal: the Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 219, 223. 14 David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 218, 274. 15 Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage, pp. 11–12; Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 238–45; Peter Spence, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), esp. pp. 136–40; R. Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England’, Past and Present, 192 (August 2006), pp. 109–53. 16 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 31–8. 17 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 151. 18 Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage, pp. 17–23. 19 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indiana and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987; 1790), p. 9; Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.  52. 20 Burke, Reflections, pp. 66–7; Swindells, Glorious Causes, pp. 20–7. 21 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; 1791–92), pp. 204, 218, 251. 22 Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 225, 163. 23 Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 2. 24 For discussion, see Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 58–61. 25 George Taylor, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 39–40, 101–2, 199–203. 26 Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery, 2nd edn (London, 1802); Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 106–9; David Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 30–1.

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England 27 There is an unresolved difference of opinion between Worrall, who argues that the monopoly of stage plays left little scope for minor or illegal theatres to perform anything but musical burlettas, and most other scholars, who see greater practical scope for licensed and unlicensed dramatic performance. For conflicting summaries see Worrall, Politics of Romantic Theatricality, pp. 11–18; Katherine Newey, ‘Reform on the London Stage’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 240–4; Robert Poole, ‘Radicalism and Protest’, Reviews in History (2009), at www. history.ac.uk/reviews/review/800 (accessed 7 June 2015). 28 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 227–8. 29 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 273, 361–2. See also Baer, Theatre and ­Disorder; Newey, ‘Reform on the London Stage’; Swindells, Glorious Causes, chapters 1 and 6; Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, chapter 3; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 45; Clark, ‘Politics of Seduction’; Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama’, New Literary History, 13:1 (Autumn 1981), pp.  127–43. 30 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 12; Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean, pp. 117–18; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 28–9. 31 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 28–9; Jackie Bratton, ‘British Heroism and the Structure of Melodrama’, in J. S. Bratton et al. (eds), Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage 1790–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 18–61; Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘The Ideological Tack of Nautical Melodrama’, in M. Hays and A. Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 167–89; Gillian Russell, Theatres of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 96–106; Spence, Birth of Romantic Radicalism. 32 Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean, p. 119. 33 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, chapter 9; Swindells, Glorious Causes; Anastasia Nikolopoulou, ‘E. P. Thompson and Artisan Theatre Audiences’, unpublished paper prepared for conference ‘E. P. Thompson: The Freeborn Englishman’, London Socialist Historians Group, 2003. I am grateful to Dr Nikolopoulou for sight of this paper. 34 Terry Wyke and Nigel Rudyard (eds), Manchester Theatres (Manchester: Bibliography of North West England, 1994), pp. 53–7; The Townsman, 2 (Manchester, 1803). 35 The Prompter, or Theatrical Investigator (Manchester, 1815–16), pp. 7–24, 308–9. 36 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 58–61; Hays and Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama, p. ix. 37 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), chapter 15; John Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and WorkingClass Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chapter 3; Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chapter 3; Robert Poole, ‘French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt? Petitioners and Rebels from the Blanketeers to the Chartists’, Labour History Review, 74:1 (April 2009), pp. 6–26.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 38 Thompson, Making, pp. 107–8; C. F. Volney, Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires and the Law of Nature, 3rd edn (London, 1890; 1802), chapters 15–19; The National Archives (hereafter TNA), HO 42/165, fol. 94v. 39 Proceedings of the Hampden Club (n.d., c.1817), 2 November 1816; Belchem, Orator Hunt, p. 53. These events are related in more detail in Poole, ‘French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt?’ 40 Chippendale to Fletcher, 5 December 1816, TNA, HO 40/3, part 1, fol. 719; Chase, People’s Farm, pp. 83–9; Belchem, Orator Hunt, pp. 49–52. 41 Axson to Nadin, report of meeting at Bibby’s large room, Manchester, 9 December 1816, TNA, HO 40/9/4, fols 440–1. 42 TNA, HO 42/172, fol. 231. 43 Chippendale to Fletcher, 4 September 1816, TNA, HO 42/153, fol. 371. 44 TNA, HO 40/10, part 2, fol. 132. 45 TNA, HO 40/10, part 2, fol. 134. 46 TNA, HO 40/5, part 4a, fol. 1335. 47 TNA, HO 40/5, part 4a, fols 1331–3. 48 TNA, HO 42/164, fol. 256. 49 TNA, HO 40/5, part 4a, fols 1338–45. 50 Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839–42), ed. W. H. Chaloner (London: Frank Cass, 1967), book 1, chapter 6. 51 The Black Dwarf, for example February–March 1817; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 77–8. 52 Richard Hendrix, ‘Popular Humour and “The Black Dwarf ”’, Journal of British Studies, 16:1 (Fall 1976), pp. 110–11; James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 2, pp. 37–8. 53 Wat Tyler and Jack Straw; or, The Mob Reformers. A Dramatick Entertainment. As it is Perform’d at Pinkethman’s and Giffard’s Great Theatrical (London, 1730); The History of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw (London, n.d., c.1800). 54 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 107, 109–11. 55 Frank Taliaferro Hoadley, ‘The Controversy over Southey’s Wat Tyler’, Studies in Philology, 38 (1941), pp. 81–96; David M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political Argument in Britain 1780–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), pp. 1–4; W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 51–2, 169–74; Duncan Wu (ed.), The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, vol. 4 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), pp. 157–74. 56 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 316–19. 57 Robert Southey, Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817), Act II. 58 TNA, HO 40/5, Manchester Papers, no. 11. This item is reproduced in the appendix to H. W. C. Davis, ‘Lancashire Reformers 1816–17’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 10 (1926), pp. 47–79. 59 TNA, HO 42/162, quoted in A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press 1780–1850 (Brighton: Harvester, 1973; 1949), p. 46n.

Melodrama and politics in late Georgian England 60 The paper attracted the instant attention of the authorities; there is a copy of The Republican in TNA, HO 42/163, fols 461–70. 61 TNA, HO 42/162, fol. 198. 62 Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 303–7. 63 Manchester Observer, 23 January 1819, reprinted in Donald Read, Peterloo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), pp. 210–16. 6 4 For a parallel argument about the role of ritual confrontation in restoration France, see Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 65 The Triumph of Reform, or The Fall of the Boroughmongers, British Museum, London, AN00677287.

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2 The platform and the stage: the primary aesthetics of Chartism Mike Sanders

A

t first sight, the subject of Chartism’s relationship with the stage offers scant pickings. In contrast with the situation in the late twentieth century, when the British acting profession was closely associated with leftwing politics, no actor of note proclaimed his support for the Chartist cause. Indeed, the only Chartist thespian of note, William Jones – one of the leaders of the failed ‘Newport insurrection’ – pursued a largely unsuccessful career as a travelling actor in the United Kingdom before the insurrection and again in Australia after serving his sentence of transportation. The paucity of Chartist drama becomes clear if we make a comparison with other literary genres. Whereas the Chartist archive contains more than one thousand poems and scores of works of prose fiction, it has next to nothing by way of dramatic literature. Indeed, John Watkins is the only Chartist author to have published more than one play, and most of his plays were written after he became a marginal figure within the movement. However, despite this dearth of dramatic texts, this chapter argues not only that the theatre existed in a series of specific relationships with Chartist activity, but also that there is a set of ‘meta-links’ between radical politics and the theatre. The central hypothesis of this chapter is that there is a continuous but variable interchange between the ‘theatrical’ and the ‘political’ throughout the nineteenth century which requires us to think in terms of both a ‘culture of politics’ as well as a ‘politics of culture’. In pursuit of this ‘politics of culture’, this chapter begins by sketching the practical ways in which theatrical performance and ideas of the theatre manifest themselves within early nineteenth-century radicalism. It then examines two contrasting yet exemplary radical approaches towards the theatrical by way of identifying the political and cultural stakes at issue here, before attempting to construct a taxonomy of the various modes of

The platform and the stage

relationship between theatre and politics in the early nineteenth century. This taxonomy begins with radicalism’s immediate interest in the theatre before discussing its metaphorical appropriations of the theatrical. From there, the chapter moves to a more general, and conceptual, analysis of the interconnections between the platform and the stage which argues for an understanding of theatre as a deep, generative structure which makes radical politics possible. This analysis draws heavily on the work of Jacques Rancière, particularly his concept of ‘primary aesthetics’. As Malcolm Chase’s and Robert Poole’s contributions to this collection demonstrate, there are multiple interconnections between the theatre and radical politics in the early nineteenth century. From the simple fact of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office through to the theatre’s exemption from the restrictions on public assembly imposed the ‘Six Acts’, the practices of the Georgian theatre were inflected by a particular relationship to the state. Equally important, though harder to ascertain, is the role of theatre as both barometer of and contributor to popular opinion. Indeed, Chase begins by noting the ability of theatrical audiences to find contemporary significance in plays from past centuries. Thus Othello and Henry VIII were interpreted in the light of the Queen Caroline affair, and plays including Coriolanus and Otway’s Venice Preserved were subject to censorship and even suspension by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Malcolm Chase’s chapter highlights two particular ways in which the stage interacts with the political sphere. Firstly, under certain conditions, the institution of the theatre becomes involved in questions of ‘public order’. Secondly, individual plays can become implicated in wider ideological struggles. Robert Poole’s chapter demonstrates the ways in which late Georgian radicalism was both sustained and informed by an essentially melodramatic understanding of the world. In effect, Poole proposes a near-homologous relationship between melodrama and radical politics in which the former provides the imaginary forms within which radical political praxis occurs. In particular, Poole demonstrates how radicalism’s key strategy for effecting political change – a dramatic confrontation between the virtuous people and a corrupt state which would secure the restoration of lost rights – replicates ‘a classic melodramatic denouement in which the hidden links between the characters would be revealed, corruption brought to light, despotism defeated, the virtues of the common man rewarded, the national family reunited’. Chartism’s belief in the efficacy of the mass platform rested on similar assumptions. Indeed, Poole’s observation that ‘melodrama was not merely a cultural fad which spread from the

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theatrical style to the political one but a Manichean mode of language, posture and values common to both theatre and popular politics’ is as valid for early Victorian Chartism as it is for late Georgian radicalism (see pp. 29–39). Chartism frequently used theatrical modes or genres to provide a frame for political analysis. Consider, for example, the Northern Star’s editorial protesting at the sudden transportation of John Frost (the leader of the failed Newport Insurrection) and his fellow Chartist prisoners. Entitled ‘The Body Snatchers’, the editorial owes much to melodrama as it invites its readers to imagine the scene: They are first awoke, and then roused to sorrowful reflection, by the clanking of their manacles. They have been partially prepared for death, and are relieved from the anticipation of one sudden shock and convulsive struggle, by the announcement that life is to be spent in perpetual torture, not only of bodily suffering, but of mental anguish and despair. The wife of the bosom, the offspring of the loins, the associations of youth, the anticipations of old age, all to be bade adieu to and for ever. (Northern Star, 15 February 1840, p. 4)

Clearly such an editorial is striving for an emotional response on the part of its readers (and auditors, given the practice of collective reading of the Northern Star). The use of melodrama in such instances prompts the reflection as to whether the generic frame is used in a calculated fashion to provoke a particular response, or whether it is necessary to make the event visible and intelligible to its audience. If the latter is the case, then what we are looking at is not so much the self-conscious appropriation of theatrical motifs and metaphors by radicalism but rather the production (in and through the ‘theatrical’) of those deep, generative structures which actually make radical politics possible in the nineteenth century. At this juncture it is important to note that radicalism itself evinces an ambivalent attitude towards the interplay of the political and the theatrical. For example, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, two of British radicalism’s most important and influential thinkers, both exhibit a profound mistrust of the theatrical in their writings. In The Rights of Man, Paine took Edmund Burke to task for his overly dramatic prose: ‘Mr Burke should recollect that he is writing history and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation.’1 For Paine (reversing the aesthetic values of Aristotle), the drama stands in an inferior relation to history because of the truth content of the latter. Similarly, for Wollstonecraft, in Vindication, ‘theatrical attitudes’ are associated with artificiality and

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insincerity: ‘Even the ladies, Sir, may repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.’2 The mistrust of the drama which makes its way into the Northern Star has a long and impeccable radical pedigree. Yet a more positive evaluation of the political uses of theatre exists alongside this sceptical tradition. Consider, for example, the following extract from a ‘playbill’ which was given in evidence during the trial of Thomas Hardy (secretary and treasurer of the London Corresponding Society, arguably the first ‘working-class’ political organisation in Britain) in 1795: For The Benefit of JOHN BULL. ——— At the FEDERATION THEATRE, in EQUALITY SQUARE, On Thursday, the 1st of April, 4971, Will be performed, A new and entertaining Farce, called LA GUILLOTINE; OR, GEORGE’S HEAD IN THE BASKET! ——— Dramatis Personae. Numpy the Third, by Mr. GWELP, (Being the last time of his appearing in that character.) Prince of Leeks, by Mr. GWELP, junior.3

Here, in a formally complex satire which parodies the commercial playbill, inescapably revolutionary action (the decapitation of the monarch) is presented as enjoyable farce, while the ‘theatrical’ mystifications on which courtly power depends are demystified by representing the King precisely as an actor. These examples drawn from the late eighteenth century exemplify the ambivalence which characterised radicalism’s attitude to the theatre. On the one hand, there is the suspicion of ‘theatricality’ as expressed by Paine and Wollstonecraft, which surely owes much to a peculiarly English combination of Enlightenment rationalism and the traditions of Puritan dissent. On the other hand, there is the willingness to use theatrical modes for propaganda purposes. Furthermore, between them these two attitudes also represent two rather different models of political practice. Indeed, this could be seen as a version of the distinction drawn by Classical Greek rhetoricians between ‘logos’ (the appeal to reason) and ‘pathos’ (the appeal to feeling) as rhetorical

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strategies. In this case Paine and Wollstonecraft represent critique and analysis, privileging reason and expressing a suspicion of the emotions. Conversely, the radical playbill has a strong sense of the carnivalesque, of the radical debunking and overturning of the status quo through the use of satire, and hence has a much heavier reliance on an affective or emotional response. Between them these examples mark out the spectrum of radical responses to the theatre. This chapter has, as its central hypothesis, the proposition that from the late eighteenth century onwards radicalism is always situated in a relationship to the theatre; whether hostile, suspicious or enthusiastic, radicalism always evinces an attitude towards the theatre. It may be possible, therefore, to posit a continuous, mutually constitutive (albeit variable) relationship between the theatrical and the political in the nineteenth century. In particular, I want to suggest not only that does the ‘political’ seek to express itself through theatrical means (for example, through the medium of political drama), but also that the theatrical needs to be understood as one of the preconditions of political expression. In the case of Chartism, the general absence of a Chartist dramaturgy did not arise from an antipathy towards the stage. Following its move to London in 1844, the leading Chartist newspaper – the Northern Star – carried regular reports on the London stage. For example, the ‘Public Amusements’ column for 8 November 1845 carried reviews of The Bride of the Nile at Astley’s, Mary Campbell; or The Wife and Witness and Macbeth at the Royal Marylebone Theatre; Pauline, the Spitalfields Weaver; and The Revolt of La Vendee at the City Theatre (8 November 1845, p. 8). In addition, as Paul Pickering has shown, local Chartist groups often put on dramatic performances both as an entertainment and as a fundraising activity, with the Trial of Robert Emmett a particular favourite.4 Beyond this theatres sometimes served as a location for Chartist public meetings. Thus, within Chartism we find evidence of an interest in the theatre, a recognition of the utility of the drama as a means of promoting sociability and generating income at a local level and a readiness to use the physical space afforded by theatres for meetings where possible. However, ideas of ‘theatre’ also influenced Chartism’s conceptualisation of politics. At the most rudimentary level, theatre provided the Northern Star with a set of metaphors and characters which could be deployed to analyse political events and characters. For example, in an editorial entitled ‘Whig Loyalty and Moral Force’, the Northern Star comments that its own title suggests ‘Christmas Mummery ... the name of some delectable farce’ before likening the Whigs to a series of dramatic roles commonly known for their ‘conceit,

The platform and the stage

ambition, deception, hypocrisy, and lying’: Malvolio (from ­ Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), Justice Greedy (from the Renaissance drama New Way to Pay Old Debts by Philip Massinger), Tartuffe (from Molière’s play of the same name), Mawworm (Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite) and Joseph Surface (from Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal) (Northern Star, 5 January 1839, p. 4). In a more sophisticated usage of the theatre–politics metaphor, the efforts of certain middle-class radicals to reclaim leadership of the popular movement is debunked in an editorial from 28 November 1840: Had the democratic mind slumbered during the last eight years, it might, upon waking, have looked with astonishment at the great improvement in the old political actors, but being wide awake, the audience merely recognise some alterations in the stage gaggery, without the slightest change in the plot. ROEBUCK and BAINES, and the old company of Malthusian strollers, cannot now sustain the diversity of characters in the drama which was so successfully performed in 1832 to an ignorant multitude. (Northern Star, 28 November 1840, p. 4)

Here the politics–theatre metaphor works in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, middle-class radicalism is likened to an outmoded drama whose new stage effects cannot disguise its worn-out plot. Secondly, the idea of politics as form of mystifying performance is used to suggest the duplicity of the ‘leading actors’. An enlightened audience, the Northern Star suggests, will not fall again for such flummery. In these examples, the politics–theatre metaphor underpins a form of ideology-critique. It establishes a critical distance because if politicians are understood as actors performing to a script, the sincerity of their declarations is called into question. Indeed, the existence of a critically engaged audience, which is no longer prepared to willingly suspend its disbelief, is both effect and guarantor of an independent working-class radical movement. Elsewhere the Northern Star often makes similar use of the idea of the curtain. In an editorial from 9 January 1841 the Star declares: ‘But we see behind the curtain; – we are acquainted with the whole machinery’ (p. 4). Here, in an anticipation of Brechtian theory, the ‘unillusioned’ audience exists in a privileged position to the events on ‘stage’: he or she cannot be fooled by political machinations due to her or his awareness of theatrical machinery. Or as the Northern Star puts it over a decade later, ‘[p]olitics are very much like a drama – those who are before the curtain gaze at a blank till it is lifted, but those behind it know that before that happens the hard work has been almost concluded’ (31 January 1852, p. 1).

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Between 1842 and 1850, the pejorative use of the politics–theatre metaphor as a way of suggesting the inherent untrustworthiness of professional p ­ oliticians appears less frequently in the pages of the Northern Star. In its place, the analogy provides a self-conscious cliché with which to dismiss the significance of events in Parliament. Thus, an editorial entitled ‘Progress and Prospects of the Session’ begins: ‘After a brief recess, the curtain has risen upon the third and concluding act of the annual Parliamentary melo-drama or farce – whichever may be the most suitable title for the performances in the “New Palace at Westminster”’ (Northern Star, 25 May 1848, p. 4). However, towards the very end of Chartism’s life, a more positive use of the politics–theatre metaphor appears in the pages of its press. In November 1852, in the Star of Freedom (the short-lived successor to the Northern Star), an editorial entitled ‘Concerning Democracy’ offers the following self-consciously historical reflection: We are now between the acts of the great drama. The curtain dropped on a scene of wasted energy and aimless talk. We cannot now create a great movement, but we can prepare one. (Star of Freedom, 20 November 1852, p. 10)

Here, in sharp contrast with earlier examples, the use of the dramatic metaphor valorises politics, investing it with a significance that can be appreciated only from a profoundly historicised perspective. By implication, the next act of the ‘great drama’ will not be witnessed by the current ‘audience’. The use of the term ‘great drama’ indicates the extent to which theatrical metaphors are used to conceptualise political activity, and it is this enabling function of theatre – theatre as a deep, generative structure of the political – which is the focus of the second half of this chapter. We can begin to grasp the structuring role of theatre by considering the direct correspondences between the drama and the political event. At a very basic level it is possible to identify four structural necessities which the theatre shares with the Chartist meeting: a space, a platform, performers and an audience. In addition, in the case of some forms of direct political action, we might also instance the practice of ‘dressing up’: the use of costume as disguise during the ‘Rebecca’ protests, for example. It strikes me that from the outset a consideration of these structural necessities reveals the simultaneous presence of those modes of direct correspondence, metaphorical appropriation and enabling functionality which constitute the relationship between the theatrical and the political. Insofar as the platform is a stage and is like a stage; the chosen orators are performers and are like

The platform and the stage

actors, and the crowd is an audience and is like an audience: it is clear that questions of correspondence and of metaphorical appropriation blend into one another. Moreover, the fact that it is so difficult to disentangle correspondence from metaphor gestures towards the enabling or generative role played by the theatre – that is, that we need the metaphorical in order to apprehend the actual. It is not that we perceive the political meeting and then recognise its similarities to the theatre, but, rather, it is precisely because we perceive its similarities to theatre that we are able to conceive of it as a political event. As noted earlier in this chapter, Robert Poole’s analysis provides a concrete historical example of the significance of the interconnections between the ‘political’ and the ‘aesthetic’ as theorised by Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004). Rancière observes that art and politics both ‘construct “fictions”, that is to say material arrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is said, between what is done and what can be done’.5 Beyond this, Rancière also argues for the existence of a ‘primary aesthetics’ which through a series of specific delimitations – space/time, visible/invisible, speech/noise – ‘simultaneously determines the place and stake of politics as a force of experience’.6 The structuring role of primary aesthetics in the creation of the political is both embodied and exemplified by theatrical performance. At a very fundamental level, the designation of a space, the instantiation of a platform which itself makes possible privileged utterance and even the adoption of costume (see, for example, Marcus Morris’s discussion of the headgear of Hardie and Hyndman in this volume: see pp. 264–8), enable activity which aims for transformation (of some kind). Without the possibility of transformative action it seems to me impossible to imagine any form of radical politics. Beyond these structural necessities, it is possible to point to the importance of the speaking voice, of the commanding presence, of the ability to address a crowd and to hold its attention – attributes which the successful political orator as well as the aspiring actor must possess. For example, here is the leading Chartist and long-time editor of the Northern Star, George Julian Harney, explaining to Engels those qualities necessary for the overall leadership of the Chartist movement: ‘A popular chief [explained Harney] should be possessed of a magnificent bodily appearance, an iron frame, eloquence, or at least a ready fluency of tongue ... O’Connor has them all – at least in degree’.7 In similar fashion, Thomas Wheeler (secretary to the Chartist Land Plan company) described O’Connor as being ‘of commanding stature ... rich in natural eloquence ... facile, ready-witted, varying from the deepest pathos to the loudest indignation’.8

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When the first historian of Chartism, Robert Gammage, offers pen portraits of the various Chartist leaders he invariably comments on their speaking styles and capacity to hold an audience’s attention. Consider the following descriptions of Henry Vincent, Feargus O’Connor and Ernest Jones respectively (Gammage was writing in the 1850s): [Vincent’s] person, however, was extremely graceful, and he appeared on the platform to considerable advantage. With a fine mellow flexible voice ... he had only to present himself in order to win all hearts over to his side ... His versatility which enabled him to change from the grave to the gay and vice versa, and to assume a dozen various characters in almost as many minutes, was one of the secrets of his success. ...   [Of O’Connor] Upwards of six feet in height, stout and athletic, and in spite of his opinions invested with a sort of aristocratic bearing, the sight of his person was calculated to inspire the masses with a solemn awe ... Out of doors O’Connor was the almost universal idol, for the thunder of his voice would reach the ears of the most careless, and put to silence the most noisy of his audience ... [he had] a voice that made the vault of Heaven echo with its sound, which out Stentor’d even Stentor himself. The effect was ­irresistible. ...   [Jones] possessed exactly the qualities for captivating the crowd, with the single exception that, unlike his patron O’Connor, he was small in stature; but his voice was stentorian, his delivery good, his language brilliant, his action heroic – and, above all, he had a concealed cunning, which had the advantage of bearing every appearance of the most extreme candour.9

In each of these cases it is noticeable that Gammage’s portrait suggests an affinity with the stage; Vincent is a character actor, and O’Connor and Jones are both leading men (Gammage uncannily almost anticipates later cinematic categories: O’Connor is nearly a matinee idol whilst Jones is almost an action hero!). More importantly, these portraits replicate that ambivalence towards the theatrical noted earlier – namely that the effective (and affective) oratorical performance may also be politically suspect. Indeed, in the case of Vincent, O’Connor and Jones there is a definite anxiety that the theatrically effective must be politically suspect, precisely because it appeals to the emotions rather than to the reason. Here, for example, is the conclusion of Gammage’s ­assessment of Vincent: His oratory, moreover, was not really so good as it appeared. As one listened to him from the platform he seemed to cap the climax; it was his attitude, his voice, his gesture, and his enthusiasm, rather than his language, which contained the summary of his power ... He could impress his hearers with the conviction that his speeches were from beginning to end masterpieces of eloquence; but the moment they appeared in black and white the sweet

The platform and the stage

illusion vanished, the charm was dissolved, the magic spell was broken, and he appeared but little more than an ordinary speaker.10

As Janette Martin has pointed out in her doctoral thesis, the parallels between the theatrical and the oratorical in the nineteenth century are strengthened by the existence of elocution manuals such as the best-selling Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (1860), whose diagrams illustrating the meanings of particular hand gestures drew heavily on Chironomia: or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery published in 1806.11 One question, which I am not well placed to answer, is the extent to which such manuals draw on existing theatrical practices and/or handbooks. Beyond this is the further question of whether at any moment in the nineteenth century, political movements began to study the theatre with a view to appropriating and/or adapting what we might call the rhetorical and affective technologies of the stage. Finally, in terms of direct correspondences, the Chartist political meeting itself can also be understood as a theatrical performance. From the torchlight meetings of the autumn of 1838 which, in Gammage’s words, ‘presented a scene of awful grandeur’, and the elaborately choreographed processions arranged to greet Chartist prisoners upon their release, through to the ‘monster meetings’, Chartist meetings frequently offered themselves as spectacle.12 Once again, the ambiguity attending the theatrical manifests itself. For on the one hand, these meetings embodied or even performed Chartism’s democratic claims, aspirations and credentials. Chartist meetings would regularly vote on resolutions, while their size was intended to make manifest the movement’s claim to represent ‘public opinion’. Similarly, the ceremony and orderliness with which processions and meetings were conducted were intended to demonstrate the working classes’ fitness to participate in the public sphere. However, as John Plotz among others has noted, the significance of the crowd, particularly its capacity to constitute itself as rational public discourse, was by no means widely accepted in the Chartist era.13 The difference between the ‘crowd’ and the ‘mob’ was very often one which existed in the eye of the beholder. Moreover, the spectacular dimension of Chartist meetings might also be seen as an attempt to aestheticise politics. There is certainly more than a hint of disquiet in Gammage’s assessment of those same torchlight meetings. They were, he declared, ‘of a still more terrific character. The very appearance of such a vast number of blazing torches only seemed more effectually to inflame the minds alike of speaker and hearers.’14 Shortly afterwards, when Gammage discusses the response to a government proclamation banning torchlight meetings, he aligns the emotional with the irrational, commenting:

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To say that the appearance of the proclamation was the cause of great excitement, were to convey a very inadequate idea of the state of popular feeling. That feeling had been worked up to such a feverish state, that a sort of delirium now seized the people.15

The torchlight meetings themselves were continuous with the political practices of late Georgian radicalism. Robert Poole has argued that, in the late Georgian period, ‘the whole cultural grammar of ritual and confrontation ... [was] in some sense theatrical’ insofar as it was designed to create the impression of an ‘insurgent populace which it would be safe to support and politically impossible to resist’.16 Before 1832, Poole suggests, history provided no models of incremental, peaceful political change, rather all such changes were dramatic – Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War and, most recently, the fall of the Bastille. In short, there exists an essential congruence between the theatrical and the political, which makes the interpretive codes governing each sphere interchangeable. At first sight, Gammage’s commentary appears to trace the fault-line between two very different forms of politics which may be described as the theatrical and the anti-theatrical. However, I want to suggest that the binary opposition of the theatrical to the anti-theatrical is too convenient, too neat. In his essay in this volume, Poole questions the received critical wisdom which sees Burke as ‘theatrical’ and Paine as ‘anti-theatrical’. He argues that this identification ignores the extent to which Burke is an anti-melodramatic writer (a stance which Burke shares with Coleridge and which arises from their understanding of melodrama as a form of popular political agency). I wish to propose an additional complicating factor, which is that the category of the theatrical subsumes two rather different forms of politics: the politics of spectacle and the politics of affect. Spectacle, as a number of historians have noted, played a key role in the politics of the ancien régime. Court, church and state all displayed their power in ceremonies and rituals which, for the most part, required a spectatorial (and thus largely passive) audience. In this mode, we might say that power impresses itself onto the consciousness of the people via a series of theatrical devices (costume, music, stylised action). We might also note in passing that spectacle operates in a quasi-Brechtian fashion since it does not encourage an empathetic response; rather, it insists on the non-identity of performers and audience. Little wonder that the early critical sociology of the bourgeoisie both sought to demystify these procedures and attempted to install ‘reason’ as the sole grounds for the legitimisation of power. That same critical sociology also

The platform and the stage

argued for the superiority of the politics of reason (which requires the active consent of this subject) over the politics of spectacle. From this perspective, the Chartist monster meeting can be understood as a form of radical spectacle. Like its aristocratic counterpart, it is designed as a symbolic manifestation of an actual, if latent, power, and is intended to give its participants a sense of their own power and to make spectators (particularly those from other classes) feel a sense of relative powerlessness. The crucial difference between these two modes of spectacle consists in the ability of the organising group to define the ‘meaning’ of the event. As noted earlier, beyond its own ranks, Chartism was generally unable to construe the monster meeting as a display of public order. More frequently, its opponents were able to characterise such events as signs of public disorder. Furthermore, radical spectacle remained politically vulnerable on two further fronts. Insofar as it mirrored aristocratic spectacle, it allowed the middle classes to consolidate their preferred self-identity as the virtuous, rational middle between two vicious and irrational extremes. In addition, although the radical spectacle strove to invert the relationship between the dominator and the dominated, nonetheless it remained committed (tactically, if not strategically) to a politics of domination. In addition, as Gammage’s unease about the effects of the torchlight meetings reminds us, some Chartists were concerned that an over-reliance on spectacle diminished (or even destroyed) Chartism’s claim to be a rational movement. Simultaneously, the types of rationality exemplified by classical political economy and utilitarianism were equally hostile and damaging to the cause of labour. Caught between the demands of spectacle and of reason, and the claims of physical and moral force, Chartism presents itself as the site of a failed synthesis: registering the contradictions of its historical movement without being able to resolve them. Both spectacle and melodrama are committed to an embodied or visceral form of politics, a politics of affect – politics as felt. In contrast, the emerging (and soon to be dominant) ‘liberal politics’ of the early Victorian period understands itself as primarily a rational contest, a struggle over meaning, and appears to champion a politics of rational persuasion: that is, as a somewhat cooler and more cerebral politics of the mind. To return again to Janette Martin’s work, she argues that somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century there is a discernible shift in the forms of political oratory symbolised by the increasing importance given to the presentation of ‘evidence’. She cites Thomas Ballantyne’s advice in the Corn-Law Repealer’s Handbook that speakers should trust to ‘the figures of arithmetic’ rather than the ‘figures of rhetoric’ as indicative

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of an almost Gradgrindian privileging of ‘fact’ as well as ‘a wider cultural shift away from the romanticism of the early nineteenth century’.17 The attractions of this ‘communications’ model of politics to a liberal bourgeoisie are readily apparent. The preference for ‘figures of arithmetic’ over those of ‘rhetoric’ is clearly intended to confine politics to an accommodation with the ‘is’ of an actual social formation rather than the ‘ought’ of a transformed social order. Furthermore, the communications model allows for social conflict to be recast as misunderstanding. This enables the liberal bourgeoisie to represent class conflict as an unnecessary, accidental and temporary feature of capitalism and thus preserve its own (illusory) claims to be a universal class capable of ruling for the benefit of all. Incidentally, the persistence of the communications model was thrown into sharp relief in the final years of the British ‘New Labour’ government when, on encountering public opposition, ministers would repeat the mantra ‘We’re not getting our message across.’ Clearly, for these ministers, opposition could only be a result of public misunderstanding of a given policy. It was inconceivable that the policy itself could be the object of rational opposition. Regardless of its veracity, the communications model of politics was the dominant model for early Victorian politics. From moral force Chartism and Owenism on the ‘left’, through the Whig-Liberal ‘centre’ to the Conservative ‘right’, politics was increasingly understood as a rational contest, a battle of ideas. Arguably, only the ultra-radicals and the ultra-Tories remained outside this ideological consensus. Thus ‘meaning’ plays a central role in political struggle. The centrality of meaning also allows us to grasp another dimension of the generative role played by theatre in the political sphere. As numerous theorists have argued, narrative provides one of the essential conditions of meaning. However, what is often overlooked in discussions of the ubiquity of narrative is the extent to which its hermeneutic properties frequently depend on the simultaneous presence of genre. To state the matter baldly, while narrative provides sequence which makes interpretation possible, it is genre which provides the frame within which interpretation occurs. It is precisely this conjunction of narrative and genre which makes the theatrical a privileged site for early nineteenth-century politics. In short, theatre makes both narrative and genre visible; it makes them manifest to an audience. In this respect, theatre provides the two interpretative codes within which action becomes meaningful. In making this claim, I am not arguing that this is an exclusive property

The platform and the stage

(or function) of the theatre. Rather the theatre has this potential because it belongs to what Rancière calls the sphere of ‘primary aesthetics’. If Rancière is correct, then in addition to tracking topicality and comments on contemporary events in the theatre, we also need to examine the ways in which the theatrical provides the ‘cultural grammar of ritual and confrontation’ (to use Robert Poole’s resonant formulation) for late Georgian radicalism through Chartism and perhaps beyond? In conclusion, then, the continual if variable interchange between theatre and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century demonstrates that Boyd Hilton’s contention that ‘theatre was political ... politics was theatrical’ can be extended beyond the late Georgian period.18 Various strands within radicalism and Chartism defined themselves (at least in part) in relation to the theatrical. It is possible to identify a tension in early nineteenth-century radicalism between ‘theatrical’ and ‘anti-theatrical’ conceptions of political activity, and, generally speaking, this ambivalence corresponds with the distinction between the rhetorical modes of ‘pathos’ and ‘logos’. Furthermore, this distinction has clear implications for both the scope and the form of politics insofar as the ‘theatrical’ pursued a politics of affect and viscerality while the ‘anti-theatrical’ sought a politics of the mind. There is some evidence which suggests an increasing tendency on the part of middle-class radicalism to incline to the latter rather than the former from around the mid-century. If so, this might provide an additional complicating factor in the construction of alliances between working-class and middle-class radicals in the post-Chartist period. If we look towards the end of the nineteenth century, the increasing tendency for sections of advanced liberalism to be seen as puritanical killjoys in contrast to the Tories’ willingness to embrace a beer and music hall populism might also be seen as a variation within the theatrical/anti-theatrical debate. Finally, theatre’s capacity to refer to and comment on topical events (which are questions of content), while important, should not distract us from a consideration of the formal or structural relations between the theatrical and the political. In particular, the direct correspondences between Chartism and the stage – space, platform, performers, audience and the voice – are indicative of the importance of the theatrical as a ‘structure of feeling’ or form of ‘primary aesthetics’ which makes politics possible in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Notes 1 Tom Paine, The Rights of Man, vol. 2 of Thomas Paine: Life and Works, ed. M. D. Conway (London: Routledge, Thoemmes, 1996), pp. 286–7. 2 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 6. 3 Quoted in R. and E. Frow, Citizen Guillotine (Salford: R. and E. Frow, 1996), p. 11. 4 Paul Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 186–7. 5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 39. 6 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 13. 7 Paul Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: A Political Life (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2008), p. 149. 8 Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 149–50. 9 R. C. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement 1837–1854 (London: Merlin Press, 1969), pp. 11 (Vincent), 45 (O’Connor), 282 (Jones). 10 Gammage, History, p. 12. 11 Janette Martin, ‘Popular Political Oratory and Itinerant Lecturing in Yorkshire and the North East in the Age of Chartism, c 1837–1860’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of York, 2010). See also Janette Martin, ‘Oratory, Itinerant Lecturing and Victorian Popular Politics: A Case Study of James Acland (1799–1876)’, Historical Research, 86:231 (2012), pp. 30–52. 12 Gammage, History, p. 95. 13 John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 14 Gammage, History, p. 95. 15 Gammage, History, p. 98. 16 Robert Poole, ‘Melodrama and Politics in Late Georgian England’, research paper presented at the North-West Long Nineteenth Century Seminar, Manchester, November 2009. I am grateful to Robert Poole for sending me a copy of this paper. 17 Martin, ‘Popular Political Oratory’, p. 187. 18 B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 31.

3 Bubbles of the day: the melodramatic and  the pantomimic Katherine Newey

A

s the two previous chapters have argued, melodrama was a vital frame of reference, or in Raymond Williams’s term, a ‘structure of feeling’, for nineteenth-century oppositional and radical politics. Poole and Sanders chart the fluidity of form and action between public politics, performance and the aesthetics and practices of the early nineteenth-century stage. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which pantomime, the other dominant popular theatrical genre of the period, offers a politics and poetics of affect. How did this form of popular performance use fantasy and excess to link political protest and topical commentary with strong feeling? I am interested in the ways in which the generic characteristics of pantomime in the first half of the nineteenth century facilitate topical commentary. As the stage operated as a conduit for communicating and publicising popular opinion, it served as an important touchstone in topical commentary and, more generally, the discursive construction of national political debates. The theatre was an important remediating space, replaying and re-forming the materials of political action and debate,1 and, in the course of this mediation, manufacturing and influencing popular opinion and feeling (to return to Blanchard Jerrold’s observations cited in the Introduction). Melodramatic historiography But first, the melodramatic, and the recent historiography of melodrama. In the last three decades, accounts of the British theatre of the nineteenth century have explored the topical political and ideological content of popular performance, and melodrama in particular. Scholars argue that the British stage was a significant venue for the expression of political ideas, contrary to the opinion

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of contemporary dramatists and critics such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote that ‘the English, instead of finding politics on the stage, find their stage in politics’.2 It is interesting to note that the recent revival of the serious study of melodrama as a cultural as well as theatrical phenomenon is connected with the recognition of its ideological significance and potential for political communication. As early as 1948, Wylie Sypher argued that the melodramatic mode was central to nineteenth-century art and thought and the ‘archetypal pattern of nineteenth century response’. He characterised the melodramatic mode as ‘the revolutionary choice between extremes’, an unequivocal choice between opposing absolutes.3 Sypher finds this pattern operating largely beyond the stage, offering the examples of Marx’s division of the world and history into antagonistic forces of capital and labour, or Darwin’s and Malthus’s theories of the survival of the fittest. In stage melodrama this truncated dialectic is dramatised simply, directly and effectively. Characters are good or bad – a virtuous black-eyed Susan or an evil Lady Audley. Action is uncompromising, final and devastating, its resolution inevitable. In a now familiar historiography, Peter Brooks’s study of the melodramatic mode, The Melodramatic Imagination, took up this category of the melodramatic in explicitly psychoanalytic terms, again moving from stage scripts to fictional narrative and the cultural scripts of nineteenth-century identity, as constructed by the melodramatic mode.4 What is often overlooked in this genealogy is the ‘rediscovery’ of melodrama in the post-1968 moment in Britain. The work of practitioners and historians such as Clive Barker, Robin Estill and Simon Trussler connected early nineteenth-century working-class melodrama with radical theatre of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.5 Theatre scholars in newly established university drama departments (such as those at the Universities of Manchester and Kent) took up melodrama and the melodramatic as a demonstration of the potential of the new academic discipline of theatre studies to offer historical insight into the theatres of the New Left of the period.6 They were rescuing a previously overlooked or despised popular form, and showing it to be an authentic voice of the oppressed masses of the nineteenth century. What is notable about these studies of melodrama and the melodramatic is a demonstration of that historiographical truism that we resort to history to find ourselves. The explicit radicalism and expression of non-elite culture which scholars such as Barker, Louis James and David Mayer and others found in the texts and contexts of melodrama can be seen in part as a reflection of the scholarly desires of the time, as a way of connecting the past to the present, and particularly the oppositional politics of late twentieth-century radical liberal scholarship.

The melodramatic and the pantomimic

To observe this historiography, and its connection with scholarly desires, is not to dismiss the political content or significance of melodrama, nor to dismiss the recuperative work of those scholars and their insights into the cultural work of melodrama. Most of the contributors to this book owe an intellectual debt to the pioneers of the study of popular culture in the nineteenth century. Rather, it is to trace the ways in which a theatrical genre has been woven into political and ideological thinking in ways which are illuminating and challenging. It is also to trace the framework for this book, as we wrestle with the different set of contemporary ideological debates of global late capitalism. However, one of the consequences of the ways in which nineteenth-century melodrama was taken up as a radically inclined form of popular culture by radically inclined scholars was that it has left us with a tendency to want to see melodrama as implicitly subversive and transgressive in its political views and the methods by which it expressed those views. This is not to say that there is not evidence of melodrama being used as a vehicle for political protest: there are prominent examples of melodrama doing exactly this, by playwrights who were explicit about their political sympathies. We need look no further than the work of Douglas Jerrold or William Thomas Moncrieff, both prolific playwrights and proponents of melodrama as both a valuable genre for rational recreation and a platform for commenting on and protesting about the position of the working man or woman. Yet melodrama was not always or necessarily radically inclined in intention or effect, and even those melodramas (such as Jerrold’s series of nautical and domestic dramas in the 1820s and early 1830s) where there is an element of protest rarely offer the kind of proletarian revolution that Marx and Engels fantasised in The Communist Manifesto. Part of the problem of discerning political transgression and subversion in nineteenth-century melodrama is that any critical commentary needed to be carefully made. Political expression in melodrama was not always direct, and its topicality was often cloaked in generic conventions. It needed to be, as censorship by the Examiner of Plays operated in what appeared to be arbitrary ways, more often than not motivated by the avoidance of direct political comment. George Colman the Younger, then Examiner of Plays, confirmed this in his evidence to the 1832 Select Committee, remarking that he censored ‘anything that may be so allusive to the times as to be applied to the existing moment, and which is likely to be inflammatory.’7 Colman’s exchange with Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, in the chair on that day, is entertaining and informative, in Duncombe’s dogged pursuit of Colman over his fees as Examiner of Plays and the revelation of Colman’s hypocrisy in censoring scripts which contained

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milder blasphemies and political satires than those he himself had composed as a playwright a decade earlier. Colman’s answers are easily read as insouciant or dismissive; there is an air of the older mode of paternalism in Colman’s account of his exercise of power. In their exchange about Colman’s attitude to licensing plays which he judges to be ‘politically wrong’, Duncombe asks: In the exercise of your censorship at the present moment, if the word reform should occur, you would strike it out? – No; I should say, ‘I think you had better omit it; I advise you to do so for your own sakes, or you will have a hubbub.’8

Implicit in Colman’s advice is an understanding of the long history of ‘hubbub’ in London theatres, most famously the Old Price riots of 1809. Jane Moody argues that Colman’s own play Blue-Beard (revived at Covent Garden in 1811) represented ‘the theatrical climax of that contempt and patrician arrogance’ of Covent Garden management which had so enraged the Old Price rioters in the 1809–10 season.9 Given this mix of advice, masking Colman’s censorship and the knowledge of likely managerial loss from ‘hubbub’ (the Old Price riots led to severe losses in John Philip Kemble’s management of Covent Garden), managers and playwrights were indeed faced with difficulties in presenting topical politics on the stage. In melodrama, certain dramaturgical conventions became embedded in the development of national British melodrama forms, such as the nautical drama and the domestic drama, the two sub-genres which emerged from the naturalisation of French romantic melodrama on the British stage. British melodramatic forms placed ordinary working men and women as heroic and feeling individuals at the centre of the spectacle. In post-Napoleonic Britain, this was a radical move: it broke conventions of the ‘legitimate’ drama of elite culture. Melodrama argued for a moral and aesthetic understanding of the world through the emotion. What is important to note here is an emphasis on theatricality and theatrical representation in a period when performance and theatricality – what we might now call performativity – were contentious and treacherous fractured ground. Melodramatic dramaturgical structures tended towards the unequivocal moral choice between opposing absolutes. Action was represented as uncompromising, and the resolution of the melodramatic plot appeared inevitable and closed. The ending is important here: the fatalistic pattern of response could end in triumph or defeat, but the melodramatic ending was constructed so as to admit of little doubt or ambivalence about the moral and emotional resolution of the plot, whatever plot complications or moral or ideological ambiguities may have been raised in the play. But what

The melodramatic and the pantomimic

if meaning could not be contained within that structure? And what if we want to interrogate this structure for what it represses, or for what it does with the excess of feeling it generates? If audiences in the nineteenth century were concerned about the growing complexities of modernity, then melodrama and pantomime offer us some very interesting indicators of how they felt about themselves: popular performance in this period tells us about the politics of emotion. Scholarship has explored for the last three decades how affect in melodramatic performance is structured through a series of moral binaries, apparently final and closed. However, it is possible to find in these binaries oppositional readings within apparently fixed positions: interpretations which are occluded but ultimately readable. This is in detail the kind of ‘uneven development’ that Mary Poovey traces at large in Victorian culture and society, particularly with regard to domestic sexual relationships between men and women. As Poovey writes, ‘the middle-class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period was both contested and always under construction; because it was always in the making, it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of oppositional formulations’.10 In theatrical performance, the fissures and ambiguities which Poovey finds in Victorian middle-class ideology were put on display, played with and played out, in ways which constantly challenge conventions of domesticity, gender roles and respectability. Pantomimic politics We have developed these ways of understanding melodrama as a form of politicised popular performance, even if we are starting to dismantle assumptions about it as always or wholly a radical or oppositional form. Yet we have not yet managed this for pantomime, as Jim Davis points out. Davis’s critique is significant, as he offers a convincing case for pantomime in the nineteenth century as ‘an all pervasive form of popular entertainment, but also functioned as a way of seeing’.11 If part of the emotional, and thus political, power of popular performance in the period was due to its focus on excess, conveyed through the performing body, then pantomime offered opportunities for seeing, feeling and understanding which were significant for the kinds of cultural work they made possible. Pantomime’s ‘way of seeing’ was, like melodrama, through excess. As successive attempts at regulation of performance in the nineteenth century demonstrate, the body and the voice on stage eluded attempts at pinning them down within a regulatory framework. Performance in the period was endlessly

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innovative and resourceful, and it was this energy which defied both regulation and critical attempts to talk down the impact and power of the theatre across the century. Pantomime, in its queer humour, violence and absurdities, offered excess in performance and in the imaginative worlds it conjured on stage and in audience recollections. Suggestions about how this reads in relation to the political in the first half of the nineteenth century form the focus of the rest of this essay. A year after the Great Reform Bill of 1832, ‘Theatrical Examiner’ in Leigh Hunt’s radical weekly paper, the Examiner, contributed a lengthy article which wilfully tangled up pantomime and politics. It is worth quoting at length as an example of the kind of comic seriousness of a certain kind of dashing metropolitan journalism of the 1830s: Pantomime, whose end is to hold up the mirror to Politics; to show Improvement in her own changes, Toryism its own image, and the very age and body of Aristocracy its form and pressure. To us, much thinking of these matters, it has always seemed that Pantomime was the personification of Politics. Harlequin is the innovator working miracles with a sword of wood, purporting that the age of iron has passed away, and the slight instrument by which great effects are produced, whose tough material, and somewhat dull edge, are nevertheless type of the common understanding. Harlequin is never quiet, never in repose, always flitting about, perpetually in pursuit, he represents the Movement Party – virtue nescia stare in loco. The cap on his head is the cap of liberty of the sober, peaceful colour. His mask adumbrates the necessity for the Ballot. Columbine represents the Happiness to which Improvement is devoted. The Clown follows them – the personification of Toryism – a glutton and a thief – with a hand to seize and a pouch to hold; always in mischief and in roguery – the sworn fool of the innovator, ever persecuting or plundering, but with a blessed aptitude for running his head against the wall, and catching stray buffets and slaps on faces. And who is his confederate, that lean, hobbling old fellow … pottering about in an incapacity for any thing but to fall to and enjoy other men’s meat? That is Aristocracy – the very age and body of Aristocracy, the genius of the Peerage. … He is not so forward and practical as the Clown; he does not make such bold inroads, or plunge into men’s pockets as if it was his nature to live in them – as if his element were felony; but he is always ready to toddle off with the booty the other has fingered, and to go snacks in it. Now and then Clown and Pantaloon have their tiffs, as we have seen Toryism and Aristocracy sparring in the Wellington rule, but after a round or two of buffets they espy Harlequin at his changes, and forget their quarrel in the eagerness of their animosity towards the common enemy. … The Clown too follows and imitates the exploits of the innovator, and boasts that he can do the same, but with that juste milieu, that happy medium between attempt and ­performance

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which is called bungling in every thing but politics, in which takes the name of moderation.   Considering Pantomimes, as we do, as pictures to the page of History … it is with great concern that we see any deviation from the proprieties illustrative of the course of things and the disturbing devices. … We care not what liberties dramatists take with history, but there is some truth in fairy tales which should not be violated, and least of all when they are converted to Pantomimes, setting before our minds, as they do, in apt resemblances, the doings and undoings, the morals and properties of the great parties in the strife of state. (Examiner, 13 January 1833, pp. 22–3)

Leigh Hunt was a great enthusiast for pantomime, from Grimaldi’s heyday in the 1810s to the stormy period of the early 1830s. Jane Moody argues that Hunt’s analysis of the wordless dramaturgy of pantomime in 1817 articulated for his reading audience the genre’s potential radicalism by identifying its creative licence and satirical freedom.12 One year after the 1832 Reform Bill, pantomime is still represented in the Examiner as radical. Its political potential is read doubly: the characters and events of the pantomime Harlequinade are clearly aligned with specific party-political personages and events surrounding Reform, such as the besting of Wellington’s iron rule over the parliamentary Tories over the Reform Bill. These are specific references, but the pantomime Harlequinade also offers playful representations of broader social and moral currents of the time – the ‘morals and properties of the great parties in the strife of state’ – innovation, progress and resistance to those changes. The other way in which the Examiner journalist reads pantomime is as allegory. The Harlequinade characters represent not only the enduring traits of British political life, both within and without the Houses of Parliament, but also character types, deeply entrenched in Britain’s social memory and imagination. The further metatheatrical meaning of the Examiner’s 1833 discourse is evident: the characterisation of the Clown as a political animal who is ‘a glutton and a thief – with a hand to seize and a pouch to hold; always in mischief and in roguery’ and as the character who ‘follows and imitates the exploits of the innovator’ comes at a point where the focus of the Harlequinade has shifted from the exploits, magic and agility of the Harlequin and Columbine to the grotesquerie and corporeal appetites and tricks of the Clown. The political pantomime imagined in the Examiner article was also a preface to the standard round-up of the pantomimes appearing in London from Boxing Night. It was expected that pantomime made hits at the topics of the day. In spite of the blue pencils and admonitory letters of the Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays, nineteenth-century pantomimes satisfied audiences’

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desires to see parody and satire of notable events and personages of the past year. As the Theatrical Journal comments in 1851, reflecting on a disappointing season of pantomimes, ‘Prior to Christmas there was a general opinion that the immense number of incidents of the year 1850 would create extra food for pantomimes, and add materially to their attractions. Instead of which, the average has been lower than usual, flatness being prevalent in lieu of exuberance of wit’ (‘Decline of Pantomime’, February 1851, p. 57). Pantomime, unlike melodrama in its early phase in the 1820s and 1830s, attracted comparatively little criticism for its supposed moral failings; it was a familiar form, and was seen increasingly as a standard part of the urban ritual calendar, particularly as it became a Boxing Day standard, rather than a genre of performance which could happen throughout the year. Until 1850 at least, when the then Examiner of Plays, William Bodham Donne, required a written version of the Harlequinade comic scenes to be forwarded together with the pantomime opening script, pantomime seemed to be able to slip away from the gaze of censorious officials. The greatest liberties were taken in the performance of excess and incontinence, linguistically, sexually and in bodily propriety; it does not take a post-1968 audience to wring the filthy humour out from a Clown’s red-hot poker, or Grimaldi’s performance as the apple seller in ‘Hot Codlins’, first performed in Mother Goose (1806). There is no question that pantomime offered a running commentary on topical events and ideas in British (and sometimes international) political and social life. Jill Sullivan focuses on the plethora of topical allusion, local, national and international, in her study of regional pantomimes of the second half of the nineteenth century.13 Regency pantomime has also been discussed as a vehicle for local and topical satire: David Mayer comments that ‘much of the material that arrangers and pantomimists used reflected basic economic questions of the period,’14 while Jane Moody argues that the ‘illegitimate’ theatre was part of a larger battle over control of metropolitan culture, and that the the battle between legitimate and illegitimate theatres defined the terms of the cultural debate in London before 1843.15 However, what have not been considered in broad terms are the mechanisms and frameworks by which topical allusion and political parody and satire were transformed into the generically recognisable form of pantomime. On the one hand, the mechanisms for commentary are simple and straightforward. There is almost universal use of what Jill Sullivan calls ‘social referencing’16 in pantomime throughout the century: the use of direct mention of local and topical matters in both the opening and the comic scenes. On the other hand, however, the structure, plot and staging

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of ­pantomimes all tap into much deeper patterns and ideologies of national life, and often in ways which contradict the sharp parody and satire of the opening. Over the century, for example, while there is mockery of authority and legislation, the alignment of pantomime with British imperialist policy is almost absolute, to the extent that by the late nineteenth century, music hall and pantomime might be seen as the prime training ground for jingoism. This pattern, writ large, recurs throughout the century: specific parody and critique, which is folded into and resolved through the generic structure and characteristics of pantomime. There is also plenty of evidence that the tropes of pantomime are used to describe contemporary politics, such as this squib of 1840 in the Satirist, commenting on parliamentary political instability of this period: We are inexpressibly happy in being able to lay before our readers an exact copy of the play bill issued on this great occasion, together with full particulars of several of the most remarkable changes, tricks, and transformations contained in this extraordinary Political Pantomime, which excited the most lively interest, and would have created a broad grin even on the iron cheeks of the white-whiskered Sovereign of Hanover, had his Infernal Majesty been fortunate enough to be present. (Play Bill) Grand National Theatre, Buckingham Palace. This evening will be performed, A New Grand Christmas Political Pantomime, entitled Harlequin and Miss Goose; or, Columbine Cabinet Maker. The Machinery by Messrs. Melbourne, Cottenham, and Normanby. The Foreign Views by Mr. Palmerston. The Colonial Sketches by Mr. John Russell.17

The central question, then, is a theoretical and methodological one, as well as one about the material practices of the theatre. What was the relationship between topicality and fun, between the rituals of pantomime and its pointed political satire? Nelson Lee told it straight: in Harlequin Fairy Land, or The Princess Zela and the Three Wishes (first performed at the Marylebone Theatre, 1849–50), the play opens in ‘Fairy Land by Moonlight ... in the distance a miniature Railway with bridge’. Snowdrop and Fortuna are in dialogue: fortuna: I sped to London first – and there I saw snowdrop: What? fortuna: The glorious working of the new Poor Law

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Poverty’s a crime – and tho’ you’ve done no sin The Workhouse! full – you can’t be taken in Met sailors weeping and with right good cause England’s bulwark’s gone – her Navigation Laws No men in power I’m sure seen such a rig snowdrop: The Tories beat them – if not – mark my wig fortuna: I don’t know that, but this I know – full well Who could more mischief do, I cannot tell So on I went and led a pretty dance Through Holland, Italy, Austria & France I saw strange sights in every state & nation Runaway Kings – Republic annexation Until at last in Germany I came To Katchkill Tower, and Princess ofthatname And there beheld his beauteous daughter fair The Princess Zela – child of the golden hair Who just of age – without thought or reflection The Prince her father swears shall make selection And choose a husband from the suitors who Strive all to gain a maid so fair to view Not knowing what to do, with puzzled brain I thought it best to order out my train And bring her hither that you might decide What we shall do with this unwilling bride.18

Lee was a prolific pantomime writer, and managed to include pointed political commentary in most, if not all, of his scripts. He was engaged in his version of class war, opening his pantomimes with images of violence, poverty and dispossession reported to the Fairy Queen, at the centre of fairyland, that place of light, luxury and fantasy. But Lee was nothing if not a traditional pantomimist: after these pointed topical opening scenes, his pantomimes proceeded according to the structure of Victorian pantomime, with trouble in the earthly kingdom, fairy involvement to save a princess from a grotesque marriage, a dark moment and then a song and a dance. His shows conclude according to the practices of London’s East End pantomime, with a Harlequinade – a choreographed chase through the familiar urban landscape of the streets outside the theatre. So my question here is how one might read these very direct topical openings against the rest of the play of pantomime in fantasy and excess. My answer– contingent for the moment – is that it is precisely in those elements of pantomime which appear to be the least topical – pantomime’s call on myth and ritual – that we can find the most fundamental political expression in popular

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form. To explore topical and political commentary in Victorian pantomime through the models of myth, ritual and allegory may appear to force together two very unmatched elements, at the levels of both practice and concept. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of deeply felt myth and entertaining excess proved captivating throughout the century. Pantomime was licensed mayhem, but of course, there is more to it than that. The mayhem was controlled – by the social space of the theatre, by the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays, by the manager and the ushers, even the performers on stage, and by the self-surveillance of the audience. Part of the enduring attraction of pantomime in the nineteenth century was precisely this mix of frivolity and topicality, with a call on the audience’s cultural and social memories through fairy tale represented through ritualised performance conventions. John Ruskin, that radical Tory and fierce analyst and critic of Victorian values, was very keen on both pantomime and fairy lore. As he wrote in his introduction to an English translation of the Brothers Grimm’s German Märchen on the existence and endurance of fairy tales in culture: For every fairy tale worth recording at all is the remnant of a tradition posses­­ sing true historical value;-historical, at least, in so far as it has naturally arisen out of the mind of a people under special circumstances, and risen not without meaning, nor removed altogether from their sphere of religious faith.19

Ruskin here is taking up a trend in Victorian folklorist studies, and connecting them to the studies of myth which were also emerging at this time; indeed, he was ahead of the professional scholarship of his period, as Sharon Weltman points out in her study of Ruskin’s mythic queen.20 Part of what Ruskin enjoyed in the Victorian pantomime was its revelling in fairy tale. The ritualistic and mythic presence of the supernatural dominates Victorian pantomime, through the presence of fairies and sylphs and their opposites: imps and demons. The creation of this ethereal world in practical terms on stage was made possible by increasingly complex industrial machinery and working practices in the theatre. Transformation scenes, fairy grottoes, fairy bowers and the imaginary worlds of fairyland and the impish or demonic underworld – all features of popular entertainments throughout the Victorian period – relied on modern technology, industrial machinery and sheer physical labour for their creation. The labour of the dancer on stage and visible, in making the representation of fairyland seem effortless, and the labour of the manual worker, back-stage and unseen, are the contrasting poles of the Victorian theatre as a driving force of popular modernity.21 ‘Transformation’ in pantomime is a complex term, indicating both the spectacular, visual,

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physical transformation of one scene to another, one location to another, and transformation from the quotidian to the ethereal world. But it is also, as David Mayer reminds us, the visible transformation of the characters of the opening into the magical and clowning characters of the Harlequinade.22 In the tradition of pantomime established by John Rich, and continuing to the last third of the nineteenth century, the transformation is a generic and moral transformation – from the dangers of the contemporary world as it was represented on the pantomime stage to the violence of the knockabout Harlequinade. But it is violence which will take us to a happy ending; the chase, as comically violent as it is, takes us breathlessly to the happy ending. As Mayer describes the pre-1870 pantomime: The benevolent agent [the Good Fairy] reproaches the parent for his unsympathetic attitude towards love, then waves her magic wand and pronounces or sings a formula which predictably transforms each of the characters of the opening.23

Here is the ritual patterning of the pantomime plot in terms of a ‘festive comedy’ – the comedy of regeneration and rebirth – offering the satisfaction of both certainty and familiarity, tempered by the surprise of each year’s novelty in performance and spectacle. This is a powerful, seductive mix which seemed to go straight to Victorian spectators’ pleasure centres in a way which no other performance genre achieved in the period. The structural bones of pantomime offer even more connections to a reading of it as cultural ritual remade for the new industrial world. Victorian pantomime generally starts with a war in the spirit world; we could call it heaven. Here is an example, in John Maddison Morton’s version of the Valentine and Orson story for his 1843 Drury Lane pantomime, Harlequin King Pepin; or, Valentine and Orson. The pantomime opens with a scene of idleness: The abode of Idleness – a wild uncultivated country – a hut with the roof broken &c – a Garden over run with weeds – palings broken down – the whole to represent the effects of Idleness – a neglected Beehive on side opposite the hut – idleness: Oh [yawns] Bless my old Bones – how time does fly – These after dinner naps are quite gone by Since this new scheme of general education Has turned the heads of all the nation – Now not a moment must be lost forsooth All work – no play – a pretty joke in truth – Industry is now the order of the day And Idleness is voted quite passé –

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Now boys and girls as soon as they can talk Are taught to read – to run before they walk And every town and village have their schools To make men wise that else had grown up fools – The very animals now catch the infection And singing mice are heard in each direction Dogs bark in chorus – pussies mew in glees And live in harmony with their Industrious fleas. Horses turn tail and join the drawing classes And leave the Cabs and Busses to the Asses Bullocks toss up their heads sheep seize the pen And write down Smithfield and the Butcher’s men – Absurd! It really puts me in a passion To see that Intellect’s so much the fashion This little spot alone throughout the land Is left to me, and here I take my stand My school of Idleness I’ll start in opposition! All play! No work! My system of tuition! 24

Idleness sets up a board announcing a school of idleness which attracts a group of schoolboys, who throw aside their books and start playing games. The Schoolmaster appears, and to the accompaniment of music, the Queen Bee emerges from the beehive. After Idleness has tried to chase her off, the hive on stage opens, and discovers Industry (a little Fairy) in an illuminated Cell. She comes out – waves her wand and the whole Scene changes – the uncultivated waste becomes covered with ripe corn – the trees become green and full of fruit – the brushwood hedges filled with flowers – the old hut changes to a neat brick building – on it written ‘School of Industry’.25

Neatly dressed charity boys and girls walk out, and children also play at carpenters and masons, and at reaping and sheaving the corn. Industry challenges Idleness, and Idleness instead suggests a challenge, for each to raise a child, and see which proves the better man. The pantomime then goes into a series of scenes – mostly in mime – retelling the familiar story of Valentine and Orson. This is an example of the pantomime ‘opening’: the space where popular folk and fairy tales were retold, and the satire of contemporary events is slid in. The archetypal conflict between the virtues of industry and the sin of idleness (or sloth in the older typology of the Seven Deadly Sins) is transformed into a contemporary setting; yet that setting, implicitly modern and industrial, is framed by the countryside and the older cyclical life of farming and cultivation. The rest of the opening of Harlequin King Pepin is structured as a quest

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narrative: mortals, used as pawns by the immortals in their arguments – fairies, imps, the Demon King – are sent to find something, retrieve something, vanquish something. That thing is usually a charmed or magic object. The quest involves encounters with immortals, and displays of wit and courage in these encounters. Strikingly, there is the ‘dark scene’, a scene of descent into the underworld of the Demon King, and the heroic party faces possible death. Scenically, the stage is transformed into an enclosed space, where all hope seems to be lost. This is a particularly crucial moment in pantomime, as it is the dark underlining of all the silliness and sparkle of fairyland. It is also an echo or a gesture towards what is arguably the most powerful of James Frazer’s categories of myth in The Golden Bough: the myth of the dying god, the revelation of and our witness to the mortal immortal.26 The entrance of the pantomime characters into the cave (the usual locus for the dark scene) is a powerful echo of the descent to hell of Orpheus and Jesus. In pantomime, we are secure in the knowledge of eventual rescue and a happy ending, but in the physical and metaphorical representations of the dark scene, we can find that edgy playing with mortality that is such a feature of many childhood games, for example, and which also homes in directly on the widespread human instinct to be scared of the dark. The dark scene is the most extreme example of the doubleness of pantomime. This doubleness is then continued into the Harlequinade, and particularly the use of masks and disguises. They have the effect of the ‘not real’ but ‘not-not real’, which highlight the innate metatheatricality of pantomime: its constant self-reference, and its fundamental acknowledgement, all the time, of its own theatricality, its own playfulness. So what is the connection between politics, ideology and the ritualised performances of mythical structures, remediated into an ephemeral and knockabout comic form? If we return to earlier questions about the cultural work of excess and licence, it can be argued that pantomime offers a licensed space in which to explore, perform and represent in embodied form a performance of counter-hegemonic values and behaviours, in the face of what became stereotyped as ‘Victorianism’. Pantomime’s counter-hegemonic values are of fun, of petty criminality, of violence without consequences, of lack of any kind of seriousness. And as the nineteenth century became more Victorian, so the parody, the intrusion of the demotic, became more insistent. Pantomime became a significant space for a kind of rough, populist democracy. And it did this by taking its audiences back: back to childhood, back to an imagined Golden Age, and back to a magical world of foundational myths and rituals.

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Notes 1 I am drawing on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s definition of remediation as the process ‘by which new media fashion prior media forms’: Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 273. 2 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, vol. 8 of The Knebworth Edition of Collected Works (London: Routledge, 1874; 1833), p. 65. 3 Wylie Sypher, ‘Aesthetic of Revolution: The Marxist Melodrama’, Kenyon Review, 10 (1948), p. 431. 4 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 5 See the special number of New Theatre Quarterly, 1:4 (October–December 1971), on melodrama and working-class politics, with essays by Clive Barker, ‘The Chartists, Theatre, Reform and Research’, Robin Estill, ‘The Factory Lad: Melodrama as Propaganda’ and Simon Trussler, ‘A Chronology of Early Melodrama’, pp. 3–10, 22–6 and 19–21 respectively. 6 See esp. David Mayer and Kenneth Richards (eds), Western Popular Theatre (London: Methuen, 1977), and David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (eds), Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 7 House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1831–32), p. 66. 8 Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, p. 66. 9 Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 70. 10 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Virago Press, 1989), p. 3. 11 Jim Davis, ‘Introduction’, in Jim Davis (ed.), Victorian Pantomime (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2. 12 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 227–8. 13 Jill A. Sullivan, The Politics of the Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). 14 David Mayer, Harlequin in his Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 191. 15 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 244. 16 Sullivan, The Politics of the Pantomime, p. 16. 17 ‘Grand State Pantomime’, The Satirist; or, The Censor of the Times, 27 December 1840. 18 R. Nelson Lee, Harlequin Fairy Land, or the Princess Zela and the Three Wishes, British Library, London, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MSS 43023, fols 762–6. 19 John Ruskin, ‘Fairy Stories’, in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), The Complete Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1903–12; 1869), vol. 19, p.  236.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 20 Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998). 21 See Katherine Newey, ‘Pantomime and Modernity: The Fairy and the Navvy’, in Kara Reilly (ed.), Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 97–116. 22 David Mayer, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomime’, Theatre Quarterly, 4:13 (March–April 1974), p. 57. 23 Mayer, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomime’, p. 57. 24 John Maddison Morton, Harlequin King Pepin; or, Valentine and Orson, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collectionof Plays, Add. MSS 42971, fols 238–40. 25 Morton, Harlequin King Pepin, fol. 239. 26 James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900).

4 Theatrical hierarchy, cultural capital and the legitimate/illegitimate divide Caroline Radcliffe

T

hroughout the 1866 hearings of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Theatrical Licensing, the performance of dramatic sketches in music halls had been fiercely debated and contested.1 When the proceedings of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature re-opened the debate in 1892, tensions had escalated between the figureheads of the respective industries over the cultural, hierarchical and economic interests of the legitimate theatre and the music halls. This chapter will consider the conflicting interests of the music hall and the dramatic theatre which came to a head in the early to mid-1890s. Until the 1843 Theatres Act, the minor theatres had posed a threat to the monopoly of the drama by the patent houses; as Jane Moody states, ‘The battle for free trade in drama was not only a campaign to overturn a commercial monopoly, but also a deeply political conflict about who should control theatrical culture.’2 Thus, as the distinctions between major and minor theatres became less clearly defined by the end of the nineteenth century, the music hall had replaced the minor theatres’ position as the overriding threat to the cultural, economic and hegemonic dominance of the dramatic theatres. The music hall’s increasingly persuasive bid to obtain a ‘free trade’ in drama (to fall within the same licensing laws and even the same licensing body as the dramatic theatres), as opposed to the dramatic theatre’s adamantly protectionist response, not only demonstrates the deep-rooted historical divide between the ‘dramatic’ and the ‘popular’ theatres of the late nineteenth century but also further reveal an embedded cultural and ideological status based both on British hierarchical structures and the centrality of cultural capital to the dramatic theatre. The nature of music hall as a nascent ‘mass’ entertainment led to further divisions within the popular and dramatic theatres, leading contemporary critics of the growing industry to question its

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authenticity and artistic validity in the light of its success as a commercially viable ­entertainment. Over the course of this chapter I will explore and employ some of the recurrent themes and theoretical models commonly employed in the interpretation of popular theatre and offer a revisionist analysis of the late nineteenth-century debate over the legitimate versus the illegitimate theatre by foregrounding the centrality of hierarchy and status within the discourse of the Select Committee proceedings of 1892. I will argue that Britain’s leading actor-manager, Henry Irving, as representative of the legitimate theatre, aligned himself with the British hierarchical system, as defined by David Cannadine, in order to secure unchallengeable cultural and social status for the professional theatre. In contrast, the music hall entrepreneur Edward Moss constructed a solid and economically secure empire of music halls by methods which conform to Weber’s economic and social theories through which status is secured by the employment of an economic corporate system, a sophisticated administrative structure and the accumulation of property, which, in Moss’s case, took the form of a nationwide chain of successful music halls. Music hall has been identified as one of the first mass entertainments in Britain, commercialising leisure and commodifying culture. In his unpublished thesis, ‘The Music Hall 1885–1922: The Emergence of a National Entertainment Industry in Britain’, Andrew Crowhurst examines the weaknesses in any analysis of music hall as a mass culture, as defined by the Frankfurt theorists Adorno and Horkheimer, in which culture is subordinated to the economic. Popular mass culture places the audience in a passive state of inertia, helpless to resist the imposition of cultural values from above. Moreover, it is often assumed, on the basis of the analogy with the transformation to production line techniques in industrial manufacturing, that the commercialisation of the music hall necessarily introduced the standardisation of the cultural product of the halls.3

Adorno and Horkheimer’s statement that ‘it follows logically that authentic art cannot be commodified’4 indicates that their assessment of mass culture is dictated by ‘high art’ values. It also contains an unquestioning assumption of ‘authenticity’. When viewed from this perspective, music hall – the first thoroughly commercialised theatrical form – necessarily becomes ‘responsible for the debasement of culture’.5 To analyse music hall purely as mass culture does not allow for the flexibility required to define a culture that envelops non-specific classes or social groups: it is viewed as a capitalist industry projected onto the consenting ‘masses’ or

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labouring class.6 The social historian Peter Bailey sought to redress the view of the music hall audience as passive consumers, emphasising the necessity to resist an interpretation which places the music hall audience as the placid, politically inactive recipients of an ‘authentic’ working-class culture: In the most influential account of this dilation of class consciousness, Gareth Stedman Jones identifies a new flight into escapism in the small pleasures of plebian life … Thus, from the 1880s music hall songs come to denote what he labels as ‘a culture of consolation’ that compensates for political and social impotence, a chronic disability, wryly acknowledged …7

With the publication of Bailey’s and J. S. Bratton’s seminal collections of studies on music hall in the early 1980s, historians began to revise and considerably widen their analyses of class structure in relation to the halls.8 Class analysis From the 1990s onwards, however, coinciding with the fall of communism, the rise of New Labour in Britain and an attempt to eradicate class from the political vocabulary, subsequent scholarship reflects a general backlash against class history and particularly against Marxism. Dagmar Kift’s work on music hall is particularly symptomatic of this general depoliticisation of class analysis. Kift’s writing reflects a limited triadic class reading of audience and management structures; although she provides convincing case studies of both class and conflict within the music hall, Kift underplays the elements of repressive social control persuasively evidenced by writers such as Summerfield, Donajgrodzki and Bailey, depoliticising the natural conclusions of her own evidence. She reiterates a common misreading of Gramsci’s Marxist theory of hegemony, describing his explication of consent and negotiation within areas of civil society as an empowering process of choice rather than a more subtle process of control by the dominant society which functions less transparently than repressive state mechanisms – but with equal effect by reducing the recipient to a passive acceptance of political and state ideology.9 Kift reads Bailey in a similar vein to Stedman Jones: both, she states, discover an authentic working class expression of popular culture within the music hall;10 this reading ignores Bailey’s earlier, ideologically informed approach in which he examines popular entertainment as a form of imposed, rational recreation.11 Kift’s writing on music hall is self-contradictory and misleading: she denies her own factual evidence in an attempt to depoliticise her work in a bid to distance herself from any implication of Marxism.

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David Cannadine invoked the old adage ‘class dismissed’ to describe this devaluation of class history, reflecting on the trend in Class in Britain in 1998: the last two decades have witnessed a fundamental re-thinking of the economic, social and political history of modern Britain, with the result that class analysis and class conflict, which had until so recently seemed central to it, have ceased to carry the conviction they once did. Instead, an alternative interpretation has come to prevail which, although not always explicitly Thatcherite, shares her assumption that class should be downplayed, disregarded and denied, and that grouping people in confrontational collectives is a subversive rhetorical and political device rather than an expression or description of a more complex, integrated and individualist social reality.12

Theatre historians previously shared a common problematic; in their discussion of popular theatre they were constrained to use a terminology that reflects a view of nineteenth-century class structure that was broadly generalised. On the basis of a premise that Britain’s previously powerful aristocracy had been replaced or absorbed by middle-class capitalists, many historians viewed the nineteenth-century patrons of the popular theatre as – simply – middle class. In doing so, they saw Britain’s earlier hierarchical society as having been replaced by a triadic three-class model of collective groups of upper, middle and lower. However, Cannadine correctly indicates that there were no such clearly delineated collectivities, referring instead to the middle classes or the working classes. There was a significant proliferation of the ‘lower middle class’ – shopkeepers, clerks and office workers, for instance – merging into the middle class above and the working class below, with classes becoming indistinct and hard to place, and this has been reflected in the more recent scholarship on nineteenthcentury theatre and music hall. Hierarchy, the cult of monarchy and the national popular Even with the wider class terminology available, as articulated by Cannadine, class analysis still does not adequately define the role of status in relation to the emerging music hall manager or the actor-manager within the period of rapid economic change and social transformation at the end of the nineteenth century. I suggest, therefore, that there is a need to employ other theoretical modes of analysis in relation to the latter part of the century, venturing beyond the earlier nineteenth-century class categorisations usually employed by popular studies.13 Cannadine suggests that rather than viewing society simply as either triadic or polarised, most Britons also refer to and position themselves according to

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hierarchy – an individualistic, finely layered model based on rank and status. Cannadine emphasises hierarchy as a way of seeing British society, stating that the dismissal of hierarchy by historians is one of the ‘greatest gaps in modern British historical writing’, with right-wing scholars ignoring it and taking its existence for granted, while scholars on the left take its disappearance for granted: For all the continued appeal of the three-stage and polarised models during the years 1832 to 1848, it was hierarchy which remained for many people the natural, omnipresent, time-honoured and divinely sanctioned way of seeing British society and of understanding their own place within it.14

Cannadine demonstrates that while Britons have moved back and forth between the three models (triadic, polar and hierarchic) at different points in history, For good or for ill, with enthusiasm or regret, most Victorians believed that theirs was a viable hierarchical society: that individual identities based on superiority and subordination were a better guide than the collective identities based on conflict or accommodation. This perception was increasingly reinforced from the Empire.15

Class analysis and certain areas of the popular become more intelligible when viewed in terms of hierarchy. Hierarchical order is ultimately based on the position of the Royal Family and an individual’s relationship to it. It is instilled by its continuous appeal to what Gramsci terms ‘the national popular’, which is achieved through hegemonic and ideological leadership; rank and hierarchy have to be subliminally accepted by all classes within the integral nation. 16 Moody refers to the ‘pervasive fear that modern drama might disavow the established, monarchistical genres of tragedy and comedy in favour of an anarchic miscellany of dramatic forms; in other words, that generic innovation might somehow be proleptic of social and political revolution’.17 Although she is referring to the late eighteenth century, the fear of a national subversion of dramatic hierarchy occurring by way of the dissemination of the popular recurred in the late nineteenth century when empire and monarchy permeate the cultural sites of both legitimate and popular entertainment. Popular culture had long posed a threat to state hegemony, and although the fear of civil revolution subsided as the nineteenth century progressed, the residual distrust of the illegitimate remained embedded in political and cultural consciousness. The aristocratic and monarchistic structures referred to by Moody laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century dramatic theatre’s antipathy to the

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music hall. With class and economy moving rapidly away from the Marxist model of labour versus production of the early to mid-nineteenth century, music hall adapted itself accordingly. As economic status replaced aristocratic power, hierarchy was forced to find ways to survive. Thus the hierarchical and monarchistic vision was strengthened by a ‘revived cult of monarchy’ with such celebrations and rituals as the jubilees and funeral of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII contributing to the display of pomp and the hierarchical order. A similar appeal to the national popular appeared to be a conscious strategy used by the dramatic theatre to retain its legitimate status when threatened by the rise of the music halls. In his chapter in this volume Anselm Heinrich discusses Irving’s view of theatre as a rational and moral means of teaching and educating the public to a ‘higher’ level, raising the cultural profile of the nation and helping to establish drama as a high-cultural art form; ‘The stage is now seen to be an elevating instead of a lowering influence on national morality’, declared Irving in his address to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1892.18 Irving initially wanted to protect the autonomy of the theatre but was to strategically revise his ideas in line with Gladstone’s proposal for a state-funded National Theatre which would serve not only to preserve the national heritage but to protect Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic status. Another manifestation of the cult of monarchy directly aligned to the hierarchical structure of British society was the modernised honours system. From the 1870s peerages were awarded in greater numbers; from the 1880s Gladstone pressed for baronetcies for the arts, and he achieved state recognition of the arts through the granting of theatrical knighthoods. Lesser orders and knighthoods were extended to businessmen, manufacturers and prime ministers. But the actor’s personal status was still a target of scrutiny. Jeffrey Richards reveals that although Gladstone had proposed Irving for a knighthood in 1883, his private life did not meet the approval of the Cabinet, who opposed it.19 By 1895 Irving’s status as a great actor was considered sufficiently respectable to award him the accolade he had earlier been deprived of. Irving declared that his knighthood ‘removes, once and for all, a certain shadow which has rested on our calling’.20 The first actors to receive honours were all male actor-managers who met the new criteria for peerages through their reputation not only as established actors but also, equally through their business credentials as managers.21 Irving ensured that he met these prerequisites while also exploiting the cultural assets or ‘cultural capital’ of the theatre – a literary theatre history dependent on Shakespeare and the great tragic and comic writers. Actors rarely had either

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class or economic status and were historically viewed as operating on the edge of respectable society.22 Those such as Irving worked hard to redress the image of the itinerant actor. It was his appropriation of legitimate theatre history, combined with the monarchy’s validation of the dramatic theatre through the granting of the Royal Patents dating back to the seventeenth century, that was his main recourse in his discourse during the licensing contests with the halls. Cultural capital and social status Further to Cannadine’s analysis of class and Weber’s analysis of status, Pierre Bourdieu identifies a relationship between economy and culture that presents an additional perspective to class analysis.23 Cultural capital, similarly to Marxist economic capital, establishes and maintains class distinctions. Although cultural capital is far easier to accumulate if the individual has accumulated economic capital, the arguments forwarded by Henry Irving to counteract the cultural and economic threat of the music hall demonstrate his reliance on hierarchical status in order to strengthen and expand the cultural capital of the dramatic theatre. Bourdieu examines how systems of social inequality are embedded in cultural practices (particularly how educative processes can reproduce class difference). In Distinction he states that: Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.24

Art therefore cannot be ‘autonomous’: it will always exist within a social realm. Autonomy is a class-based notion created to establish and maintain cultural capital. Bourdieu supersedes the approaches of Adorno and Horkheimer by identifying ‘taste’ as the measure of how distinctions are made and justified between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, according more with the work of Bailey and Stedman Jones. Bourdieu also identifies habitus – habits and ways of behaving which go unnoticed, cementing cultural power between social classes. Habitus is not enforced and is therefore similar to Gramscian hegemonic theory. Habitus can also be a way of explaining the implicit and almost imperceptible status of hierarchy within the factors of cultural capital. One recent criticism of Bourdieu’s theories is that in our present,post- postmodernist society, distinctions between high and low have somewhat dissolved and objections to commercialism in art are no longer as strong, but the

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arguments for and against the commercialisation of late nineteenth-century theatre easily comply with Bourdieu’s theories in Distinction. Actors such as Irving succeeded in defying class categorisation, partly because of their innately theatrical ability to confound such precepts as accent or education (both indicators of class origin), and partly through the theatrical biographical mythologies they cultivated. To escape the pejorative labels attached to actors and to afford the theatre with a respectable status, if not a definable class, such tactics were increasingly necessary for the survival of the dramatic theatre. The approval of Prime Minister and monarch raised the actor-manager up the hierarchical ladder, granting him the opportunity of a semi-aristocratic status. Similarly, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new plutocracy of extremely rich businessmen, financiers and bankers – likewise defying any recognisable class category – merged with or bought its way into the a­ ristocracy.25 While the music hall tended to mock the aristocracy, the new genre of musical comedy directly addressed and reflected the relationship between the new plutocracy and the aristocracy; the legitimate theatre echoed this relationship through both its repertoire and its rising class of actors.26 The new business class, rapidly rising socially, presented the biggest challenge to the legitimate theatre’s cultural hegemony. With its new, successfully organised corporate system, the music hall sought to buy into the cultural capital exclusive to the drama, thus threatening both the economic survival and the cultural advantage of the legitimate theatre. ‘Economically conditioned’ power is not, of course, identical with ‘power’ as such. On the contrary, the emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued for its own sake. Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social honor it entails. Not all power, however, entails social honor. The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor. Quite generally, ‘mere economic’ power, and especially ‘naked’ money power, is by no means a recognized basis of social honor. Nor is power the only basis of social honor. Indeed, social honor, or prestige, may even be the basis of economic power, and very frequently has been.27

Weber indicates that although the newly acquired wealth of the self-made capitalist buys power, it cannot necessarily buy social honour. This was certainly the case for the new music hall entrepreneurs. The music hall was attacked for its association with prostitution and drink; the legitimate theatre took ­advantage of these associations in their arguments to the Select Committee.

Theatrical hierarchy and cultural capital

The figure of the successful music hall entrepreneur indicates the nineteenthcentury merger of business industry with the English aristocracy. Whereas the landed elite had previously held hegemonic superiority, the emerging bourgeois capitalist gained economic power as the aristocracy conceded to the sway of big business. But the aristocracy still maintained their ruling hierarchical status, with the bourgeoisie aspiring to their values and interests.28 In Britain, social honour is automatically assumed through the aristocratic and hierarchical systems; ultimately the Victorian and Edwardian legitimate theatres had to call upon these systems in order to maintain their higher status as the music hall gained increasing economic and geographic power. Even if the music hall succeeded in winning the right to perform Shakespeare and other ‘legitimate’ drama, Irving needed to retain the legitimate theatre’s status through the official recognition of government and monarchy. Although Irving had achieved this recognition through his knighthood in 1895, it took another ten years for a music hall manager to be similarly recognised: Edward Moss received a knighthood in 1905 and Oswald Stoll in 1919. Andrew Crowhurst’s study of the music hall has been much overlooked by theatre historians, and although it was written some years ago I am now revisiting it for its close analysis of the manager Oswald Stoll and its analysis of the music hall’s corporate structure. Crowhurst examined the transformations in the economic management systems of the music hall industry dating from 1885, relating them to the changes to the capitalist system necessary to adapt to an industry aimed at a mass market and based on increased bureaucratic and corporate structures. In line with my own conclusions, he identifies Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic and corporate management systems as a model applicable to the changing demands being placed upon the entertainment industry towards the end of the nineteenth century. In his article ‘Big Men and Big Business’ Crowhurst demonstrates how formerly publican-run taverns and pubs were submerged by organised management structures, moving away from a more personalised management style to corporate management practices in line with the economic changes occurring during the period. 29 Crowhurst’s research reveals that the majority of new-style entrepreneurial managers came from secure accounting or legal backgrounds, with fewer having migrated from the licensing trades or having direct links to the music hall profession (although, paradoxically, Stoll and Moss had both taken over their parents’ music halls). Business administrators took over music hall management roles, formerly maintained by those with a foot in the profession, and employer– employee relationships were now separated and distanced by entrepreneurs,

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with the former reliance on the ‘camaraderie’ of the halls breaking down as the industry was professionalised. Interestingly, this move away from an entertainment background coincided with a similar shift in the professional backgrounds of actors, playwrights and actor-managers, and with a move away from the traditional routes of family-run theatres and unbroken generations of actors. Irving himself came from a non-theatrical background.30 The fight for a free trade in drama Crowhurst states that although ‘by 1882 a nationwide framework of music halls was already in existence … it was only in the 1890s, with the emergence of a number of music hall syndicates which controlled several halls in disparate locations, that these geographically widespread halls began to be integrated into a coherent network’.31 He traces ‘The initial boom in music hall i­nvestment (limited liability companies registered at Company House) … between 1886 and 1888 … followed by quantitatively more significant increases in the number of new registrations in the years 1896–8, and 1907–10’,32 with the 1890s experiencing more incorporations than any other decade. Although the larger syndicates did not form until 1893, the opening of the new Pavilion in 1885 heralded the commencement of the new style of music hall management. Stoll and Moss established chains of music halls in the early 1890s; the London Syndicate Halls and the Tivoli, Oxford and London Pavilion formed in 1893, and by 1896 the Stoll–Moss partnership had cemented into Moss Empires. The new-style corporate and bureaucratic systems based on increased profit margins and attractive share returns, outlined by Weber, directly clashed with and threatened the traditional legitimate theatre system based on the leadership of the actor-manager favoured by actors such as Henry Irving or Beerbohm Tree. Actor-managers maintained artistic autonomy and control by relying on a cult of presence and professional theatrical-dramatic status in the public eye. Actors rightly feared a threat to their autonomy from the rising, financially driven corporate management structures as they witnessed individual music hall performers being increasingly limited by their controlling syndicates. Music hall managers not only applied strict barring clauses and a monopoly on where the performers could work, but also restricted music hall performers’ material in line with the county council’s requirements, specifically to counteract accusations of immorality emanating from the progressives, or ‘Puritan Party’, as they became known.

Theatrical hierarchy and cultural capital

The ‘purity campaigns’ led by religious reformers and campaigners such as Mrs Ormiston Chant have been the focus of scholarly discussion on music hall licensing regulations, with temperance and censorship extensively explored.33 Regulations concerning buildings and safety have also come under scrutiny. The debate that concerns this chapter – whether or not all theatres and music halls should be given ‘free dramatic and artistic trade’, and whether that trade should fall under the same licensing laws and even the same licensing body – has been most thoroughly examined in Richard Schoch’s discussion of the 1866 proceedings. From the point of view of the licensing committees and the music halls themselves, Schoch states that during these proceedings, the call for Shakespeare in the Victorian music hall was not an act of middle class cultural oppression, not a tyranny of the majority, but a sincere attempt to find common ground beyond the entrenched boundaries of class, wealth and rank.34

Schoch links this view to an Arnoldian humanism; certainly the intentions of the 1892 Select Committee were egalitarian and progressive in view, but the legitimate theatre viewed them purely as a threat to appropriate and degrade legitimate drama. Schoch emphasises the fact that ‘In 1866 productions of melodrama in theatres far outnumbered those of Shakespeare with only two theatres out of twenty-five performing Shakespeare during the 1865–6 season.’35 Although the music hall did not succeed in winning the right to perform sketches as a result of the 1866 proceedings, by 1892 proprietors of the halls found themselves in a position to campaign once more for the right to perform continuous, dramatic sketches of more than one act. Hence the 1892 Select Committee was convened in order to revisit the same question. The managers argued that the educational and intellectual qualities of the drama would elevate the nature of music hall entertainments. Music hall managers’ application of barring clauses and their limitation of performance material were coupled with an agenda to attract a higher class of audience in line with the legitimate theatre. Some managers simply stopped applying for alcohol licences when seeking to open new halls in order to pre-empt any opposition to the proposed premises, although critics such as Irving continued to cite the music hall’s traditional association with the drinks trade to undermine their claim to respectability. The music hall managers insisted that music hall had already managed to transform itself from its tavern roots into a respectable form of entertainment. They denied the reputation of the music halls as a place of impropriety and drunkenness, claiming that drinking was ­considerably

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reduced because of the continuous nature of entertainments and that the inclusion of dramatic sketches would further this reduction. Many campaigners were in agreement with the proposal for drama in music halls: anything that could elevate what was frequently considered as low, anti-intellectual entertainment could only be considered positive. Mr G. W. E. Russell, chairman of the Churchmen’s Liberation League and National Vigilance Society, chaired the Theatres and Music Halls Committee, part of the Select Committee for the London County Council, the licensing body for music halls in London. Russell pointed out that: the object of the committee was not to degrade the theatres, but to elevate the music halls. At present the music halls were very liable to degenerate into extremely foolish performances, anything like a continuous performance being prohibited by the Act of King George II. Anything like a connected story was illegal. It was the compliance with the law which kept the standard of entertainments at music halls very low. He would like to see the halls absolutely free, so that every manager might decide what kind of entertainment was most suited to the audience of his house. It was to do away with the restrictions which kept the standard of the music halls so miserably low that the proposal of the committee was made. (Era, 9 April 1892, p. 18)

Mrs Chant the temperance and purity campaigner, who had instigated the reform of the Empire Theatre, is generally viewed as an enemy of the halls; paradoxically, she supported the presence of the halls for the uneducated or ‘working-class’ person, echoing G. W. E. Russell’s support for the elevating and instructive purpose of the dramatic sketch at a meeting of the Playgoers’ Club: The difference between the theatre and the music hall was one rather of modes rather than people, and why should superior persons be ashamed to confess that they were not always up to the highest level of tension that rendered the theatre a necessity to them? The music hall supplied a class of entertainment to suit people who, out of sheer tiredness of brain or want of a superior education, could hardly appreciate a play. She did not, however, see why, at a music hall, half an hour should not be devoted to the presentation of a scene from some high-class novel calculated to elevate and instruct the minds of the audience. The music hall catered for people who had a small proportion of brains. That was quite true. They had not the reserve power to cater for themselves, and therefore someone else must do it for them. No doubt some of the entertainments might be vulgar but she had no more right to quarrel with a vulgar entertainment than with a vulgar bonnet. She wanted people to live and be glad, and there was but little of gladness found in the factory and the workshop. (Era, 17 November 1894, p. 16)

Theatrical hierarchy and cultural capital

Both Russell and Chant expressed a common perception of the music hall – that its entertainment was vulgar; Chant recognised that it catered for a certain type of ‘brainless’ person, while Russell saw a need to elevate it. Max Beerbohm (Herbert Tree’s brother) also defined music hall as an entertainment for the uneducated, but, unlike Chant and Russell, was in favour of maintaining what he considered to be the fundamental distinction between music hall and drama: ‘The music hall entertainment ought to be stupid, as surely as the drama ought to be intelligent’ (Saturday Review, 14 November 1903). Beerbohm required music hall to remain an ‘authentic’, lower-class form of popular entertainment. These three differing views express some of the arguments forwarded for and against music hall reform: Russell, the liberal campaigner, hegemonically advocating more freedom for the halls but with a moral and philosophical agenda of rational recreation; Chant, the conservative reformer, advocating a rational culture of consolation for the masses; and Beerbohm, the intellectual critic who advocated leaving low culture where it was, for the ironic appreciation of the elite. The views reflect the analyses of mass culture offered, respectively, by Bailey, Stedman Jones and Bourdieu. Charles Coborn, the veteran music hall performer and senior representative of the profession at the Playgoers’ Club, voiced the music hall’s mission to elevate the content of the halls. Coming from within the profession, rather than from within the management, he agreed with Mrs Chant’s ideals of improvement, stating that: Mrs. Chant’s action would do incalculable good to the music hall, because there were many people who would not visit such a place owing to the drawbacks which she sought to remove. He congratulated her on having made a determined effort to improve the position of music hall artists, and if she succeeded in doing that she would earn the hearty thanks of the boys and girls whom he represented. (Era, 17 November 1894, p. 16)

Coborn’s statement contradicts recent interpretations of the music hall profession’s view of reformers such as Chant. Both managers and performers, influenced by the late Victorian aspiration to achieve higher cultural and economic status, were in favour of raising the moral profile of the halls. Performers were keen to secure legitimate status equal to that of actors; managers were willing to submit to many reforms, including censorship and loss of alcohol licences as long as it did not endanger their profit. But the strongest voice of opposition, whose evidence influenced the Parliamentary Inquiry of 1892, remained the actor and manager of the Lyceum Theatre, Henry Irving.

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One of the main arguments forwarded by Irving against granting drama to the music halls was the fact that smoking and drinking were allowed in the music hall auditorium. Irving voiced the opinion that throughout a continuous dramatic sketch smoking and drinking interrupted the concentration and continuity demanded of actors and audience, and that to allow the two to exist together could only endanger the quality of the drama. In a letter to the Era from Irving and J. L. Toole – burlesque comedian and actor-manager of Toole’s Theatre – Irving responded to the accusation that they were ‘dead against the elevation of the music halls’, emphasising their objections: On the contrary, we desire the elevation of the music halls, but we do not wish that desirable consummation to be achieved at the expense of lowering the theatres. The only persons who do not seem to desire the elevation of the halls are their own proprietors and managers. The proof of this is very simple. These gentlemen say that they desire to produce plays which would tend to elevate the tone of the halls. This they can do, if they so wish, with the greatest ease. There is not a music hall in London that cannot obtain a licence to produce plays. The Lord Chamberlain gives every facility, and granted that the place be suitable and the manager a proper person, a licence follows application as a matter of course ... These licences allow all possible refreshments required by the audience to be served in the proper places, and also allow smoking in places other than the auditorium. Here then, we have the point of difference under our finger – drinking and smoking in the auditorium. (Era, 23 April 1892, p. 15)

The actors astutely turned the 1843 Theatres Act, which by abolishing the earlier monopoly granted to a few theatres had enabled all theatres to obtain a licence, to their own purposes. Both the arguments of the music hall and those of the legitimate theatre in relation to smoking and drinking ultimately reduce to economic interests. The evidence produced at the Parliamentary Inquiry of 1892 highlighted the financial competition posed by having a music hall next door to a theatre, performing the same material but providing alcohol and tobacco to its advantage. Irving confirmed this fear: ‘If ’, said Mr. Irving, ‘I were playing The Corsican Brothers at my theatre, and it was being played next door with the added attractions of smoking and drinking, I am afraid my pit and gallery would be pretty empty.’ (Era, 9 April 1892, p. 15)

Irving implied that the music hall’s unwillingness to forgo alcohol and tobacco was due to its reliance on drink profits to finance its cheap entertainment. He incorrectly cited the Alhambra as confirmation of this, stating that the music hall had, for a period, converted to the jurisdiction of the Lord

Theatrical hierarchy and cultural capital

Chamberlain in an attempt to ‘better itself ’, but had had to convert back to its ‘tavern’ status for financial reasons. In fact, in 1871 the Alhambra had applied for a magistrate’s licence and been refused, instead having to ‘make do’ with a Lord Chamberlain’s licence. The managers combated the argument by stating that comparatively little profit was now made from drink; it was, rather, the nature of the music hall as a place that you could drop in to and the variety of entertainment that made it what it was. But the overriding argument which Irving forwarded, and which none of the committee questioned, was that of the cultural superiority of the legitimate drama and the status of the modern theatre above that of the music hall – the cultural capital and hegemonically instated supremacy of high art over low – the theatre being, among other things, ‘“a place of recreation for the intelligent and sober minded” – a place of education’. The Era continued: To give to places other than theatres, which are ordained for the special purpose, the right to perform stage plays, would be a destructive innovation to stage art unless proper theatre conditions be maintained. For we must not overlook the fact that the class of places whence emanates the desire for the extension is that of the music hall, which is really a tavern which has obtained licences for music and dancing ... It is not sufficient that the various performers should be merely talented or skilled in the exercise of a particular branch of their craft. There must be some far-reaching artistic aim – some effort to rise out of the common level ... work on the variety stage is more purely personal. Here the effort of the artist, whatever be his talent, is of a more desultory kind. But in the theatre the artist is only a part of an organisation, and has to submit himself and his powers to the development of a common end. The art of acting would, I hold, be imperilled by any change which would necessarily make theatres into music halls by allowing stage plays to be given where smoking and drinking were allowed in the auditorium. In fact, time only would be required to effect a certain degradation of the artist thus subjected to debasing conditions ... I would earnestly protest against an art which is a beautiful one, and which may be a noble one, being used merely as an attraction to further drink traffic. (Era, 9 April 1892, p. 8)

Irving described the drama in both aesthetic and morally superior terms: ‘ordained, noble, beautiful and proper’. He was not prepared to lose the cultural capital his theatre had advantageously accrued; when his cultural argument veered towards the unsubstantiated he swiftly returned to the alcohol and tobacco argument. The London managers’ representative at the Parliamentary Inquiry, Mr Fladgate, forwarded the same argument as Irving, that ‘the theatre was the exponent of ... cultured feeling and cultured ideas’, and he defended the right

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of the legitimate theatre to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain and not to come under the jurisdiction of the London County Council on the basis that the Lord Chamberlain had always been the controlling authority, and there was a certain prestige in the fact that they were licensed from the Crown ... They felt the drama was an art, and the County Council was not exactly the body to whom they would go to assist them in this respect. (Era, 9 April 1892, p. 8)

Charles Coborn took great offence at Irving’s evidence to the Parliamentary Committee; he expressed his indignation in response to a summons issued against the Manchester Palace for the performance of a sketch, at the instigation of James Macready Chute on behalf of the Provincial Association of Theatre Managers:36 There has been a terrible lot of cant lately about the ‘art’ which is to be found in theatres. Of course there is art to be found in theatres. There is art to be found in a Zulu kraal. I have in my house several examples of Zulu pottery. Well, we will allow, for the sake of argument, that art exists nowhere else than in the theatres, and come to the point. If art is good, beautiful, and desirable, and the theatres possess it, why should they not out of mere charity let the patrons of the music hall have some? ‘Oh,’ they may reply, ‘we want it all ourselves – it would not pay us to let music halls have any.’   I find it useless to expect anything but mercenary considerations from that quarter, so I turn elsewhere, and (I) ask from what they have derived this monopoly which enables them to dictate to the music hall proprietors and managers as to what they shall or shall not put before their patrons. It is derived from some selfish, ridiculous old law of some centuries old, dating from a period of corruption and favouritism, and it is wholly and bitterly alien to the spirit of the present day ... I have lately given permission for one of my best songs to be sung in Mr. Chute’s own forthcoming pantomime. All these little courtesies will have to be stopped if the music hall people are to be harried and worried by theatre people, and pantomimes and burlesques will suffer. Not only so, the variety theatre is a growing institution, and many actors will be able to earn a living in them, as many do now ... Does Mr. Irving, who is head of the Actors’ Association, approve of this beautiful police-court case and its result? The action was taken in a police-court by theatrical proprietors against actors. (Era, 22 October 1892, p. 17)

Charles Coborn’s arguments anticipate those of Bourdieu; Coborn criticises the legitimate theatre’s appropriation of high culture by demonstrating the subjectivity of art and the validation of the popular. Art should be available to all and, like economic capital, can be accumulated, bought and exchanged. Cultural capital should not be available only to those with a hierarchical advantage. Coborn condemns Irving’s recourse to an outmoded law of privilege,

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pointing out that legitimate theatre has ‘bought’ into popular theatre’s cultural capital by appropriating the pantomime and burlesque to secure economic profit, and legitimate actors have crossed over to the music hall, thus rendering redundant the old laws of hierarchy: thus culture becomes an exchange and barter rather than a privilege. Irving’s objectives were to maintain both the artistic and the legislative distinctions between the legitimate theatre and the music hall. In 1894, the County Council was reviewing the licence for the notorious Empire Music Hall, whose promenade was allegedly frequented by prostitutes, and Irving was incensed by the parallels drawn between the legitimate theatre and the music halls. What Irving really had to fear was the possible interference in theatre legislation by the London County Council, which would present a much more serious threat to the relative autonomy that the theatre managers had so far enjoyed. Irving needed to prevent the autocratic censorship of the County Council, already imposed on music hall songs and sketches, from being applied to the drama, since the ‘aristocratic indifference of the Lord Chamberlain’s office would more readily allow the continued existence of a relatively less-restricted London theatre’.’37 In a letter to the Daily Chronicle, Irving presented a version of theatre history that substantiated his demands for the theatre to remain within the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain, under the moral supervision of the theatre managers themselves: Sir – I … trust that you will not consider out of place a word of discrimination between ‘theatres’ and all other places of amusement. In the various acts of Parliament a ‘theatre’ is taken to be a place reserved solely for the performance of stage plays, and is in London under the sole jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain … In the existing state of the law, the London County Council has no power whatever regarding the discipline of theatres licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, or of regulating who shall or shall not be admitted, and this state of things must exist unless Parliament in its wisdom shall see fit to alter the law. It was David Garrick who abolished the footman’s free gallery, which had through its brawling become a nuisance; it was Macready who did away with the promenade in Drury-lane Theatre long before any public comment had been made upon the scandal of it. Since that time, by gradual process of improvement, theatres proper throughout the country are the last places where solicitation can be practised. From the very nature of the performance, which is, and must be, one of sustained interest demanding absolute attention, the plying of the sad trade – even were it to be permitted – would be an impossibility.   If the London County Council does not remember, through its component elements, that ‘theatres’ are different from ‘music halls’ – called in legal

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phrase ‘places of entertainment’ – in both aim and scope, origin, jurisdiction, and method, then the sooner the great theatre-going and theatre-loving public have their attention called to it the better. Believe me, Sir, yours very faithfully, HENRY IRVING Edinburgh, Oct 27th (reprinted in Era, 3 November 1894, p. 17)

Irving defended the legitimate theatre’s honour by creating a very sanitised theatrical history that contrasts with his descriptions of the music halls as immoral and disreputable. In swift response to Irving’s letter, H. E. Moss defended the music hall against Irving’s accusations of indecency, echoing Coborn’s letter of 1892 by pointing out the hypocrisy of Irving’s arguments in the light of the legitimate theatre’s financial reliance on the music hall and other popular theatres, with an increasing presence of legitimate actors on the music hall stage: If every theatre were conducted as the Lyceum were conducted, Mr. Irving might have some shadow of justification for saying that ‘theatres’ have ‘nothing whatever in common’ with ‘places of entertainment.’ But what are the facts? Is it not so that the modern musical-burlesque, or so-called comic opera, which is the mainstay of many a theatre, is simply a series of music hall turns, held together by the merest thread of a plot? Even the Gilbert–Sullivan combination, which surely represents the highest form of comedy-opera in this country, has in Utopia, Unlimited, at the opening of the second act, introduced what is nothing more than a Christy Minstrel entertainment with the black faces left out.   Not only so. Many of the ‘theatres’ in this country would not survive but for the Christmas pantomime. Yet what would the pantomime of today be without the music hall singer, the music hall dancer, and the music hall comedian? Why, when the boards of the Lyceum Theatre itself – sacred to the higher drama – were given over to pantomime last year, a not unimportant part was played there by a gentleman whose ‘show’ occupies a prominent place in the Edinburgh Empire Palace programme of this week. It ought to be clear then, that the business of the ‘music halls’ is not so absolutely different from that of the ‘theatres,’ as Mr Irving suggests. (‘Theatres and Music Halls’, Era, 10 November 1894, p. 16)

Moss proceeded to claim that many of the legitimate ‘popular plays and burlesques’ of the day were far more morally injurious than anything a youth might witness at a music hall. The drama critic Clement Scott (whom one might expect to defend the drama) made the same point in a speech defending the music halls and dramatic free trade: I say with confidence and authority that the despised music hall has in my time advanced in refinement, in order, and in decency as much as the once

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despised drama. But how and why has it so advanced? Mr John Burns told you ... that it was all due to the beneficient action of the County Council. Do not believe a word of it; the improvement dates from the minute that the theatrical managers let the music halls alone, and allowed them, by means of little plays, scenes, sketches, and interludes, to be dramatic, not dirty, and to exchange vulgar tomfoolery for sentiment and human nature. Some of our high-minded, conscientious, and most art-loving managers are very sensitive as to the union between the theatre and the music hall. Mrs. Drama says, with a shudder, ‘It is no child of mine!’ All I can say is then ‘Let Mrs. Drama put her own house in order! Let her take a turn round and see what the children she does own are doing! Let her drag them out of the gutter where they are playing, and having boxed their ears, put on them some clean frocks and pinafores.’ For I declare that during the last few years I have seen dances and exhibitions and vulgarities at the so-called theatres which no music hall director would dare to give and no music hall audience would tolerate. (‘Clement Scott at Newcastle’, Era, 10 November 1894, p. 9)

The original division of the legitimate and illegitimate theatres resulting from the two Royal Patents granted by King Charles II in 1660 gave an immediate hegemonic advantage to the legitimate theatre. By the late nineteenth century, theatre was still seeking to maintain the divisions initiated in the seventeenth century, still basing its cultural leadership on its established hierarchical status as legitimate drama, ‘above’ the popular theatre. Although the music hall had a secure economic and corporate advantage over the legitimate theatre, it continually struggled to achieve the cultural capital awarded to the legitimate theatre. The music hall prided itself with having been granted legitimate status when the first Royal Variety Performance took place in 1912. It had finally received official royal approval and could almost go no further in terms of validation and status. Ironically, it was heralded as the beginning of the end for the music hall. Notes 1 For a discussion of the 1866 proceedings see, for example, Richard Schoch, ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 236–49. 2 Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5. 3 See Andrew J. Crowhurst, ‘The Music Hall: The Emergence of a National Entertainment Industry in Britain’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992), pp. 18–19.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 4 Quoted in Crowhurst, ‘The Music Hall’, p. 24. 5 Crowhurst, ‘The Music Hall’, p. 24. 6 See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of the Working Class’, Journal of Social History, 7 (1974), pp. 460–508. 7 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 130. 8 Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986) and J. S. Bratton (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). 9 Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict, trans. Roy Kift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 9–10. I deliberately emphasise the definition of Gramsci as a Marxist, while many writers of the 1990s incorrectly positioned him as an alternative to Marxism rather than a theorist who further developed and evolved Marx’s original theories. 10 Kift, The Victorian Music Hall, p. 5. 11 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Methuen, 1987; 1978). 12 David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 2. 13 Contrary to Cannadine’s rejection of Marx, my own research, focusing on repetitive labour in the Lancashire cotton mills, can only be read in terms of labour versus capital. See Caroline Radcliffe and Sarah Angliss, ‘Revolution: Challenging the Automaton. Repetitive Labour and Dance in the Industrial Workspace’, Performance Research, 18:1 (Winter 2013), pp. 40–47. Marx and Engels’s account of conditions in the cotton mills seems unquestionable when placed alongside the evidence of the parliamentary enquiries into factory working conditions; Cannadine overlooks Marx’s specificity to the cotton mills, seeking instead to create a generalised class model applicable to Britain as a non-specific whole. My research also discovers a popular form of dance absolutely specific to the labouring industrial worker, thus echoing and substantiating the early studies of Bailey and Stedman Jones. However, these uncompromisingly binary class structures appear to collapse as the century progresses and the limitations of a solely Marxist analysis applied to this period start to become apparent. 14 Cannadine, Class in Britain, p. 85. 15 Cannadine, Class in Britain, p. 60. 16 For discussion of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘national popular’, see David Forgacs, ‘National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 209–19. 17 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 51. 18 ‘The Stage as It Is’, lecture, Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, in The Drama: Addresses by Henry Irving (New York, Tait, Sons & Co., 1892), p. 24, quoted in Richard Schoch, Great Shakespeareans: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 5. 19 Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon, 2005), p. 41.

Theatrical hierarchy and cultural capital 20 Era, 13 July 1895, quoted in Schoch, Great Shakespeareans, p. 6. 21 Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England 1880–1983 (London: Athlone Press, 1984), pp. 17–18. Sanderson examines the social backgrounds of actors, discussing class and status within the acting profession. 22 Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) is one of the first thorough studies to examine the changing status and class mobility of the actor. Neither Sanderson nor Davis, however, considers these themes in relation to Weber’s analysis of status. Davis does briefly refer to Weber in relation to the role of the theatrical entrepreneur in The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 167. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 24 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 6. 25 Davis, Actresses as Working Women, p. 117. 26 See Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, p. 20. 27 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and Claus Widditch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; 1922), vol. 2, p. 926. 28 See Martin J. Weiner, ‘The Failure of the Bourgeoisie’, in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 7–10, for a discussion on the relationship between the English capitalist and the aristocracy. 29 Andrew Crowhurst, ‘Big Men and Big Business: The Transition from “Caterers” to “Magnates” in British Music-hall Entrepreneurship, 1850–1914’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, 25:1 (Summer 1997), pp. 33–59, at p. 34. 30 Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, pp. 18–20. 31 Crowhurst, The Music Hall, p. 96. 32 Crowhurst, The Music Hall, p. 148. 33 See, for example, Susan Pennybacker, ‘“It was not what she said but the way in which she said it”: The London County Council and the Music Halls’, in Bailey (ed.), Music Hall, pp. 120–40; Chris Waters, ‘Manchester Morality and the London Capital: The Battle over the Palace of Varieties’, in Bailey (ed.), Music Hall, pp. 141–61; and Joseph Donohue, Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 34 Schoch, ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’, p. 241. 35 Schoch, ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’, pp. 245 and 242. 36 See Waters, ‘Manchester Morality’, pp. 145–6 for a discussion of the Manchester Palace case. 37 See Pennybacker, ‘“It was not what she said but the way in which she said it”’, p. 122.

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5 Performance for imagined ­communities: Gladstone, the National Theatre and contested didactics of the stage Anselm Heinrich

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ne of William Gladstone’s most lasting visions for British society was one of social cohesion, and the ‘working man’ played an important part in this. For Gladstone this did not include upward social mobility but it did mean a vision of the working man wishing to improve – ‘to improve his mind, to improve his income and to improve his skills, in roughly equal measure’.1 The working man would still remain a working man – Gladstone did not advocate radical social reform – but he would be rewarded by ‘enriching his mind’. The 1870 Elementary Education Act seemed to provide a basis for such improvement. Although Gladstone did not become particularly involved with this Bill and was personally disappointed by the outcome,2 the result of a national framework for universal elementary schooling for children aged between five and twelve is remarkable and may seem to have been relating to and providing for the ‘enrichment’ of minds that Gladstone advocated. Interestingly Gladstone’s ideal of a state-funded National Theatre can be linked to his thinking about intellectual improvement of the working classes and in many ways mirrors the contradictions exemplified by the early advocates of a National Theatre, particularly concerning imagined audiences, repertoire and the educational function of such a stage. The concept of enriching the mind of the populace has distinct links to the nineteenth-century movement for a National Theatre – an institution which, as Loren Kruger has persuasively pointed out, was never meant to reflect popular forms of performance. In fact she claims that it was not national at all either but had a distinctly patronising agenda. Kruger claims that ‘whereas the French could proceed with the assurance that the people had a place in the national arena, marked by the annual reminder of Bastille Day, the English had no such all-embracing and regular celebration of national unity’.3 In the

Performance for imagined communities

proposed English National Theatre the nation was in fact silent; the majority was spoken for by an influential minority who saw the populace in need of an ‘uplift’. In this respect the popular theatre, and in particular the music hall, was regarded as having a dubious influence and, crucially, as attracting the ‘wrong’ kind of audience. Henry Arthur Jones, for example, established a clear distinction between ‘popular amusement’ and the ‘art of drama’.4 The audience that went to such a National Theatre was decidedly non-working class. Harley Granville Barker envisaged his ‘exemplary theatre’ to attract a ‘leisured class’.5 Matthew Arnold in his seminal article ‘The French Play in London’ lamented the ‘estrangement of the British middle class from the theatre’ and argued that an ‘organised’ theatre would succeed in winning them back.6 Despite some differences in their approaches, the protagonists of the National Theatre movement by and large envisaged as patrons ‘leisured amateurs in confident possession of their patrimony’, as Loren Kruger convincingly sums them up.7 Following on from Friedrich Schiller and his influential essay on theatre as a moral institution, supporters of the National Theatre movement in Britain advocated its educational function.8 Schiller had claimed that the ‘stehende Schaubühne’ (permanent theatre) was morally instructive and educational, and would ‘provide a channel through which the light of wisdom beams down from the thinking better half of the people’.9 Relating back to Schiller, Henry Irving argued in 1878 that the followers of a future National Theatre ought ‘to have an ideal standard somewhat above the average of contemporary taste’, and William Archer was certain that such a venture would attract ‘more and more attention from the educated and thoughtful portion of the community’.10 Writing in 1886, Archer was relieved to record a fundamental change within British society towards an increased acceptance of the theatre within the last four years, with the Prince of Wales hardly ever missing a first night and many ‘leaders of society’ becoming equally keen playgoers: ‘Statesmen, painters and poets, men of law, men of science, soldiers and divines, all follow with more or less attention the movements of things theatrical.’11 Archer’s focus is entirely on these ‘men of culture’; the general public, the working classes and the vast audiences attending the popular theatre are not included in this discourse. In fact, to the self-proclaimed cultural minority this majority seemed unreliable and unsuitable because ‘it disrupts the exemplary audience’s contemplation of their dramatic patrimony’, as Loren Kruger succinctly puts it.12 The only role that the working classes could have in this kind of undertaking, it seems, was to be the object of an educational endeavour of mass improvement through art. ‘Improvement’ in this concept had definite political undertones

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of keeping the working classes at bay, of persuading them to ‘keep the peace’ and – crucially – putting them in their place. This concept of ‘crowd control’ may be linked to more general fears on the part of the rising middle classes of a working-class invasion of their leisure spaces. In an increasing number of public spaces of entertainment social distinctions were vulnerable, as Peter Bailey has argued.13 It was much safer to imagine the working classes as passive recipients of artistic beauty, prepared and presented to them by representatives of the hegemonic culture who might agree to admit them at ‘small prices’ – if they were lucky.14 For most proponents of the National Theatre movement this also meant that representatives of this hegemonic culture would pay for and invest in such an undertaking. William Archer favoured the idea of a ‘selfsupporting’ house, invested in by ‘a body of art-lovers, who should be content with a moderate interest on this investment’15 – a group of influential men of independent means providing an educational repertoire for Barker’s ‘leisured class’ and Matthew Arnold’s bourgeois theatre-goers – or Schiller’s ‘thinking better half of the people’. However, in contrast to Schiller’s vision for a German National Theatre as means to foster cultural awareness and Germanness in contrast to an overbearing French influence, a National Theatre that in fact could help bring about the absent national unity, in Britain the calls for a National Theatre were almost always linked to an imperial agenda. Henry Arthur Jones posited that an English National Theatre would be an object of national pride and would contribute to the theatre on these isles becoming the ‘admiration instead of the contempt of Europe’.16 Following this concept the National Theatre would turn into ‘the guardian as well as the repository of the dramatic heritage of the nation’.17 The focus on Shakespeare in particular was not concerned with making Shakespearean performances at reduced prices available for everyone. It was not a discourse about democratisation of access, but an endeavour to educate ‘the world through our Shakespeare’.18 Linking to this, a National Theatre was not about safeguarding production standards, supporting new ideas about theatre programming, for example through productions in repertoire, or the fostering of an ensemble culture. Instead the debate almost exclusively focused on political issues and imagined a National Theatre as a representative cultural asset of imperial Britain, intended to enhance her political, economic and military power. The political function of such a future National Theatre as both a vehicle for imperial propaganda and a teaching institution aimed at stabilising social relations called for a repertoire which was conservative rather than avant-

Performance for imagined communities

garde, one which had a consolidating influence and offered the possibility of appreciating great works of art. In the face of the destructive character of the Industrial Revolution, such a repertoire represented ‘the solution exclusively as a return to the contemplation of beauty and, by emphatic implication, to those amateurs already at leisure to appreciate it’.19 The canonical repertoire required by no means reflected the popular taste for melodrama, burlesque and spectacle. Effingham Wilson, one of the first commentators to call for a national playhouse, in 1848 envisaged that such an institution would educate the public through ‘the standardization of the best’.20 In the first edition of A National Theatre: Scheme & Estimates, for example, Harley Granville Barker and William Archer made it quite clear that their National Theatre would not be a pioneering one; on the contrary Archer and Barker display a ‘fundamental loyalty to tradition’.21 Although they were happy to include Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, Molière’s Don Juan and Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Melisande in its repertoire, they stayed well clear of Tolstoy, Gorky, Ibsen, D’Annunzio, Hauptmann and Shaw.22 In that respect, the theatre that Barker, Archer and the cultural critic Matthew Arnold envisioned was not to be a place for artistic experiments, new aesthetic approaches or political plays. On the contrary, ‘it placed the cultural past as a refuge, or point of nostalgic purity, through which national identity could be preserved’.23 Their National Theatre was to preserve the national heritage rather than foster new writing. They wanted a playhouse which would defend Shakespeare’s status as a cultural and national icon, one that would become a showcase venue at the heart of the British Empire.24 Gladstone concurred with much of this thinking and shared with the protagonists of the National Theatre movement the idea of the theatre’s social and cultural function and its importance in delivering a moral education. The purpose of the theatre was not just to amuse the public, but it ‘must always be an indirect mechanism of teaching’, claimed Henry Irving in 1898. In short, the theatre was ‘a potent means of teaching great truths and furthering the spread of education of the higher kind’.25 However, Gladstone linked this understanding with an ideal of the state, which was not ‘appointed to be conversant with material ends alone’.26 Instead this state would be prepared to provide for such a theatre for the wider community. Gladstone’s vision did not seem to have been a theatre for the ‘leisured classes’ or the ‘thinking better half of the people’. His primary motive for a National Theatre was not to cement a status quo in attracting only a particular middle-class audience; it was one of widening access to its teaching function.

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Linking to his Christian piety, the ‘cultivation and improvement’ of workingclass audiences in particular moved Gladstone to call for an official encouragement of the arts and popular education.27 Indeed, one of the recurring themes in Gladstone’s writing concerns the ‘improvement’ of the working man, not in terms of social mobility but in terms of his morals, his mind and his skills.28 On laying the foundation stone for a new elementary school in the parish of St Thomas, Charterhouse, in London’s East End, which aimed at ‘supplying a free education to the children of the costermongers and poor inhabitants of Golden-lane and Whitecross-street’, Gladstone delivered a speech in which he not only emphasised fresh possibilities offered by the school to the very poorest in this deprived area (including entering further education and even university), but also stressed the responsibilities of the affluent West End for the wellbeing of the East End (‘Education of the Poor’, The Times, 9 May 1856). Although the ‘People’s William’ may have been playing to his audience here, there seems to have been a genuine concern (no doubt driven by his Christianity) for the disadvantaged, the less privileged (this does not mean that they are treated as subjects here; they are still at the mercy of the establishment’s philanthropy, and not once do we actually hear from the poor themselves for whom this new school is going to be built). But even though Gladstone remained a paternalist with a feudal image of society, he was perceived as concerning himself with the miseries of the working man’s life. According to Chris Wrigley, ‘the roots of Gladstone’s appeal to a large section of working people’ – or what he termed the ‘masses’ – ‘were in the moral seriousness of his politics, his perceived fairness between classes and his views of a widening electorate’.29 In fact contemporary working-class commentators may have felt that bringing ‘the working man within the pale of the constitution’ was his greatest achievement, as Simon Peaple and John Vincent have argued.30 In keeping with Victorian ideals of self-help and individual betterment,31 Gladstone encouraged the working man to expose himself to and learn from the greatest works of the human mind. This, for him, included theology, classics and philosophy rather than modern languages, technical subjects and sciences. On opening new reading rooms at the Saltney Literary Institute in 1889 Gladstone gave a speech entitled ‘The Workman and his Opportunities’. Here he further developed ideas alluded to in his speech at the opening of St Thomas elementary school in London’s East End (see above). At the outset he made it clear that he did not regard the present event as a ‘mere foundation of a reading room for those who have ample means of furnishing themselves with mental food’ but as the opening of ‘a place of recreation, a place of study, and

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a place of improvement – for our fellow citizens who belong to the class that we call the working men’. Apart from praising some of the social achievements of the last decades (including – by implication – the ones effected by himself ), Gladstone urged users of new reading room to make use of its resources. In particular, he explained that the main purpose of the library was to enlarge the mind, to brace the mind, to enable the people to find pleasure not only in the relaxation of literature, but in the hard work, in the stiff thought of literature. The hard work of literature conveys to those who pursue it in sincerity and truth not only utility, but also real enjoyment.

He continued to make specific suggestions as to what subject the working men of Saltney should be interested in, particularly history, and he urged his listeners to improve themselves by acquiring ‘useful knowledge’.32 In effect Gladstone offered a recipe for self-improvement (he also made comments on thrift and self-reliance), which already went beyond what had been achieved as a result of the Elementary Education Act. At a similar occasion almost thirty years earlier – and well before the passing of the Elementary Education Act – Gladstone addressed the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics’ Institutes in Manchester in 1862 and praised the members for their enthusiasm to take up educational classes at a time of mass unemployment – ‘for here is not leisure, wealth and ease, which come to disport themselves as athletes in intellectual games: it is the hard hand of the worker, which his yet stronger will has taught to wield the pen’.33 Although Gladstone praised the mechanics’ institutes for not relying on financial aid from the state, he clearly saw the limitations of such bodies in providing a general elementary education. Therefore, and contrary to widely accepted ideals of free trade, Gladstone advocated state intervention in the education system.34 Not unlike Matthew Arnold, who in his seminal study Culture and Anarchy (1869) had pilloried middle-class ‘Barbarians and Philistines’ for their disregard of the state (‘for indeed the only State they know of, and think they administer, is the expression of their ordinary self ’),35 Gladstone defended the ‘material aid from the State, by which the skeleton and framework of your education are provided’.36 Although he was not entirely satisfied with the outcome, the 1870 Elementary Education Act did illustrate Gladstone’s growing conviction that the state needed to provide a framework for public life. Gladstone was convinced that market forces could not necessarily be relied upon when it came to providing for the public wellbeing. The fact that by the time of the debates about the Education Bill about two thirds of English children did not receive a proper school education seemed to

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confirm Gladstone’s point.37 After all, the state was ‘the safeguard of the best, purest, and truest portions of the common life’, as Gladstone posited as early as 1841.38 Although hotly debated and fiercely contested at the time, the 1870 Act set in motion a process by which education would become both free and compulsory; a process, too, which shifted working-class aspirations from the ‘securing of a basic literary education to the desire of some form of secondary instruction’.39 The move towards an inclusive constitution and an increasing responsibility of the state was mirrored in Gladstone’s concept of a theatre, which was to uplift, provide moral education and facilitate learning. Therefore, and in contrast to most Victorians, he did not view theatres in purely commercial terms and as business ventures whose chief aim was to produce profits for managers and stakeholders but saw them as having a social function as well. For example, Gladstone took an interest in the devastating effects of the ‘long run’ of West End plays, which was commercially attractive for theatre managers but artistically ruinous, as it seemed to treat playwrights, plays and actors solely as commodities who were needed to guarantee a financial success. The critic Theodore Martin observed: Night after night, for one, two, three, or even four hundred nights, to go on repeating the same parts, in pieces for which they must often find it difficult … must reduce the most elastic spirit, and most lively imagination, to a state of sullen torpor.

In such a theatre system ‘intelligence, culture, ambition, art, are out of the calculation’.40 Gladstone read Martin’s book, which was only printed for ‘private circulation’, with much interest and annotated it throughout. Martin, like Gladstone, did not see theatre as a commercial entity: ‘free-trade has nothing to do with art, whether on the stage or elsewhere. … It never has developed, and never will develop art.’ Gladstone annotated this section with an ‘NB’.41 Theatre as art, as a subject worthy of a serious critical investigation (which even called for its ongoing support), was at odds with the prevailing attitude of Britain’s Christian churches. Many of Gladstone’s fellow Christians continued to view playhouses as places of evil. When the Anglican Church reviewed its stance on leisure and amusements in 1870s and 1880s its veto on the theatre remained unanimous.42 By contrast Gladstone did not only support theatregoing but also viewed recreation in general as something necessary and, in moderation, as ‘nought but change of employment’.43 Crucially, for the purpose of this essay, Gladstone’s view of the positive powers of state intervention had a significant impact on his thinking about

Performance for imagined communities

state subsidies to the arts and towards a future National Theatre in particular. Gladstone’s thinking on this issue developed more clearly in the late 1850s, especially in connection with his admiration of Charles Kean. When Gladstone presided over a dinner given to Kean on his retirement from the stage in 1862, he praised Kean ‘for raising the moral tone of the stage’.44 In fact Kean’s management of the Princess’s Theatre seems to illustrate what Gladstone had in mind when calling for a state-funded National Theatre. By the late 1850s Kean had established himself as London’s leading actor-manager, and his Princess’s as the leading theatre. The Princess’s had managed to attract a cross section of society, and according to one contemporary critic, its audiences extended from ‘the Queen in the Royal Box to the artisan in the gallery’.45 Through its mounting of ‘virtuous’ entertainment such as plays by Shakespeare and Molière, educational melodramas, toga plays and pantomime, this theatre seemed a powerful tool to ‘better’ lower-middle-class and working-class audiences, an aim Gladstone was only too keen to realise. In contrast to most prominent proponents of the National Theatre, however, who envisaged wealthy individuals to fund such a venture, Gladstone called for a state subsidy. In 1857, after meeting Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre and receiving a tour of the playhouse, he noted in his diary that ‘we had long conversation on the question of Government subvention to the Drama’.46 Gladstone returned to the issue repeatedly over the next decades and spoke about it with others. In 1874, on reading Theodore Martin’s Essays on the Drama, Gladstone marked out a section in which Martin stressed the superiority of a state-funded theatre system – a passage with which he clearly concurred: It is true, no doubt, that the superior tone and finish which prevail in the best theatres of France and Germany, are due in a great measure to the fact that being, by reason of the State subventions, less dependent on the caprices of the public taste, they can afford to appeal to a higher culture than theatres, which, like ours, must come to a stand-still unless they can attract the general public.47

In 1878, Gladstone wrote an open letter to the editor of The Theatre, the leading theatre journal of the time.48 He submitted that ‘the drama requires, in order to its prosperity [sic], some great centre of attraction and of elevation’, as was the case with art and the Royal Academy.49 The letter became one of the key texts of the National Theatre movement. The journal returned to it soon afterwards, discussing it in detail in a feature article. The editor concluded that Gladstone ‘would be not unwilling to see the country provide

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for the drama the centre of attraction and of elevation which he believes it to require’.50 A short time later, the journalist and architect George Godwin wrote that the chances of founding a subsidised National Theatre had ‘lately greatly increased’, thanks in large part to Gladstone’s overt encouragement.51 Crucially, this overt encouragement of a subsidised National Theatre had a significant effect on others, too. Henry Irving, for example, changed his opinion on the topic quite dramatically. In the early 1880s, Irving had claimed that theatre ‘must be carried on as a business or it will fail as an art’52 and that a National Theatre would need to be free of state intervention.53 But he changed his stance and from the 1890s onwards demanded state support. As an ‘education medium’, the theatre should be given a ‘proper place in State economy’, said Irving in 1898, emoaning a situation where up to now ‘the State ... has, at the best, been indifferent’ to the performing arts.54 He argued that ‘the State should exercise an influence, ranging between control and aid’ and that the theatre ‘should distinctly be in some degree encouraged by the State or by municipalities’.55 Irving openly acknowledged the link between his thinking and that of Gladstone. When he called for subsidised theatres in a speech in 1894 he was keen to mention that Gladstone endorsed his idea, and even anticipated it.56 Irving asserted that although it would be praiseworthy if a millionaire spent his money to endow a theatre, ‘it would be more to the advantage of the community to feel that the theatre was a department of public service than to see it dependent on individual beneficence [as] libraries, museums and picture-galleries flourish under this civic rule, and I see no reason why a municipal theatre should not be equally advantageous’. He referred to Gladstone’s thinking as an endorsement of his own ideas: ‘I remember that in an interesting conversation I had with Mr. Gladstone on this subject, he expressed the opinion that ... such an experiment as I have sketched to you would have an excellent chance of commanding public favour.’57 Interestingly the differences between the major protagonists of the National Theatre movement and Gladstone also extended to the proposed repertoire of such an institution. Although Gladstone was in agreement with them concerning the avoidance of the more radical social and naturalistic drama that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century his dramatic tastes were not elitist.58 He enjoyed Shakespeare and plays produced in French, Italian or German as much as musicals, operas, melodramas, circus performances and pantomime. He patronised melodramas, comedies and farces at the Globe, the Haymarket, the Royal Olympic, the Prince of Wales, Sadler’s Wells, Her Majesty’s, St James’s, the Princess’s, the Vaudeville and even the Metropolitan

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Music Hall, although the show he saw there ‘was certainly not Athenian’.59 Gladstone saw Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Mary Anderson in Shakespeare at the Lyceum but also enjoyed Pygmalion and Galatea and a double bill of The Cup and The Corsican Brothers with its ‘beautiful mise en scène’.60 He commented on the ‘excellent acting’ in Ingomar at the Gaiety;61 admired ballet at the Alhambra (‘the prettiest & best ballet I ever saw’);62 attended variety at the Royal Aquarium;63 saw Olivia, My Milliner’s Bill, Devotion and Young Mrs Winthrop at the Court;64 followed A Pair of Spectacles at the Garrick ‘with the greatest keenness’;65 and admired the Italian actor Tommaso Salvini in Alexandre Soumet’s Il gladiatore as ‘manifestly an actor of real greatness’ at the Haymarket.66 In conclusion, Gladstone concurred with much of the thinking of the most influential supporters of the National Theatre movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The theatre seems to represent a fascinating link to one of the pillars of Gladstonian liberalism, one that was ‘based on a stable, moral order, founded on an alliance between the great landed estates and the church’.67 A repertoire that avoided the controversial social drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and instead helped sustain the status quo served this bill perfectly, and was in line with calls put forward by Barker, Archer and others for a canonical repertoire of established classics to suit both middle-class tastes and an imperial agenda. At the same time Gladstone’s ideal National Theatre was not reliant on the philanthropy of some wealthy individuals. It was not meant to be a socially exclusive affair with high ticket prices, but seemed to become part of the catalogue of responsibilities of a state. This state had come to accept (albeit slowly) its responsibility towards providing access to a basic education for everyone. In effect, therefore, Gladstone’s vision of a state-funded National Theatre that facilitated access for working-class audiences stood in direct opposition to the established positions of the National Theatre movement. In fact, many of the leading protagonists of this movement questioned the importance of the reforms in public education. Henry Arthur Jones complained about the ‘vast sums that are now spent – nay, that in many cases are now wasted – on public education’.68 Although the terms Gladstone used, such as ‘education’, ‘enriching the mind’ and ‘self-improvement’, have a patronising ring to modern readers, and we have seen that the working man himself was rarely heard as he continued to be spoken to and spoken for, Gladstone had the – possibly naive – vision of the liberating qualities of great works of knowledge and art. In fact Gladstone’s vision of ‘enriching’ the mind through works of theatre art points to a wider

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phenomenon which has recently been persuasively discussed by Richard Schoch. In his article on the 1866 Select Committee on Theatrical Licences and Regulations Schoch posits that the committee members were in fact less patronising and more progressive than they have been given credit for and that their endeavour to get Shakespeare into the music hall was based on their hope for a ‘shared culture that would unit all segments of the population’. Schoch argues that rather than the impetus in this moment in history being ‘hegemonic force … exercised over a marginalised community’,69 it may have been a different one, and one with which Gladstone would have concurred: the utopian non-elitist vision of a society unified through culture. Whereas the members of the Select Committee, however, mainly related to Shakespeare, the ‘People’s William’ displayed a theatrical taste which included (even championed) popular forms of entertainment and a performance tradition which remained sidelined by the protagonists of the National Theatre movement: melodrama, pantomime, burlesque, even circus. Gladstone was prepared to acknowledge the ‘merit’ of a far wider range of performances – including the popular theatre – than most of the major proponents of the National Theatre movement. Gladstone’s vision of a National Theatre, therefore, seems not to have been chiefly focused on presenting a canonical repertoire of established masterpieces for the ‘leisured theatre-goer’. By contrast his ideas are much more inclusive and less patronising. This qualification also means that the findings of current research on the National Theatre movement (and in particular the work of Loren Kruger and Kristen Guest) need to be added to. Notes 1 Simon Peaple and John Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London: Hambledon, 1998), p. 72. 2 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 202–4. In particular Gladstone failed to secure public funds to be paid to the Church of England in return for its provision of elementary education; see Richard Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 2: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 81. 3 Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 84. 4 Henry Arthur Jones, The Foundations of a National Drama (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), pp. 6–7, 17, 114. 5 Harley Granville Barker, The Exemplary Theatre (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), p. 286. 6 Matthew Arnold, ‘The French Play in London’, The Nineteenth Century (August 1879), p. 239.

Performance for imagined communities 7 Kruger, The National Stage, p. 101. 8 Schiller’s 1785 treatise was entitled ‘The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution’ (see the abbreviated English translation in George W. Brandt and Wiebe Hogendoorn (eds), German and Dutch Theatre 1600–1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 217–21). 9 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5:9, rev. edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 828. 10 Irving, quoted in Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving, vol. 1 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), p. 257; William Archer, About the Theatre: Essays and Studies (London: Fisher Unwin, 1886), p. 3. 11 Archer, About the Theatre, pp. 4–5. 12 Kruger, The National Stage, p. 100. 13 See Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 17–18. 14 See John Martin-Harvey speaking in 1919, quoted in Kruger, The National Stage, pp. 124–5. 15 Archer, About the Theatre, pp. 272–3. 16 Jones, Foundations of a National Drama, preface, p. vii. 17 Kruger, The National Stage, p. 97. 18 Quoted from Parliamentary Debates, 1913, quoted in Kruger, The National Stage, p. 126. 19 Kruger, The National Stage, p. 101. 20 Quoted in John Elsom and Nicholas Tomalin, The History of the National Theatre (London: Cape, 1978), p. 7. 21 Kruger, The National Stage, p. 96. 22 See William Archer and Harley Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Scheme & Estimates (London: Duckworth, 1907), p. 44. 23 Kristen Guest, ‘Culture, Class, and Colonialism: The Struggle for an English National Theatre, 1879–1913’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11:2 (2006), p. 296. 24 As an aside, this was an approach which was in fact not too different from that of East Germany’s Berliner Ensemble under Bertolt Brecht and after. The government of the German Democratic Republic was keen to promote its support of the arts internationally and allowed the Berliner Ensemble to tour widely. 25 Henry Irving, speech on receiving an honorary doctorate, Cambridge, 15 June 1898, quoted in Jeffrey Richards (ed. and intro.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society: Essays, Addresses and Lectures (Keele: Ryburn Publishing and Keele University Press, 1994), pp. 223, 227–8. 26 William Ewart Gladstone, The State in its Relations with the Church, 4th rev. edn, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1841), vol. 1, p. 151. 27 Gladstone, State in its Relations, p. 81. 28 See Peaple and Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, p. 72. 29 Chris Wrigley, ‘Gladstone and Labour’, in Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel (eds), William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 51.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 30 Gladstone used this phrase in a Commons debate on 11 May 1864. Peaple and Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, p. 83. 31 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, ed. and with intro. by Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Self-Help was first published in 1860. 32 The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, MP, The Workman and his Opportunities: A Discourse. Delivered at the Saltney Literary Institute, on the Opening of the New Reading and Recreation Rooms. October 26th, 1889 (London: New Book Court, n.d.), pp. 3, 4, 12, 19. 33 Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Address and Speeches Delivered at Manchester on the 23rd and 24th of April 1862 (London: John Murray, 1862), p. 31. 34 We should note, however, Peter Bailey’s convincing argument that contemporaneous belief in free trade assumed that free art and free self-culture would follow on as natural consequences. This posed problems for the Victorian middle classes since such a system would allow anonymity – and an escape from moralistic supervision – for those attending the popular entertainments (see Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance, p. 20). 35 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Stefan Collini (ed.), Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 183. 36 Gladstone in a Commons debate in 1856 as recorded in The Times, 12 April 1856. 37 Figures established by a report of the Royal Commission in 1861. Still, state intervention in educational matters was heavily criticised. Representatives from the different factions criticised too much continuing church influence on public education whereas their opponents lamented the increasing erosion of that influence. A large number of petitions were brought before the House of Commons (see, for example, a series of articles in The Times in June and July 1870). See also Mr Gladstone and the Schools’: A Letter to the Editor of the Manchester Guardian (Bangor: Jarvis & Foster, 1904). For another similarly damning Church of England view see Malcolm MacColl, The Education Question and the Liberal Party (London: Longmans, 1902). Increasingly, though, England was out of step with developments elsewhere. Prussia had established successful state schooling in 1794. 38 Peaple and Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, p. 78. 39 Michael Sanderson, Education, Economic Change and Society in England, 1780–1870 (Oxford: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 59–60. This desire was exactly what a significant section of conservative England feared. Instead commentators praised the old voluntary system where rich benefactors had provided schooling for the poor, and those poor, in turn, had ‘felt grateful to the donors’ (Compulsory Education as Opposed to the Liberty of the Citizen by a Late Member of a Local School Board Committee, London: William Ridgway, 1875, p. 2). 40 Theodore Martin, Essays on the Drama (London: n.p., 1874), pp. 179–80. 41 Martin, Essays on the Drama, p. 211. 42 See Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance, p. 23. See also Richard Foulkes, Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Performance for imagined communities 43 Quoted in Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance, p. 25. 4 4 Richard Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1: 1809–1865 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), p. 392. See also George Barnett Smith, The Life of the Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone. vol. 2, 2nd edn (London: Cassell, 1879), pp. 484, 486; and John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 528. 45 Quoted in Richard W. Schoch, ‘Theater and Mid-Victorian Society’, in Joseph Donohue (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2: 1660 to 1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 342. 46 M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence, 1824–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–94, vol. 5, entry for 12 May 1857. 47 Martin, Essays on the Drama, p. 324. 48 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry for 9 March 1878. 49 Gladstone, letter to the editor, The Theatre, 13 March 1878, p. 103. 50 ‘A Subsidised Theatre for London’, The Theatre, 1 August 1878, p. 8. 51 George Godwin, ‘The National Theatre Question’, The Theatre, 1 December 1878, p. 349. This article was based on a public lecture Godwin had presented at the Social Science Congress. See also the journal’s lead article ‘The Past Year at the Theatres’, 1 January 1879, p. 399. 52 Irving, speech to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, 8 November 1881, quoted in Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor, p. 89. 53 Irving, speech at the Social Science Congress in 1878, quoted in Whitworth, pp. 31–3. 54 Irving, speech at Cambridge, 15 June 1898, quoted in Richards (ed.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, pp. 223, 227. 55 Quoted in Richards (ed.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, pp. 228–9. A few years later, at a speech in Buffalo, New York, in 1902, Irving claimed, ‘I doubt not that by and by every great city will have its own theatre built by its municipality’ (Richards (ed.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, p. 234). 56 Irving, presidential address to the Walsall Literary Institute, 26 September 1894, originally published in The Theatre in December 1894; reprinted in Richards (ed.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, pp. 206–12. 57 Richards (ed.), Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, p. 212. 58 For more details on Gladstone’s theatre-going see Anselm Heinrich, ‘William Gladstone and the Theatre’, Theatre Survey, 52:1 (2011), pp. 83–103. 59 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry for 21 July 1877. 60 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, entry for 3 January 1881. 61 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, entry for 27 April 1883. 62 This was Alfred Thompson’s Yolande; Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry for 25 September 1877. 63 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry for 2 July 1877. 6 4 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry 20 July 1878; and vol. 11, entries for 30 April 1884, 17 May 1884 and 18 November 1884.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 65 As noted by Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, former private secretary to Gladstone (1880–85), in his unpublished diary (held at the British Library, London), entry for 18 March 1890 (also referred to in Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 12, p. 279 n. 1). 66 Foot and Matthew (eds), Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9, entry for 7 May 1875. As an aside it may be interesting to note that Gladstone’s ideas about what theatre ought to do also resulted in his speaking out when he thought these ideals were violated. On witnessing, with a party including Henry Irving, James Albery’s play Two Roses at the Vaudeville Theatre, he did not only find the ‘acting mostly poor’ but also disliked its ‘sneers at dissenting religion’. It seems that Gladstone even tried to persuade his secretary to start a campaign of protest against the production, the outcome of which is unknown. 67 Peaple and Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’, p. 74. 68 Jones, Foundations of a National Drama, p. 115. 69 Richard Schoch, ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 241, 246.

6 Women’s suffrage and theatricality Sos Eltis

P

erformance was at the heart of the women’s suffrage campaign. It was, as Lisa Tickner declares in the title of her study of the imagery of the campaign, a ‘spectacle of women’.1 By 1907 the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, had acknowledged that the suffragists had won the ‘political argument’, but had yet to win ‘the political day’, for that they must learn the lesson from men who ‘know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movements, and for establishing that force majeure which actuates and arms a government for effective work’: suffragists must prove not only the justice of their cause, but its popularity and political urgency.2 Suffragists harnessed display, performance and the visual arts as a key to fulfilling this demand; as the playwright, actress and suffragist Cicely Hamilton declared, ‘it was the first political agitation to organise the arts in its aid’.3 Large-scale public processions became a central and increasingly spectacular tactic, from the first ‘Mud March’ of February 1907, in which 3,000 women processed from Hyde Park Corner to Exeter Hall, to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies demonstration of June 1908, enhanced by embroidered banners, and the Pageant of Women’s Trades and Professions of April 1909, where crowds could enjoy a parade of well-known actresses alongside female graduates in their gowns, and nurses marked out by their professional uniforms. The Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL) and the Actresses’ Franchise League were founded in 1908 with the explicit purpose of harnessing the arts in the service of the suffrage cause, producing propaganda literature and a host of plays, sketches and monologues to enliven meetings and draw the crowds. The theatricality at the heart of women’s political activism from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the First World War was not, however, simply a matter of making clear the popularity of their demands. Feminist

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activists and writers were also deploying spectacle and performance tactically to challenge notions of woman’s ‘true nature’, her ‘natural’ sphere of activity and what constituted ‘womanliness’. Militant acts of civil disobedience and symbolic violence against property were inherently theatrical, not designed to instil fear or seriously to undermine the infrastructure of government, but rather to command public attention to the passionate commitment of the suffragettes and their rejection of existing male-controlled systems of law and justice, but also to the protestors’ enduring femininity: as Cicely Hamilton remarked, the militants were far more concerned with fashionable appearance than their non-militant colleagues, and their dress ‘usually included a picture hat when they went out smashing windows’.4 Methodology and subject matter intertwined as campaigners used demonstrations, plays and marches to examine the role of performance, costume and the male gaze in constructing accepted notions of the feminine, while asking the crucial question of what ‘woman’ really is. The roots of the suffrage campaigners’ spectacular tactics, and the rationale that underpinned them, lay in the earlier campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the first organised women’s political movement in England. The Contagious Diseases Acts, first introduced in 1864 and extended in 1866 and 1869, empowered police to arrest any woman suspected of being a prostitute, subject her to a genital examination and, if she was found to be infected with venereal disease, imprison her for up to six months in a Lock Hospital. Designed to combat the spread of venereal disease, in particular among the country’s armed forces, the Acts enshrined the sexual double standard; men were subject to no such inspections, compulsory treatment or imprisonment. These regulations, as repeal campaigners pointed out, made women’s civil rights entirely contingent upon the appearance of respectability; a policeman needed to provide no grounds for his judgement that a woman was a prostitute. The power of the male gaze was thus enshrined in law, while woman’s liberty depended upon her performance of acceptable femininity. Advocates of the Contagious Diseases Acts defended the denial of civil rights to prostitutes by arguing that such women were not only a threat to public health, but had, by nature of their occupation, ceased to be wholly human; as William Acton, a fervent champion of the Acts, explained, the prostitute is ‘a woman with half the woman gone, and that half containing all that elevates her nature, leaving her a mere instrument of impurity ... a mercenary human tigress’.5 Repeal campaigners were similarly deemed to have surrendered their claim to womanhood by speaking publicly about such matters; so one

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journalist described their leader, Josephine Butler, as ‘an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame’.6 Noting that under the Acts ‘every woman is legally placed beyond the pale of the Constitution’, Butler and her fellow campaigners responded in kind by emphasising a ‘deeply awakened common womanhood’ between respectable women and their fallen sisters; ‘We no more covet the name of ladies; we are all women’, she declared.7 Campaigners spectacularly demonstrated their conviction that femininity did not preclude speaking publicly on prostitution and venereal disease; borrowing techniques from the American temperance movement, they held candle-lit prayer meetings and vigils with protesters clothed symbolically in white to stage the moral purity of both themselves and their cause.8 As critics such as Judith Walkowitz, Amanda Vickery and Lynda Nead have established, public and private space was far more complexly constituted than any simple divide between domestic and urban might suggest, as public parks and department stores offered an expanded sphere to bourgeois women.9 Nonetheless, women’s presence in such spaces was predicated upon a performance of respectability that pretended that a woman neither looked at nor was looked upon; as one conduct book advised: ‘Never look behind you in the street, nor about you so as to attract attention. Do not talk or laugh loud out of doors; indeed, no lady ought to laugh so as to be heard in the street.’10 Suffrage marches and processions were thus not just a visible demonstration of the depth and breadth of support for the movement; they were also part of a conscious strategy to recondition the male gaze and challenge connections between a woman’s visible presence in a public space and her sexual availability. Maud Arncliffe-Sennett, who carried a banner of Queen Victoria in a National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies march in June 1908, endured heckles likening the marchers to prostitutes, and later commented that the suffragists were fighting precisely ‘to purge from these minds the connection of Women and the Street’.11 Redefining woman’s sphere and challenging assumptions about female respectability were similarly motivations behind suffragists advertising meetings and selling papers in the street; as Elizabeth Robins commented, a suffragist engaged in such activities ‘is contributing no small share to doing away with the European equivalent for the Eastern woman’s veil, i.e. that shrinking from publicity which has been elevated into a virtue, and which has so powerfully aided men in preserving their sex-dominance’.12 Suffrage assertions of women’s right to occupy the street and position themselves within a public gaze were just one aspect of a wider debate about the essential nature of woman. So Cicely Hamilton opened her polemical

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treatise, Marriage as a Trade (1909), by explaining that she must define her feminine use of the word ‘woman’ lest male readers confuse it with their contrary understanding: ‘By a woman, then, I understand an individual human being whose life is her own concern; whose worth ... is in no way advanced or detracted from by the accident of marriage’, as against the male understanding of woman ‘as something having a definite physical relation to man; without that definite and necessary relation she is, as the cant phrase goes “incomplete”. That is to say, she is not woman at all – until man has made her so.’13 Defining woman in more precise terms was, however, anything but simple. Anti-suffrage arguments were rooted in notions of women’s inherent intellectual inferiority – their lack of that ‘calmness of temperament’ and ‘balance of mind’ which would enable them to undertake weighty judgements in political affairs – and their particular qualities of ‘sympathy and disinterestedness’ which would be eroded by participating in party politics, and would take them away from their ‘proper sphere and highest duty, which is maternity’.14 Feminist and suffragist conceptions of woman’s essential nature were more diverse, ranging from those who argued that women’s moral superiority and sympathy were needed as a direct influence in politics, to those who argued that the notion of woman’s particularly sympathetic and self-sacrificing nature was itself a convenient male-authored myth. There was little coherence among feminists on the question of how far women were or should be like men; Emily Davies campaigned for women to receive the same education as men, for example, while Josephine Butler believed that female education must be tailored to preserve her particular womanliness.15 There was, however, widespread agreement among feminists that women’s innate abilities and potential were not fully realised under current social conditions: analogies with Chinese foot-binding and caged birds were common currency.16 The difficulty was determining or asserting what women’s ‘true’ nature might be. As Cicely Hamilton explained, Practically every woman I know has two distinct natures: a real and an acquired; that which she has by right of birth and heritage, and that which she has been taught she ought to have – and often thinks she has attained to. And it is quite impossible even for another woman, conscious of the same division of forces in herself, to forecast which of these two conflicting temperaments will come uppermost at a given moment.17

Not only could no woman be sure at what moment her ‘real’ or her performed social self might take command, but as Hamilton further argued, years of trained insincerity left women often unconscious of their own performances.

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Conventional norms and assumptions about women’s abilities, nature and role needed to be challenged in order to secure women’s emancipation. To present gender differences as no more than a set of performed practices, roles and images risked emptying out the crucial notion of female commonality that underlay the suffrage campaign and its crucial argument for direct female enfranchisement: the fact of being a woman – the common consciousness, nature or experience – that united women of different classes, races, incomes and abilities, and meant that women could better represent other women’s interests than any man could do. Nor were feminists willing to root the notion of ‘woman’ in the body; a key tenet of feminist campaigns was to fight against the reduction of women to their bodies’ potential for childbearing and male sexual pleasure, to challenge the doctrine, as Christabel Pankhurst put it, that ‘woman is sex and beyond that nothing’.18 There was thus widespread agreement about the false images and performances that constituted conventional notions of respectable womanhood, but little consensus on what the ‘true’ nature of woman might be. Yet precisely such truthful representation was a challenge set to those placing their creativity at the service of the feminist cause, as urged by the WWSL and the Actresses’ Franchise League. ‘[L]ife described fearlessly from the woman’s standpoint’ remained an ‘almost virgin field’, Robins informed the WWSL, exhorting her fellow writers to represent for the first time the ‘Real Girl’.19 Nor was female authorship any guarantee of truth; as Elizabeth Robins warned, the female writer ‘wrote her stories as she fashioned her gowns and formed her manners, and for the same reason; in literature following meekly in the steps of the forgotten Master, the first tribal story-teller, inventor of that chimera, “the man’s woman”’.20 The challenge facing such writers was to dispel false stereotypes, while acknowledging the difficulty of realising a ‘true’ female identity when women’s consciousness, including their own, had been shaped by the very conditioning they sought to critique. Feminist writers and activists, both male and female, were well aware of the complexity of these issues, demonstrating in their responses a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of performance and its relation to the politics of gender and identity, in the street, on the page and on the stage. Lady Constance Lytton is prominent in suffrage history for using theatrical disguise to highlight the differential treatment given to suffragists of different classes, undermining official claims to justice and humane treatment for all prisoners. Lytton was first arrested in October 1909 and was kept in the Holloway prison hospital wing and released after only two days on hunger-

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strike because she had a weak heart, whereas her lower-class companions were consigned to the third division of the prison and offered no such careful medical observation. In January 1910, Lytton therefore dressed herself as the working-class ‘Jane Warton’, in which guise she was arrested, imprisoned and force-fed eight times without her heart being properly checked, as a result of which she suffered a paralysing stroke soon after her release. Lytton’s account of her conversion to the suffrage cause and her subsequent i­mprisonment, Prisons and Prisoners (1914), deploys notions of performance, identity and the power of the public gaze over women’s lives, in order to critique social constructions of womanhood while offering an intimate narrative of her own experiences. Her political conversion is represented as awakening from a life of empty performance: as ‘one of that numerous gang of upper class leisured class spinsters, unemployed, unpropertied, unendowed, uneducated’, she had been confined to a sphere in which a woman’s ‘whole life is spent in the preservation of appearances, and she seems hardly ever to probe down to the bone of realities’.21 Lytton’s account of prison life is graphic and minutely detailed, right down to the inadequate length of the prison underwear given her long limbs, the routines of slopping out, and the task of mopping her vomit which falls to another female prisoner when she is too weak after forced-feeding to clean it up herself. Labour and subjection to male-enforced systems of control are the realities which bind women together, from the experience of cleaning laundry which connects Lytton to the working women for whom she campaigns, to the fellowship which crystallises in the back of a police van between the suffragettes, prostitutes and drunken homeless women, united by ‘the bond of the outcast’.22 It is the women who acquiesce in the system, by contrast, whose lives are a false performance, from the wardresses who ‘wore a mask’ to conceal their own personality, to the society women who transform subjection into an idealised principle because ‘A maiming subserviency is so conditional to their very existence that it becomes an aim in itself, an ideal.’23 Lytton’s disguise as Jane Warton, making herself deliberately ugly by cutting her hair and wearing stage glasses, revealed not only the snobbery behind the differential treatment of higher-class inmates, but also woman’s valuation by outward appearance, as her earlier imprisonment had taught her that ‘prisoners of unprepossessing appearance obtained least favour’.24 Most remarkable, however, is the way in which Lytton used narrative form to enact the complex relation between herself and the working-class role she inhabited. ‘Jane Warton’ is granted equal billing as author of the memoir, originally entitled Prisons and Prisoners. Some Personal Experiences. By Constance Lytton

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and Jane Warton, Spinster, and within the narrative she is granted as concrete an existence as the working women she represents, while Lytton herself can only speak on her behalf without presuming to inhabit her consciousness. So Lytton recounts the traumatic aftermath of her first force-feeding: As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but, as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval, and he seemed to take for granted that my distress was assumed. At first it seemed such an utterly contemptible thing to have done that I could only laugh in my mind. Then suddenly I saw Jane Warton lying before me, and it seemed as if I were outside of her. She was the most despised, ignorant and helpless prisoner that I had seen. When she had served her time and was out of the prison, no one would believe anything she said, and the doctor when he had fed her by force and tortured her body, struck her on the cheek to show how he despised her! That was Jane Warton, and I had come to help her.25

As Barbara Green has argued, the distance that Lytton here maintains from Jane Warton serves a dual purpose: ‘both to recognize that shared experience takes you beyond the individual body toward community and activism and to refuse the notion that experience is ever simple or “authentic”. Bringing together, in an almost impossible connection, the terms “experience” and “performance”, Lytton refuses the right to speak for other women and instead earns the right to speak.’26 Lytton’s narrative positioning can also be understood as a careful preservation of the distinction between actress and role, a textual version of Brechtian performance in which the audience is asked to remain conscious of the theatrical pretence and thus made aware of the underlying power dynamics that are being represented and revealed. In order to appreciate the strategies employed by feminist playwrights, it is vital to understand Victorian theatrical conventions and the innovative techniques introduced by the first performances of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. Melodrama, the central theatrical mode of the nineteenth century, was rooted in a cast of recognisable stock characters, and structured around complex plots that climaxed in the revelation of guilt and innocence, with villainy unmasked and virtue applauded.27 This fundamental structure can be seen deployed in a host of plays which mock feminist aspirations, as, for example, Tom Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep (1855), in which Mrs Mildmay assumes authority over her husband, until the unmasking of her would-be seducer reveals her foolishness and brings her to a proper recognition of her intrinsic inferiority. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) received its first professional performance in England in 1889, and exercised a vital influence on the notion of performed gender roles and how feminist debates could be staged.

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A Doll’s House represented the Helmers’ marriage as an orgy of play-acting; Nora hides the secret that she has forged a cheque to finance her husband’s healthcare, but more vitally she believes in an idealised image of her husband as the protective male who would take her crime upon himself, while she is the self-sacrificing woman who would commit suicide rather than let him do so. Her awakening comes when Torvald discovers her crime and rejects her, dismissing as ‘tragic airs’ and ‘fine speeches’ her determination to kill herself – the irony being that her commitment to such a melodramatic role is sincere.28 When the threat of blackmail is lifted, Torvald attempts to resume his performance as chivalrous ‘hawk’ who will protect his ‘hunted dove’, but Nora, realising that her husband is not the fairy-tale hero she imagined him to be, changes ‘costume’ and leaves for the real world outside her front door (Act III, pp. 114–15). Crucially, A Doll’s House does not end with any revelation of ‘truth’ beneath the couple’s performances; Nora envisions a ‘miracle of miracles’ in which theirs would become a ‘real’ marriage, but their journey to such a future has not even begun – and Nora’s departure alone in the night rather than waiting for daylight does not indicate any abandonment of her melodramatising tendencies (Act III, p. 124). They are so steeped in performance that it is impossible to identify where acting ends and any notion of ‘true’ identity or feeling might begin: Nora’s tarantella is simultaneously a seductive display to distract her husband and an increasingly frenetic expression of her pent-up fear and tension; even Torvald’s lust for his wife involves him imagining her still a newly wed virgin. Performing Ibsen required an entirely new acting technique, which involved stepping outside the conventional gender roles which the play critiques and which are so deeply embedded in the characters’ consciousness. As George Bernard Shaw commented, performing an Ibsen character could leave a conventional actor ‘constantly striving to get back to familiar ground by reducing his part to one of the stage types with which he is familiar, and which he has learnt to present by rule of thumb’.29 Such attempts only de-Ibsenise the plays into melodrama or farcical comedy, whereas ‘The whole point of an Ibsen play lies in the exposure of the very conventions upon which are based those by which the actor is ridden.’30 On and off stage, Nora became an icon of feminist rebellion, and her assertion of a higher duty to herself above her duties as wife and mother became a catchphrase for stage versions of the New Woman.31 Ibsen’s plays became a battleground for contesting views of what constituted ‘true’ womanhood,

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with anti-feminists reasserting the naturalness of the roles he challenged; so the Examiner of Plays, E. F. S. Pigott, explained to an inquiry into theatrical censorship in 1892: [A]ll the characters in Ibsen’s plays appear to me morally deranged. All the heroines are dissatisfied spinsters who look on marriage as a monopoly, or dissatisfied married women in a chronic state of rebellion against not only the conditions which nature has imposed on their sex, but against all the duties and obligations of mothers and wives; and as for the men they are all rascals or imbeciles.32

To Pigott, Nora and her sisters were not casting off false roles, but protesting hopelessly against the conditions of nature itself. Audiences too fell within this diagnostic gaze; the men and women attending the English premiere of Ghosts in 1891 were characterised by a reviewer in Truth as the ‘unwomanly woman, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats. … Effeminate men and male women’.33 On stage, conservative responses reverted to the melodramatic tropes of truth and revelation, rejecting Ibsenite feminism as itself a false performance. So the eponymous heroine of Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) wears an austerely ugly dress and preaches against marriage and the sexual subjection of women, seeking a purely spiritual ‘free union’ with her married lover; but when she sees herself losing her hold over him, she dons a low-cut dress and declares that ‘My sex has found me out.’34 Agnes discards her radical politics and discovers her true womanly nature – which is expressed in tears, trembling and a brief fainting fit, together with a rediscovered respect for the Bible – and retires to a vicarage, wondering at her previous self-delusion in which ‘I – I was to lead women! I was to show them ... how laws – laws made and laws that are natural – may be set aside or slighted’ (Act IV, p. 133). Pinero presents female radicalism as a self-deluding act, complete with ugly costume, while conventional femininity is an inner truth, laid bare as the natural law of a woman’s inner being. The difference between Pinero’s and Ibsen’s characterisation is crucial: where Pinero asserts a core truth, Ibsen strips away layers of illusion, performance and self-deception only to reveal more layers beneath. Nora leaves to begin her journey of self-discovery; Ghosts ends with Mrs Alving’s impossible choice as to whether to give her son the death he desires or to devote the rest of her life to nursing him in his dementia. It is impossible to know what either woman will do next; the plays do not end with a revealed truth, but with the beginning of a further journey, not just a state of being but a process of becoming.

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This became a crucial element in feminist plays of the succeeding decades: the myths, false ideals, self-deceptions and distorting performances generated by conventional, male-dictated gender roles might be stripped off, but no simple ‘truth’ was to replace them. One major strain in feminist playwrights’ theatrical engagement with prevailing debates on gender roles was a politicised realism, laying bare the economic, social and physical realities which underlaid convenient social myths about women’s lives. Realist rewritings of the ‘fallen woman play’, such as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) and Antonia Williams’s The Street (1907), refuted conventional notions of prostitution as the result of female sexual weakness, and identified the underlying causation as poverty, low wages and limited employment opportunities. As Sheila Stowell has elegantly argued in ‘Rehabilitating Realism’, their realist dramaturgy was politically radical, aiming to raise consciousness and bring about a change in the social conditions they represented.35 Dramatists were careful, however, to reveal the truth about social conditions but not about the women whose lives were shaped and limited by them; plays such as Inez Bensusan’s The Apple (1909), Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women! (1907), Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s (1908) and Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Sons (1912) show how women’s lives are constricted by sexual subjection, economic dependence, low wages and familial duty, but each play ends on a deliberate note of uncertainty, as its female protagonist hesitates between choices or steps out into an uncertain future. Diana of Dobson’s, for example, is a rewriting of Cinderella in naturalistic terms, where an overworked and exhausted shop assistant escapes the long hours, poor diet and cripplingly low wages that dictate her every waking hour. A small windfall inheritance enables her to buy not only fashionable dresses and a holiday in the Alps, but ‘politeness, consideration, and yes, I don’t mind confessing it – admiration’.36 Reversing Constance Lytton’s masquerade as a working woman, Diana dresses up, not down, but similarly experiences the ways in which appearance and social class determine a woman’s value as a human being. Where her labour gained her no social recognition or status, once transported to the leisure classes, Diana becomes a desirable commodity – a status made plain when Sir Jabez Grinley, owner of the store in which she used to work, ‘feels the quality of goods in her sleeve’ before proposing to her – a proposal she rejects, refusing to share the wealth derived from women’s sweated labour. The play ends with Diana, destitute, hungry and homeless, accepting a marriage proposal from a man she may or may not love: the question is left deliberately unclear. Mirroring the argument of Hamilton’s Marriage as

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a Trade, the play locates marriage as the only socially sanctioned and financially rewarding profession for women, leaving open the question of whether any woman can enter a marriage in genuinely disinterested love under such conditions. A converse strain within feminist dramaturgy was a comically heightened theatricality, involving meta-theatrical self-consciousness, familiar plot structures, roles and tropes redeployed to disrupt expectations and dismantle underlying assumptions, challenging and complicating assumed realities. George Bernard Shaw combined a naturalistic analysis of underlying causation with such heightened theatricality in his comic dramatisation of contemporary sexual politics, The Philanderer (1893). Shaw turned his attention to gender relations and marriage, centring on the intrigues of Leonard Charteris, a self-styled bohemian, who has become romantically involved with two women: the jealous and tempestuous Julia Craven and the rational New Woman Grace Tranfield. All three are members of the Ibsen Club, whose rules exclude womanly women and manly men, which poses a considerable problem for Julia, who is the embodiment of the womanly woman, emotionally manipulative and emptily theatrical. She constantly throws herself in pathetic poses and adopts dramatic roles, and when her posturing fails to impress Grace, Julia responds by ‘trying her theatrical method in a milder form: reasonable and impulsively goodnatured instead of tragic’.37 Julia’s performance of vulnerable femininity does, however, convince Grace’s father, who as a theatre critic and admirer of Jones, Pinero and Grundy describes his life as spent ‘witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men’ (p. 159), and believes in the reality of such productions. The rules of the Ibsen Club are, however, revealed as simply another performance, as exemplified by the comic costume of Julia’s liberated younger sister, ‘a mountaineering suit of Norfolk jacket and breeches with … detachable cloth skirt’ (p. 167). Nor does playing the role of New Woman empower Julia; Charteris simply mimics her pseudo-feminist stance and claims a parallel right to sexual freedom. Under grossly unequal marriage laws, the power remains in male hands; so Grace decides that ‘I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power’ (p. 185). As Shaw noted in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a new ideal always takes the place of a dead one, just ‘less of an illusion than the one it has supplanted’.38 But beneath this enforced play acting lies real emotion: Charteris laughs while ‘The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen

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sorrow’ (p. 190). Julia and Grace can feel deeply, though their society allows them no means of expressing it openly, offering them the invidious choice between suppression and pretence. Stepping outside the artificial roles of conventional femininity did not liberate women from social and legal structures, the male gaze or their internalisation of gendered roles and expectations. If there was no space free from performance, a central suffrage strategy was to train their audiences in reading and negotiating theatricality. Meta-theatrical reference abounded, from the all-star cast of actresses foreseeing their own professional success in Christopher St John’s The First Actress (1911) to Ellen Terry’s appearing as Nance Oldfield in Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women in 1909 and declaring that, if male Prejudice had his way, ‘The stage would be as dull as now ’tis merry, / No Oldfield, Woffington, or – Ellen Terry!’39 Actresses and roles blend, separate and comment upon each other, staging both women’s professional and artistic prowess, and their ownership of performance and its power. Such theatrical playfulness lay at the heart of suffrage sketches such as Mrs Harlow Phibbs’s The Mother’s Meeting (1913), where truth-telling is delivered as a comic drama of misconceptions. The voice of common sense is Mrs Puckle, a working-class mother of eight, who comfortably chats with the audience about how she attended a mothers’ meeting to please the vicar’s wife, and what the speaker said there: ‘The woman’s fear is the ’ome’, she says, which sounded a bit dotty; ‘let her stay in it and cherish it.’ … Then she got onto the law business, ’ow men made laws so well and careful for women and knew so much better what we wanted than we did ourselves … ‘Fact is’, she says very slow and solemn, as if she’d just thought of something nobody’d ever found out before, ‘the ’ole jest of the matter lies in this, that MAN IS MAN AND WOMAN IS WOMAN.’40

Unable to contain herself, Mrs Puckle points out that widows and those with sick husbands must necessarily leave the home to work, while man-made laws deny wives rights over their own children. Only when she is congratulated on her heckling by delighted suffragettes does Mrs Puckle realise that she has accidentally attended an anti-suffrage meeting. The voice of common sense is thus also the confused centre of overlapping performances, who is taking part in one meeting while thinking she is present in another. In Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s popular suffrage play How the Vote was Won (1909) female stereotypes are redeployed from their customary theatrical settings. The home of an ardent anti-suffragist, Horace Cole, is invaded

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by a host of female relatives: a spinster landlady, an overworked governess, an elegant milliner and so forth. Molly, a golf-playing New Woman author, could be lifted straight from the pages of Punch or Sydney Grundy’s anti-feminist play The New Woman (1894), while Maudie, ‘a young woman with an aggressively cheerful manner, a voice raucous from much bellowing of music-hall songs, a hat of huge size, and a heart of gold’, reproduces the sexual centre of a host of farcical comedies, such as Dion Boucicault’s Forbidden Fruit (1880), usually romantically entangled with a married man.41 They have all left their employment and are all coming to be supported by Horace, their nearest male relative, thereby exposing the ‘pious fraud about woman’s place in the world’ (p. 7). Horrified by the prospect of financial ruin, and hearing that the country is grinding to a halt as City men beg taxi drivers to do their typing, and naval volunteers are asked to act as charwomen in the House of Commons, Horace rushes out to join the vast procession of men marching on Westminster to demand votes for women. The play does not attempt to naturalise these comically artificial types, but rather points out the economic reality that underlies their theatricality; even in the male-authored world of comic myth, the reality of women’s labour and economic independence is undeniable. The ultimate example of meta-theatricality deployed to complicate an exploration of identity, gender and social performance is Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play, which opened the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, London, and ran for 622 performances, making it Shaw’s first long-running play.42 In a meta-theatrical frame, the audience is introduced to the titular Fanny, a Cambridge graduate, whose father has hired a company of actors to stage her first play in front of four invited theatre critics, each modelled on a real contemporary critic. The inner play concerns a young duo, Margaret Knox and Bobby Gilbey, who have each just completed a short prison sentence: Bobby for a drunken spree with Dora, a joyous prostitute; and Margaret for knocking two teeth out of a policeman in return for his roughing her up along with other innocent revellers at a dance hall. Bobby is mildly embarrassed by his exploits, but Margaret embraces them as a discovery of selfhood. She is released from the empty performance of respectability and its ‘pretending, pretending, pretending’, declaring herself to be a ‘heroine of reality, if you call me a heroine at all. And reality is pretty brutal, pretty filthy, when you come to grips with it. Yet it’s glorious all the same.’43 She fought the policeman in anger at his injustice, inspired, she explains, by ‘one of my religious fits’ (Act III, p. 406). Margaret’s epiphany is endorsed by her quietly devout mother, who believes that her daughter possesses an inner ‘happiness’ that will guide her to do right

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(Act III,  p. 416). Not all, however, are fit to be freed from the performance of respectability, as Mrs Knox comments darkly of her husband, ‘I tell him if he gives up being respectable he’ll go right down to the bottom of the hill. He has no powers inside himself to keep him steady; so let him cling to the powers outside him’ (Act III, p. 418). Shaw’s challenge to the performance of respectability is not gendered, but crucially he here reverses the notion that women must keep to their socially prescribed roles or risk becoming unsexed. In the play’s comic climax Bobby pairs off with Dora, but the French naval officer with whom Margaret was arrested turns out to be married, though his admiration for Margaret inspires a long encomium on the bravery and frankness of the English girl. He resolves to send his daughters to be educated in England and learn to box, because if French women were like Margaret, then ‘France would become the greatest nation in the world’ (Act III, p. 429). When the footman, whom Margaret has always fancied, turns out to be the younger son of a duke, who is redeeming himself by honest labour, a second romantic pair is complete. This drama, in which militant violence is presented as a semi-religious release from the empty pretences of respectability, is then discussed in the epilogue by the gathered critics, who argue over whether it is old-fashioned melodrama or an Ibsenite new drama, whether the footman is cribbed from Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton or the fallen woman from Pinero. They all agree, however, that it cannot possibly be by Shaw, as it contains passion and heart, of both of which Shaw is physiologically incapable. This carnival of theatrical self-reference ends with the unsurprising news that not only is Fanny a suffragette, but her proudest moment was serving a month in prison with Constance Lytton. Suffrage militancy is England’s glory in a meta-theatrical celebration, which preaches self-realisation and honesty while extending its playful self-reference and withholding of truth far outside the proscenium arch: the play itself was teasingly advertised as by ‘Xxxxxxx Xxxx’. Freedom from artificial gender roles and false ideals could only be imagined as a future possibility. A consciousness of performance in its subtle and manifold aspects and the ability to utilise them to one’s own ends was therefore the wisest strategy. Outworn and artificial images of women could be challenged and mocked, but the time had not yet come to stage what women might be or become without such external and internal forces constricting their potential and distorting their consciousness. The power and success of suffragist command of public performance and the politics of theatre are perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that

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the government finally sought to harness them to its own ends. In 1915, the Minister for Munitions, Lloyd George, asked Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union to organise what became known as the Great Women’s Procession of July 1915, in which thousands of women marched through London to demand their ‘Right to Serve’ in the war. £2,000 of covert government funding was provided to support women’s recruitment to munitions work in the face of opposition from Cabinet colleagues and trade unions. The suffragists, meanwhile, preferred to present their acquiescence as a defiant demand. The establishment now needed the labour of women whose ability to undertake demanding work they had so long denied, and the first skills they recruited were those of staging an eye-catching and rousing public performance.44 Notes 1 Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). 2 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Longman, 1931; reprinted London: Virago, 1977), p. 278, quoted in Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), pp. 52–3. 3 Cicely Hamilton, foreword to 1948 reprint of A Pageant of Great Women (1909), quoted in Tickner, Spectacle of Women, p. xii. 4 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: Dent, 1935), p. 75. 5 William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects in London and other Large Cities and Garrison Towns, 2nd edn (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1870), p. 166. 6 Quoted in Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 10. 7 Josephine Butler, The New Era (Liverpool, 1872), pp. 52–3, and Speech to Leicester Hall, Dublin, 1878 (Liverpool, 1878), p. 2, both quoted in Kent, Sex and Suffrage, pp. 75–6. 8 See Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 123. 9 For a concise overview of such research, see Lynda Nead, ‘“Many Little Harmless and Interesting Adventures ...”: Gender and the Victorian City’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 291–307. 10 Anon., Etiquette for Ladies (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1866), p. 65, quoted in Nead, ‘“Many Little Harmless and Interesting Adventures ...”’, p. 302. 11 ‘The Great March and Meeting 12 June 1908: Impressions of a Banner Bearer’, Maud Arncliffe-Sennett Papers, vol. 3, quoted in Tickner, Spectacle, p. 88. 12 Elizabeth Robins, ‘WHY?’, in Way Stations (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), p. 173. 13 Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman & Hall, 1909), pp. 2–3, 4.

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Conceptualising performance, theorising politics 14 ‘Lord Curzon’s Fifteen Good Reasons against the Grant of Female Suffrage’ and ‘An Appeal against Female Suffrage’, The Nineteenth Century, 25 (June 1889), pp.  781–8, reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson (ed.), Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2004), pp. 25–9. 15 See Caine, English Feminism, pp. 112–20. 16 See for example Louisa Thompson Price, Vote, 8 October 1910, pp. 236, quoted in Katharine Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players, 1911–25 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 81; George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Walter Scott, 1891), p. 142. 17 Hamilton, Marriage, pp. 52–3. 18 Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (London: E. Pankhurst, 1913), pp. 19–20. 19 Robins, ‘The Women Writers’, in Way Stations, pp. 235–6. 20 Robins, ‘Woman’s Secret’, in Way Stations, p. 5. 21 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: The Stirring Testament of a Suffragette (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 39, 135. 22 Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 254. 23 Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 75, 40. 24 Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 239. 25 Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 269–70. 26 Barbara Green, ‘From Visible Flâneuse to Spectacular Suffragette? The Prison, the Street, and the Sites of Suffrage’, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 17:2 (1995), p. 87. 27 For further analysis of melodrama’s Manichean moral structures, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 28 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, translated by William Archer (Boston: Walter Baker, 1890), Act III, pp. 111, 112. 29 Shaw, Quintessence, p. 135. 30 Shaw, Quintessence, p. 137. Notably in H. A. Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly (1884), an adaptation to suit A Doll’s House to English audiences, the husband steps up to the mark and sacrifices himself to save his foolish wife. 31 See, for example, Elaine’s statement that ‘the plainest and most sacred duties that lie before us – duties to ourselves’ in Henry Arthur Jones, The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), in Russell Jackson (ed.), Plays by Henry Arthur Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Act I, p. 119; and a similar assertion by a young bride in Dorothy Leighton’s Thyrza Fleming (1894), British Library, London, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53565F, Act I, p. 19; Act III, p.  56. 32 E. F. S. Pigott, 1892 Select Committee Inquiry, quoted in James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 113. 33 Quoted in Shaw, Quintessence, p. 92. For a similar diatribe against Ibsen’s women and their female audiences, see Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1895), book 3, chapter 4. 34 Arthur Wing Pinero, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, in Jean Chothia (ed.), The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Act III, p. 113. All further references are to this edition.

Women’s suffrage and theatricality 35 Sheila Stowell, ‘Rehabilitating Realism’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 6:2 (1992), pp. 81–8. For further details of theatrical representations of prostitution and their relation to sexual politics, see Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 36 Cicely Hamilton, Diana of Dobson’s, ed. Diane F. Gillespie and Doryjane Birrer (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2003), Act III, p. 129. 37 George Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays and their Prefaces, vol. 1: Plays Unpleasant and Plays Pleasant (London: The Bodley Head, 1970; 1931), Act II, p. 202. All further references are to this edition. 38 Shaw, Quintessence, p. 44. 39 Cicely Hamilton, A Pageant of Great Women (London; Suffrage Shop, 1910), p. 31. 40 Mrs Harlow Phibbs, The Mother’s Meeting, in Naomi Paxton (ed.), The Methuen Book of Suffrage Plays (London: Methuen, 2013), pp. 102–3. 41 Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John, How the Vote was Won, in Dale Spender and Carole Hayman (eds), How the Vote was Won and Other Suffragette Plays (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 29. All further references are to this edition. 42 Though, as Shaw pointed out, his previous plays had been deliberately restricted to short runs, according to Barker’s directorial policy. 43 George Bernard Shaw, Fanny’s First Play, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays and their Prefaces, vol. 4: Plays Unpleasant and Plays Pleasant (London: The Bodley Head, 1970; 1931), Act III, p. 429. All further references are to this edition. 4 4 See David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London; Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 39–80, for further details.

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PART II Politics in performance

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ne of the continuing appeals of popular theatre, in particular pantomime and melodrama, was topical referencing, allusions to people and events in the news, the latest fads and fashions, popular products and venues, scandals and sensations. But the producers and writers of stage works had to be careful not to invite interference from the censors. From 1737 to 1968 the stage functioned under the oversight of the Lord Chamberlain’s office and had to conform to a strict set of regulations designed to preserve moral standards and maintain the political, religious and social status quo. All scripts had to be submitted to the censors in advance of production and could not be performed without his official imprimatur. This effectively meant the exclusion from the stage of explicit discussions of politics and religion and the avoidance of all controversial matters. There was, for instance, a prohibition in force throughout the nineteenth century on the dramatisation of Bible stories to avoid giving offence to religious groups of any kind. There was no more pressing and controversial political problem in the nineteenth century than Irish Home Rule. Jill Sullivan examines the ways in which English pantomime dealt with the subject and with the broader questions of Ireland and the Irish in the years between 1860 and the early 1890s. She uncovers an often complex and nuanced range of strategies to tackle the problem. Much less controversial was the subject of the British Empire. Popular culture was saturated with largely positive endorsements of empire. Jeffrey Richards examines the way in which both pantomime and melodrama dramatised contemporary imperial campaigns such as the Zulu Wars, the Matabele Wars, the Sudanese campaigns and the Second Boer War. He assesses the popularity of pantomimes such as Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe in the context

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of imperial expansion and he traces contemporary references in pantomime to the Indian Mutiny and to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. In their jointly authored essay Jane Pritchard and Peter Yeandle extend the discussion of the use of popular culture to dramatise the empire and imperial ideas from pantomime and melodrama to music hall ballet. They are particularly interested in the questions of whether or not this was an exclusively West End phenomenon, how the stage producers contrived to render imperial ideology in purely visual terms, how far the ballets stimulated and how far they reflected contemporary enthusiasm for the empire. Taken together, these three essays demonstrate the primary importance of topicality in the popular appeal of some of the most popular performance genres.

7 English pantomime and the Irish Question Jill A. Sullivan

A

mong the glitter and gauze of a Victorian pantomime, one of the central ingredients of a successful production was topical references, what I have referred to elsewhere as ‘social referencing’, a range of comments on socioeconomic and political matters of the day.1 The political references ranged from passing comments on recent scandal to extended commentary on policies. In addition, productions often included unscripted appearances by characters ‘made up’ to look like leading personages of the day. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated and defined British politics and was subsequently referenced in pantomimes up and down the country through a range of approaches that reflected both the conflicting stances of British party politics and the primary political figures in the debate. References to Ireland and to the Irish could be more complex: they were feared and idealised, foregrounded and dismissed, silenced and made a comic focus. Such representations seemingly aligned with overarching cultural and ideological perceptions, but the presentations at different provincial theatres also carried suggestions of appeal to local community interest, potentially offering more subtle expressions of Unionist sympathy and nationalist assertions. This chapter, then, examines pantomime’s engagement with Home Rule in the period from the mid-1860s to the early 1890s; the representation not just of political debate, but of Ireland and the Irish. ‘First, I’ve a wild republican’ Following the Act of Union in 1801 and the abolition of the Irish parliament, Irish political life had been conducted from Westminster.2 Opposition to this and a desire by Irish nationalists for partial or complete self-governance

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continued into the twentieth century and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921 (and, for Northern Ireland, up until the present day). The phrase ‘Home Rule’ in relation to Irish politics was in use in the 1860s, at which point there were conflicting views: some in Ireland wanted a federal system in which an Irish parliament would control domestic issues, but more militant nationalists argued for complete separation from Great Britain. The latter group were attracting attention through planned but ultimately unsuccessful violent protests in the 1860s, prompted by the Irish-American founded Fenian Brotherhood. In 1867 a Fenian group had briefly taken over the police barracks at Ballyknockane; in England there had been two attempted Fenian attacks on Chester Castle; in Manchester, the botched rescue of Fenian prisoners resulted in the violent death of a policeman, and another attempted rescue of prisoners in Clerkenwell, London, culminated in the accidental death of twelve civilians and the destruction of several houses in the vicinity. These events distanced much public opinion from the Home Rule arguments, the latter two incidents, particularly the killing of neighbours in Clerkenwell, prompting the biggest public outcry. The response of the press and of the mainstream drama was to distance this figure of violent nationalism by de-humanising the Irishman. Such an approach was not new: Christine Kinealy cites The Times of 1847, which announced that: Before our merciful interventions, the Irish nation were a wretched, indolent, half-starved tribe of savages … notwithstanding a gradual improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of the civilised age.3

However, events in the late 1860s prompted a shift in the representations of popular culture. Stephen Watt has highlighted how Irish male characters in melodrama undertook a notable change following the emergence of Fenianism in the 1860s. Here, the Irish male could be shown as not only ‘pugnacious’ but ‘simianised’, a representation which, Watt states, ‘helped rationalize England’s continued hegemony over its colonial possession’.4 This ‘type’ of Irishman was notably promoted in the satirical press, developing the earlier, generalised idea of savagery to represent the Irish male as ‘more like a monster than a man’; ‘negative depictions … reinforced by visual images in Punch and other widely read journals’.5 Linda Colley has discussed how the concept of national identity is frequently defined ‘by reference to who and what we are not’. Perceptions of otherness were traditionally defined by religious difference: ‘Protestant Britons … viewed the predominantly Catholic Irish as the Other’, but in

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the mid-nineteenth century, the violent and unlawful tactics of Fenianism also fuelled perceptions of ‘what [Britons] were not’.6 Furthermore, by 1867, debates about the extension of the electorate in Great Britain were focused on the issue of citizenship and who exactly was entitled to vote. According to Catherine Hall, race was a key component of these debates: ‘in the imagined nation as it was reconstituted in 1867, “Paddy” the racialised Irishman, stood as a potent “other” to the respectable Englishman, who had proven his worth and deserved the vote’.7 The Irish of the late 1860s were therefore considered not only monstrous but unworthy and ineligible to play a political role in the life of the country. While satirical journals visibly foregrounded these negative portrayals, in pantomime the simianised monster of Fenianism was not depicted on stage or allowed a direct voice; his violence was instead restricted to references and aligned with the evil demons and wicked mortals, who were always defeated by the invariably English hero. At the Theatre Royal in Birmingham the pantomime for Christmas 1867 was Robinson Crusoe. The opening scene of pantomimes was frequently a ‘dark scene’, one in which the wicked characters and demons plotted their revenge against the hero and heroine and in which social referencing pertained to events such as wars, accidents and bank failures. In this production, the demon ‘Mischief ’ lists Fenianism as ‘Another brew of mine’, but he is confronted by the good spirit of ‘Adventure’, who replies: adventure. Take care That is a subject now beyond a jest. In sterner form we’ll get rid of that pest. Who murders babes and women cannot claim A hero’s laurels, or a martyr’s fame. We don’t despise a bold and manly foe, But to assassins we’ll no mercy show. – Excuse this burst of passion, I’m annoyed. The British Lion will not be defied.8

The story of Robinson Crusoe is one of shipwreck and survival but also imperial expansion. Opposition to the hero’s exploits is either silenced by the symbolic spirits of ‘Adventure’ and ‘Enterprise’ or, in the case of the rebellious human character Joe Atkins, his threats are limited to ineffectual speeches made only within the confines of the ship. His speech in Scene 3 can be read as an alignment to Fenianism: ‘I’ll be a patriot! Yes I’ll agitate / And then when power is mine, let all look out.’9 However, he then clarifies that his threats are only against the hero and heroine (which naturally in pantomime come to nothing), and on dry land, especially on the island of potential colonial

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expansion, he reverts to a standard pantomime villain type and makes no further political threats. He is easily defeated. In the 1878 version, many of the lines from the 1867 production are reused, with the notable exception of this speech and the overarching revolutionary zeal of the character. By 1869, Fenianism is already simply a reference in a catalogue of visions seen by Fatima and Anne in Blue Beard: fatima. The air’s oppressed and heavy, so beware! anne. ’Tis the Fenian scare, that’s all – Shall so weak a thing appal.10

And in 1874, in Jack the Giant Killer at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Liverpool, a ‘wild Republican, red hot!’ is one of the ingredients of the Giant’s supper, followed by ‘Some ten home rulers done in Irish stew’ (Liverpool Mercury, 24 December 1874, p. 7). The situation – the interior of the Giant’s castle – is seen as an appropriate setting for referencing modern horrors, and yet at the same time the symbolic cooking of republicans, envisaged as wild, uncontrollable Irish males, and home rulers exerts a power over such forces. They are consumed and destroyed, a meal worthy of a wicked Giant, not something to be presented to or swallowed by the English hero, Jack.

‘Grand entry of the allied army’ While depictions of dangerous Irish nationalism are boiled in the Giant’s cauldron, the next scene of this 1874 pantomime features the exterior of the castle, where the opposing forces of good gather to destroy the Giant. They comprise the ‘allied armies of England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, France, Germany [and] America’. Here Ireland is an ally, along with America, the source of Fenian politics; with both countries presented as an image of acceptable collaboration as, supporting the English hero, they defeat the Giant and everything he represents, including his Fenian-flavoured food. International-themed processions were very popular in pantomimes: the Victorian love of spectacular theatre could be effectively stage-managed to assert British sovereignty, power and – especially in times of political crisis over Ireland – unity. In 1886, the Drury Lane pantomime was Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, the story creating a sequence of opportunities for spectacular display. One scene showed an impressively large stage property of a British ironclad ship, complete ‘with a crew of tiny sailors’, children dressed to represent England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and performing a ‘series of c­ haracteristic national

English pantomime and the Irish Question

dances’ (Morning Post, 28 December 1886, p. 2). Then, according to the Era newspaper, ‘Britannia welcomes her colonies, England leading the way, with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, followed by knights from Malta, and residents and natives from Cape Colony, and Canadians … Australian diggers … New Zealanders … [and figures representing] Burmah, Ceylon and India’ (1 January 1887, p. 7). The Morning Post described this final procession of the pantomime as ‘long, elaborate and imposing’. At the end of the scene, the central figure of ‘Queen Victoria’ seated on a lion with Britannia’s shield and raised trident was raised above the dense congregation of colonial figures; the stage by this point, according to contemporaneous illustrations, so full that, once all the representatives had made their entrance, they become as it were a single unit that was, symbolically, empire, at the feet of Victoria. As Jim Davis has highlighted, there was a frequent ‘sense of imperial supremacy’ in the Drury Lane pantomimes of the 1880s and 1890s.11 The leading theatre for pantomime, situated in the capital of England and empire, Drury Lane effectively reflected its own and the country’s status in its annual productions. Pantomimes produced by Augustus Harris at Drury Lane frequently set the trend for particular themed processions and ballets that were, in later years, incorporated into productions at the transpontine and provincial theatres. In 1886 however – the year of the Ali Baba tableau – theatres beyond the West End were already simultaneously staging similar processions. The House that Jack Built at the Theatre Royal in Blackburn, for example, included a scene with ‘colonial representatives’ filling the stage, as did productions at Sanger’s Amphitheatre (Cinderella, or, The Little Glass Slipper, Fun, Frolic and Fancy, and Harlequin Old Father Christmas) and the Elephant and Castle (Jack in the Box; or, Harlequin Little Bo Peep who Lost her Sheep), both in London. This was no coincidence: 1887 was to be the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and the pantomime processions can be seen as an early start to the celebration of the monarch and the growth of empire under her rule. Fantastically costumed extras were used to create an effective visual display of empire, the mass of figures symbolising the extent of English power abroad but, importantly, the characters that made up this inclusive image were primarily silent, awaiting the swelling notes of the National Anthem to momentarily unite image and audience in nationalist pride. What is particularly pertinent in the various pantomime processions of 1886 is the representation of unity between England and its more immediate territories in Wales, Scotland and Ireland: from the opening set piece of the Drury Lane pantomime – the children dressed as British sailors – to other productions across the country, the concept of figures specifically representing

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the British Isles was a feature of many productions in 1886. For example, the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Portsmouth – Jack the Giant Killer – featured a storming of the Giant’s castle battlements by the hero Jack plus ‘English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish knights’. At the Grand Theatre, Birmingham, where Jack and the Beanstalk was also the chosen pantomime, suitors at the king’s castle again represented the four countries of the United Kingdom. And, as at Drury Lane, the production at the Theatre Royal, Blackburn, contained ‘representative dances of England, Ireland and Scotland’ (The Blackburn Standard, Darwen Observer & North-East Lancashire Advertiser, 1 January 1887, p. 2). And it was not just at the legitimate theatres: the Albert Palace in Battersea Park presented a Christmas fete, including giant portrayals of the same representative four figures. Indeed it appears that certainly for many provincial theatres, the celebratory scenes were focused not necessarily on representatives of imperial domination from around the wider globe, but on the more immediate figure of England alongside Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It could be argued that financial and spatial constrictions limited the ambition of many provincial theatre managers, and that the four figures of the British Isles were more easily accomplished than the cast of hundreds seen at Drury Lane, but the regularity of appearances of this particular quartet in the 1886 pantomimes suggests that another factor might be being brought into play. Rather than a somewhat blanket coverage of empire, the focus on a United Kingdom may well have been a more specific political comment not on the forthcoming celebrations of 1887, but on the political events of 1886, in particular the contentious issue of Unionism versus Home Rule for Ireland. The violent republicanism of the Fenian movement in the 1860s had been displaced with the emergence in the 1870s of the moderate Home Rule Party which supported limited self-government for Ireland within the Union, and which had returned sixty MPs to the British Parliament at the 1874 general election. In the 1885 general election this party – renamed the Irish Parliamentary Party – gained over eighty seats, an achievement which included establishing an MP for Liverpool. The issue of Irish political Home Rule subsequently dominated English parliamentary debates, and the two principal political parties – Liberal and Conservative – were ‘by the 1880s … distinguished and separated by their attitudes to Irish independence’.12 The issue was a defining feature in the careers of several leading politicians, in particular affecting the political fortunes of the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone strongly advocated Home Rule, presenting Irish Land Bills in 1870 and 1881 to recognise the rights of Irish tenants, and in 1886,

English pantomime and the Irish Question

the year after the parliamentary gains made by the Irish Parliamentary Party, Gladstone made a historic three-hour speech accompanying his proposal of the first Home Rule Bill. The bill was eventually defeated by thirty votes in the House of Commons, but for many the events of 1885 and 1886 were troubling: imperial sensitivities were concerned over the potential division of the Union and the increased Irish political voice. The Liberals were equally concerned over divisions within their party; party Unionists, angered by Gladstone’s proposals, instead opted to join forces with the consistently pro-Union Conservatives. Therefore, in the pantomimes of 1886, the year of the failed Home Rule Bill, the decisive representations at many theatres of positive Unionism – the figures of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland joining together, whether defeating evil giants at Portsmouth or dancing in unison at Blackburn – portray a clear message: of a persistence of and preference for Unionism. In addition to portrayals of British unity in pantomime, productions in 1886 (as well as in other years) often made reference to the idea of Irish patriotism, not to an independent Ireland but, rather, to a patriotism to Britain. The Manchester Comedy Theatre, for example, in 1886 and 1887 introduced two characters to foreground Unionist sympathies. Alderman Fitzgerald in J. Wilton Jones’s Dick Whittington of 1887 clearly announces, ‘Yes. I support the Union.’13 The alderman, played by the English comic actor Fred Newham, effectively combines the primary character of ‘a London mercer’ with the secondary attribute of an Irish surname; the dominant English economy is here permitted a political voice regarding Ireland (Manchester Times, 31 December 1887, p. 3). The politics of the Comedy Theatre managers and pantomime writers in this period were clearly Conservative, the pantomime scripts criticising Gladstone and praising the political legacies of the former Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. But the script for the 1886 production of Little Red Riding Hood (also written by Wilton Jones) included a pointed assimilation of Ireland into English concerns. In one scene, the Dame figure calls for help in rescuing the heroine, but rather than the traditional fairies and spirits, she summons the patron saints of Great Britain. Once again this reflects the appeal to national unity in the period following the defeat of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill, and upon the arrival of St Patrick the following exchange takes place: boy b[lue]. Yes – at the core old Ireland still is true. st p. Give me a chance to fight. I’ll raise a ruction. dame. Yes, fight away; but, mind you – no obstruction.14

This piece of dialogue confines the actions of the representative figure of Ireland, accepting his presumed Unionist support but banning political obstruction,

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a tactic employed by Charles Stewart Parnell of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons in order to disrupt debate. St Patrick is in this scene both heroic and politically curtailed. His heroism is clearly aligned to the concept of ‘old Ireland’, but while this phrase could be interpreted as a proffered gesture of friendship, it also effectively suggests an Ireland of tradition rather than changing and revolutionary politics. Ireland and the Irish, as seen in these examples, could be represented as a positive and patriotic colony, but the concept of a co-operative Ireland was frequently also complemented by settings that promoted an older, traditional rural culture, in which Irish characters are given to song and dance. Lionel Pilkington states that ‘For many centuries Ireland and things Irish have been viewed as essentially performative: as possessing a core of being that is inherently theatrical.’15 For pantomime producers, this cultural perception offered an alternative representation to the demonised Fenian and the overt politics of the national representatives of the ‘allied armies’. Ireland could be depicted as an intrinsic element of the fantasy world of pantomime, of fairies, magic and idealised rural lives. Pilkington argues that to think of a ‘class, ethnic group or nationality as innately performative tends to make light of its economic circumstances and political demands’.16 A ‘single fixed identity’ that works as a colonial stereotype can, he says, ‘soothe and reassure the coloniser that everything about this other culture can be condensed into a single point of view: it is inferior’.17 Jim Davis has also addressed the ‘reinforcement of racial stereotypes’ in the Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century and, certainly, the image of the comic yet sentimental Irishman was fairly persistent in pantomimes up and down the country, as were scenes of a rural, idyllic Ireland.18 In 1885, the Theatre Royal at Birkenhead presented the pantomime of King Christmas; or The Good Fairy and the Leprechaun’s Haunt, taking its story from the Irish legend of the ‘Fairy Circle’ and starring the Irish comedian Mr Stanhope. That same year, the pantomime at the Royalty Theatre in Chester featured juvenile dancers performing an Irish jig, and at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Birmingham in 1886, the production of Aladdin featured the Sisters Graham performing an Irish song and dance. ‘[T]raditional’ Irish music and dance also made an appearance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool that same year. A range of pantomimes therefore drew on both displays of British unity in the mid-1880s and performances of particular notions of Irish culture that symbolised for an English audience this particular and manageable ‘other’ of empire. This version of Ireland had also been presented in the late 1860s and provides another example of how producers counteracted public fears of

English pantomime and the Irish Question

Fenianism. Instead of being demonised, Irish nationalism could be re-invented in a way that effectively subjugated the political voice. The Drury Lane pantomime at the close of 1867 featured a romanticised Ireland, with scenery including the Giant’s Causeway, and dancers dressed as leprechauns. A reviewer in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine tellingly commented on the character of ‘“Mister Paddy’s Son”, the smallest Irishman ever seen, [who] delights [children] with an Irish jig that ought to convert a Fenian’ (1 February 1867, p. 103). This reviewer suggests that nationalist Fenianism needs converting to an altogether different kind of patriotism, expressed through the significantly small personification of timeless and traditional folklore that could entertain not necessarily a full English audience, but certainly the children among it. Militant Fenianism was here dismissed and Ireland’s needs effectively infantilised. The critic Joep Leerssen has referred to Victorian short stories about Ireland in which the ‘stage-Irish’ type is portrayed as boyish – a child – as compared with the ‘adult’ and authoritative English figures.19 That concept, of the parent–child dichotomy, can be seen in the 1867 London pantomime, Ireland here being diminished in the ‘tiny’ figure of Master Paddy. A decade later, another of the Liverpool pantomimes recognised the emergence of a more effective Irish political force while maintaining the concept of the Irish as not only dependent but also sentimental pro-Unionists. In 1879, the Fenian Michael Davitt founded the Irish Land League, whose political focus was on the rural poor and which argued for fair rents, fixity of tenure and the free sale of the right to occupancy. Figure 5 shows a cartoon from Punch, produced by John Tenniel in 1881. L. Perry Curtis stresses that Tenniel was the ‘man who did most to change the Irish stereotype in English cartoons from man to beast’ in the 1860s and that while he ‘drew fewer ape-like Irishmen’ in the early 1870s, ‘[t]oward the end of the decade, Punch began to take notice of agrarian crime in Ireland and of the more militant brand of nationalism espoused by Parnell’, turning Land Leaguers into ‘monstrous brutes without a touch of humanity’ in its cartoons.20 The figure in this particular illustration represents the simianised Irish Land Leaguer as a threat, proffering violence and disruption behind the figure of Erin (and, like pantomime demons, placed on her left hand side). Similarly, pantomime writers once again attempted to contain nationalist threats in the real world by converting the figure of the Irish male into something more manageable within the world of the fairy tale. In the opening dark scene of Cinderella at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool in 1879, the demons Alecto, Chimera and Erinys detail their achievements

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in the world during the past year. Erinys is described as ‘an obstructive fury of Irish origin in the demonic parliament’ (Liverpool Mercury, 24 December 1879, p. 3). While the figure of Erin is traditionally ‘the icon of feminine and chaste Ireland’, the male Erinys (played by Harry Fischer) initially subverts this image, presenting a corrupted spirit of Ireland.21 In this scene the usual array of topical comments are made, concluding with an argument between Alecto and Erinys:

5

John Tenniel, ‘The Rivals’, Punch, 13 August 1881.

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alecto: We’re busy now in Ireland. erinys: Indeed! alecto: The little smouldering flame of disaffection      I’ll speedily fan into insurrection

However, Erinys’s response suddenly negates expectation: he states firmly that: Ye can’t let Ireland’s foes say what they will, Ould Erin’s constant to ould England still. Demagogues may lead away a few, But Ireland as a whole is loyal and true.

Erinys then matches political sentiment to pantomime action, and when the other demons threaten Cinderella, he insists that he has an Irish heart and ‘it makes him wild to see the persecution of a helpless child’ (Liverpool Mercury, 24 December 1879, p. 3). For his sins of sentiment, the Irish demon is made mortal. Denied any potentially dangerous supernatural powers, he at this point becomes a ‘good’ character and becomes Cinderella’s friend, offering to do her housework for her. His nature is arguably feminised, but rather than a symbolic relationship between Erinys and Erin, the representative female figure of Ireland, being emphasised, he instead calls himself Pedro and effectively takes on the mantle of what we would recognise as the ‘Buttons’ character in the story. In the 1860s, Fenian violence had prompted pantomime visions of old Ireland, legends and dance to counteract public fears, but in 1879, the emergence of a more specific and potentially effective Irish political movement – indeed Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act was to be a notable success for the League – caused the creation of a pantomime character who openly denounces ‘demagogues’ and instead embraces a traditional version of Irish emotion wherein sentiment and loyalty equate to subservience. A pattern emerges therefore, in pantomimes of this period, of presenting Irish characters that are reduced symbolically to little leprechauns and servants. In Pilkington’s examination of the various presentations of the stage Irishman in the nineteenth century, he pinpoints a limiting set of characteristics which diminish this particular ‘other’: waves of Irish economic migration … beginning in the mid-eighteenth century overlap with a sentimentalism of Irish characters as loyal but clumsy; Fenian anti-colonial insurgency coincides with a stage Irishman who is loyal and entertaining and thus a perfect instrument to secure imperial hegemony.22

This aspect of loyal sentimentalism is embodied in the subservient figure of Erinys and, by implication of the name, the Irish nation as a whole. The character does not even maintain an Irish name but abandons his cultural roots along with his former wicked ways.

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From the cumulative evidence presented so far, it would appear that the Victorian pantomime writers and producers simply complied with hegemonic ideals of British Unionism and patriotic fervour, subduing political anxieties into idealised landscapes, transformed characters and contained spectacle. However, the very nature of the genre as a reflector of contemporaneous social and political issues, and the way in which each theatre aimed to attract its various audiences with referencing that not only had a broad appeal but also aimed to reflect specific local interests, would make this seem unlikely. And indeed, by looking more closely at many of these representations of Ireland and the Irish, we can find examples of more nuanced and variable inferences. The ‘Spirit of Erin’ Tenniel’s cartoon in Figure 5 depicts two versions of Ireland: the monstrous male Land Leaguer and, in the centre, the figure of Erin, the iconic image of a feminine Ireland. In illustrations she is shown either in traditional dress and cape embroidered with shamrocks or – as in Tenniel’s version – as a classical, barefooted muse-like figure. Both images corresponded with the Victorian ideal of womanhood, suggesting in these images ‘all that was feminine, courageous and chaste about Irish womanhood’.23 The concept of a beautiful, feminised and thus implicitly pure and peaceful Ireland was one that could be easily incorporated into pantomime, alongside fairy tales heroines and fairy queens, without necessarily referencing the specific symbol of Erin. A feminine Ireland was seen most frequently represented by dancers or supernumeraries in Irish costume. These appeared either as interludes, such as the Sisters Graham at the Birmingham Prince of Wales Theatre, or in scenes featuring a succession of national dances, similar to the processions discussed above. These moments did not need to be climactic, as with the procession at Drury Lane in 1886, but could instead be portrayed as incidental: moments of vocally silent but attractive visual entertainment that in principle did not present a political voice. Potentially, of course, costumed representatives could by their appearance alone encourage patriotic responses from members of the audience and be freely interpreted according to personal politics. In 1869, however, the management of the Royal Coliseum Theatre in Liverpool staged a pantomime which featured a far more overtly symbolic Irish female: that of the Spirit of Erin. King O’Toole’s Goose was created and advertised as a specifically ‘Irish pantomime’, based on a legend from County Wicklow, and it included scenes

English pantomime and the Irish Question

of an Irish village, with a ‘picturesque’ Irish peasants’ dance instead of the usual second-scene fairy ballet (Liverpool Mercury, 6 December 1869, p. 3). Similarly, the transformation scene – the central scene in terms of expenditure and spectacle in any pantomime production of this period – was adjusted to reflect Irish concerns. Rather than the Fairy Queen appearing as the central figure in this scene, the Era newspaper noted that ‘The central figure was a graceful representation of the Spirit of Erin, with her harp’ (12 December 1869, p. 12). The transformation scene of a pantomime was always an essentially feminine moment in the production. Stage mechanics and costumes emphasised an airy, idealised image of the female form, and in this production Erin was similarly featured ‘with the usual glittering surrounding and fairy groups’ (Era, 12 December 1869, p. 12). But the choice of scene and staging created a much more potent symbol for a city with a large Irish population. Liverpool by the mid-nineteenth century had the largest immigrant and second-generation Irish populations in England: about a quarter of the total population of the city according to figures in the 1851 census. And, as the Era review of the pantomime noted, the visual salute to the Spirit of Ireland was enthusiastically applauded. Potentially, therefore, silent spectacle here became extremely powerful and Erin was made a focal point in much the same way as the figure of Queen Victoria was to be represented in the final processional scene at Drury Lane nearly twenty years later. The pantomime story for King O’Toole’s Goose was set in ‘the old time’, an undefined period which, one reviewer commented, ‘seems to have been a very happy time in Ireland and the only regret is that the author’s picture is not as true as regards that part of the Queen’s dominion now’ (Liverpool Mercury, 6 December 1869, p. 3). Significantly occurring in the late 1860s, at a time of Fenian disruption, the distancing device of legend in this production did indeed permit an idealised and acquiescent version of Ireland for this English critic (and no doubt some members of the audience). However, it also provided the opportunity to foreground the Spirit of Erin as a preferred political and not subservient representation of Ireland for pro-Home Rule and patriotic Irish communities in the audience. This presentation of Erin recalls the 1879 pantomime of Cinderella, also staged at a Liverpool theatre, in which the feminised demon Erinys is not entirely recreated as Erin: the Irish icon could not become Cinderella’s servant. Historical debate about Irish immigrants and communities in Britain centred for many years on the issue of whether those communities were segregated from or assimilated into British life, or whether there was a gradual

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process from one to the other. According to the historian Mary Hickman, the two concepts differ little except in relation to the speed at which the immigrant community is perceived to be ultimately assimilated – to the satisfaction of both parties – into the host country. Hickman argues against the associated idea that an immigrant community is inherently homogeneous; she states that instead of seeking evidence of a whole group shift – a desired move from outsiders to participating citizens – the experiences of immigrant groups differ according to their individual contexts.24 This is a pertinent framework for the discussion of pantomimes and their relationship to politically aware local audiences, and there is a particularly interesting example from Manchester in the 1860s, which suggests a further and more complex interpretation of immigrant identity and the female figure. In Mother Goose, the Prince’s Theatre pantomime of 1864, the hero’s mother is the Dame character, named here ‘Mrs Angel Meadow’ and described as having ‘an accent and a will of her own’.25 In nineteenth-century Manchester, Angel Meadow was the largest Irish district in the city, an area of industrial slums and poverty. According to the 1851 census, 50.2 per cent of the population living there were Irish-born or of Irish parentage.26 However, the Dame is given a Lancashire accent and, when introduced to the other characters, proudly states herself to be from Lancashire: ‘Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely [hearty]; / How’s thysen?’27 This combination of Irish roots and Lancashire accent does suggest an element of social integration for this character, of a member of the immigrant community wholeheartedly adopting her new country. However, given the nature of pantomime it can be questioned whether ‘Mrs Angel Meadow’ would have been seen as a true reflection of individual experiences. The pantomime Dame as a character type is never quite what ‘she’ appears to be, so, in this case, the appropriated clothing of gender may also have suggested to its audiences a mere clothing, a surface appearance only, of integration into a new regional but not necessarily different national identity. ‘Revell[ing] in the brogue’ In contrast to Fenian demons and representations of a female Ireland, there was a third type of physical Irish presence in the pantomimes: that of the male Irish comedian or comic character. This type corresponds to Stephen Watt’s classifications mentioned above with regard to melodrama. While he details the simianised Irish male, Watt discusses another type, known as the ‘Stage

English pantomime and the Irish Question

Irish’, which was a usually male comic character, fond of drink and fighting, occasionally a buffoon and frequently ingenious.28 Such an example appeared in the opening scene of the 1869 pantomime at the Royal Coliseum Theatre in Liverpool; a reporter in the Mercury commented on how the Irish ‘rustic’ – a minor character in the plot – seemed ‘a true specimen of a happy-hearted and rollicking Irishman’ (Liverpool Mercury, 6 December 1869, p. 3). A few years later, in 1874, the production at the Liverpool Prince of Wales Theatre was a version of J. R. Planché’s extravaganza The Invisible Prince. This production featured the comedian Mr R. J. Roberts as ‘one of the most laughable characters in the cast … the intensely amusing representation … of the Irish ruffian Mulliganio the Merciless’ in which Roberts ‘fairly revelled in the brogue’. This character is one of a ‘villainous crew’ (Liverpool Mercury, 28 December 1874, p. 5) but is clearly presented in the script as harmless and in the crew for comic purposes. The light-hearted comic Irishman recalls Pilkington’s argument regarding the ‘innately performative’ presentation of a group, but the foregrounding of some Irish characters and the engagement by theatre managers of popular Irish comic actors and comedians suggest instead that presentations of the Irish male were not always subject to dominant political ideologies.29 As with ‘Mrs Angel Meadow’ and the layering of identity in 1864, the appearance in 1888 of the Baron O’Brannigan (played by Mr James O’Brien) in Cinderella at the Manchester Comedy Theatre and the Irish Emperor in Dick Whittington at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, permitted further opportunities to appeal to the local Irish community. In the latter example, the ‘Emperor Patrick’ was played by Mr Harry Cave and his Empress by Mr P. W. O’Brien, who ‘[held] the stage with humorous songs and dances’ (Liverpool Mercury, 27 December 1888, p. 6). The comedians in pantomime always tended to divert from the script, their songs in particular frequently not appearing in the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval. Therefore, while the role of the Irish comedian might effectively offset fears of republicanism, it also, potentially, offered the greatest opportunities for audience engagement and subversion, with the character potential for ‘gagging’, extended song lyrics and costume possibilities. The ‘Emperor Patrick’ for example was described as hailing from Scotland Road in Liverpool, a principal area of Irish immigration but also of clashes between Irish Protestant and Catholic communities. While there is no evidence in the script or reviews, did ephemeral performances of this character portray nationalist concerns? Was the Emperor a neutral figure or were there proclaimed loyalties and inferences in his performance, costume colours or songs?

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Of the recorded jokes and social referencing, there was a gradual move away from the demonisation or idealisation of the individual Irish character. Figures such as Erin and Erinys ceased to appear and instead – particularly in the 1880s and 1890s – comments focused on the primary political figures in the Home Rule debate, more especially William Gladstone. This feature of political referencing had begun in the late 1860s. In December 1868 the management of the Royal Coliseum in Liverpool presented Tom Thumb and Little Bo Peep. In the opening dark scene, the character of the evil ‘Necromancer’ made a succession of references to current events, in particular about Gladstone and the Irish Church. Irish religious issues, although of course naturally implicit in issues of national identity, were not usually openly addressed in scripted pantomime references, as religious subject matter was forbidden under the 1843 Theatre Licensing Act. Usually a pantomime reference like this would have attracted the attention of the Examiner of Plays but this one appears to have escaped his notice, possibly being only used in performance and not printed in the book of words that would have been submitted for official inspection. Significantly, the Liverpool Mercury commented on the audience’s response to these references, stating: ‘It is said that a straw is sufficient to show how the wind blows, and the “necromancer” brought down the applause of the house by declaring that “Gladstone will never rest until united is the green flag and the red”’ (15 December 1868, p. 3). Gladstone proposed and enacted the first of a series of moves in this period to disestablish the Anglican Church in Ireland, perceiving Home Rule at this stage in the context not of complete self-governance and independence but of a conciliatory relationship with England, in which the Irish had limited Home Rule for certain issues. It seems likely therefore that the pantomime speech was not promoting Unionism but instead was offering support for Gladstone’s goal of partial independence; of recognising the green flag of Ireland as a relevant constituent. With this in mind, the figure of the Spirit of Erin in the following year’s transformation scene appears as an even more potent political symbol for the theatre’s audiences. References to Gladstone and his proposed policies regarding Ireland were not of course limited to the provincial cities. In its review of the 1888 Drury Lane pantomime, The Times reported that one character represented a ‘picturesque personage’ who threatens to explain his Irish policy, but happily he confines himself … to his task of chopping wood’ (The Times, 27 December 1888, p. 8). The figure was clearly an actor ‘made up’ to look like the Prime Minister, but as representations of major political and national figures were

English pantomime and the Irish Question

also banned under the 1843 Act, the reviewer was here concurring with the theatre management in not drawing attention to the characterisation. In this review, the figure of Gladstone was apparently greeted by ‘volleys of groans’, suggesting a strong pro-Union element in the audience. However, the Irish newspaper Freeman’s Journal also carried a review of this pantomime in which the reviewer noted that among the various political comments ‘The greatest display of party feeling … took place when a man, excellently made up as Gladstone was seen chopping wood at the door of a cabin. The cheers that rang out from the pit and galleries showed that there was a very strong Home Rule element in the audience’ (Freeman’s Journal, 27 December 1888, p. 5). The production in fact contained many cross-party references but the emphases of these reviews highlight the growing range of active political allegiances in any one audience. The 1884 Reform Act had extended the British electorate once again, and it is significant that the Irish paper notes the responses of the pit and gallery, clearly highlighting the broader working-class and lower-middleclass electorate of the 1880s. Although aspects of a production could be open to interpretation by different audiences, the scripted political references in pantomime usually depended on the party-political leanings of the theatre manager and his author. However, while those theatre managements that supported the Conservative Party naturally promoted Unionism, those who supported Liberal politics, even though they were keen to mock the Conservative Party in their pantomimes, did not wholeheartedly support Gladstone’s moves for Home Rule. In 1892 Gladstone returned to power, and in the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, then managed by the pro-Liberal Thomas Ramsey, the Baron and his companions in Little Red Riding Hood opened an extended diatribe against Gladstone, Home Rule and local politicians: baron: Well here, there’s little stirring that is new. Manchester still is to the Union true. celeno: That’s just what I expected it would be. Manchester men have common sense you see. ocypete: They don’t believe in Gladstone’s Home Rule schemes.

The exchange continues, arguing that the local Gladstonian Liberal MP John Morley will ‘make a mess of Ireland’. The speech covers recent aspects of the Irish Question including Arthur Balfour’s Coercion Act of 1887, which outlawed agitation for land reform in Ireland through actions such as rent strikes and boycotting, and ends with ‘Alecto’ concluding that ‘’Ere many

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months are over friends, ’tis true, / The good Balfour did, Morley will undo.’30 In the following year’s production, the two ruffians in Babes in the Wood exclaim that ‘Gladstone is on a dangerous tack / And doesn’t bear aloft the “Union” Jack’, darkly adding that Gladstone’s policies will cost him dearly at the next election.31 And in 1895, the ‘Duke of Oofless’ in Jack and the Beanstalk openly supports Gladstone (‘Up with Home Rule!’) but is shown to be a fool who gets confused easily: ‘The sense of my remarks in vain I’m / seeking’.32 At the Comedy Theatre – also in Manchester – the management’s political allegiances became increasingly subdued in the interest of becoming a familyfriendly venue. In the pantomime Little Bo Peep in 1890, Gladstone is reduced to a symbolic item of clothing. The Prime Minister’s penchant for high collars was a frequent source of physical comedy in many pantomimes, and by the 1890s the collar alone sufficed as a political reference. In Scene 5 an exchange over a basket of laundry included the following: tucker. … Here’s the Grand Old Man’s collar. I know it’s his because it’s made of Irish linen. margery. It looks very starchy tucker. Yes, it’s turned very starchy of late, and it’s getting a little the worse for wear.

‘The Grand Old Man’ was a popular name for the elder statesman Gladstone, but this speech manages to both reduce the Irish Question to a linen collar while representing that collar as overused, discoloured (excessive starch gives linen a dark yellow colour, ironically also the Liberal Party colour) and worn. The diminishing number of political references at the Comedy Theatre created a strange scene the following year, in the 1891 pantomime of Fair One with the Golden Locks. Scene 7 featured a series of masked, silent figures attending at the Court. The character of the ‘King’ addresses them all with social and political references but they are presumed to whisper their replies to him, not openly giving voice to their political motivations. The Liberal Unionist MP for South-East Lancashire, J. W. Maclure, is presented in this way, the King voicing Maclure’s doubts about Gladstone’s latest Home Rule scheme and thus permitting both a physical representation of the politician and, at the same time, a silencing of his political views. The representation of Ireland, the Irish and the Home Rule question as it affected the careers of English politicians could be overt and nuanced. The physical embodiment of the monstrous Irish Fenian seen in prints and melodrama was negated in pantomime while references could be either clearly aligned with wicked pantomime characters or dismissed in passing. More effec-

English pantomime and the Irish Question

tive could be the feminisation and infantilisation of Ireland, although at theatres in Liverpool, where there was a large Irish immigrant population, symbolic figures such as Erin and St Patrick could be readily interpreted differently by the various communities in the audience. Similarly, comedy and the inclusion of non-scripted actions, jokes and songs could circumvent both the national and the local censors, offering alternative allegiances. Support for Home Rule seems to have been incorporated by these non-scripted moments in English pantomime, as no evidence in either scripts or reviews has been found to date of any production that openly and completely supported Home Rule. Instead, satirical criticisms centred on concerns for the perceived damage that Gladstone was doing to his party, in particular the split in 1886 between Liberals and Liberal-Unionists, which resulted in the Liberals losing the general election that year. In their engagement with the Irish Question, pantomime producers and writers, by defaulting to discussions about specific figures, were responding not with an ignorance of the intricacies of political issues (the detailed referencing in pantomimes confutes this time and again) but with a greater awareness of the impact of the issue on politicians and the growing effectiveness of personality in English politics. In relation to portrayals of Ireland and the Irish during this period, Irish characters in pantomime did frequently correspond to ‘type’, and settings aimed in many cases to calm unease with soothing images of ‘Old Ireland’. However, the mere presence of such characters and inherently political themes (which may have been lent additional interpretations through visual prompts in the mise en scène) also engaged with the complex and nuanced cultural and political debate. Most importantly, such characters and themes had the potential to be seen, heard and interpreted by an increasingly politically aware and politically active audience. Notes 1 See Jill A. Sullivan, The Politics of the Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). 2 Wales had been united with England in 1536, although the country had been conquered over 200 years earlier in 1301. Scotland was united with England under the Act of Union of 1707. 3 Christine Kinealy, ‘At Home with the Empire: The Example of Ireland’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya J. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 77–100. 4 Stephen Watt, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century Irish Theatre: Before the Abbey – and Beyond’, in Shaun Richards (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 23–4.

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Politics in performance 5 L. Perry Curtis Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), p. 39; Kinealy, ‘At Home with the Empire’, p. 92. 6 Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies, 31:4 (October 1992), p. 311. 7 Quoted in Kinealy, ‘At Home with the Empire’, p. 93. 8 Charles Millward, Book of Words for Robinson Crusoe, Theatre Royal, Birmingham, 1867, Scene 1, p. 6, Birmingham Local Studies Library. 9 Millward, Robinson Crusoe, Scene 3, p. 8. 10 Charles Millward, Book of Words for Blue Beard, Theatre Royal, Birmingham, 1869, Scene 7, p. 19, Birmingham Central Library. 11 Jim Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions: The Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12:46 (May 1996), pp. 147–55. 12 Kinealy, ‘At Home with the Empire’, p. 84. 13 J. Wilton Jones, Book of Words for Dick Whittington, Comedy Theatre, Manchester, 1887, Scene 2, p. 13, Manchester Central Library. 14 J. Wilton Jones, Book of Words for Little Red Riding Hood, Comedy Theatre, Manchester, 1886, Scene 9, p. 38, Manchester Central Library. 15 Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.  2. 16 Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, p. 7. 17 Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, pp. 12, 14. 18 Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions’, p. 152. 19 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, quoted in Julie Anne Steves, ‘Harlequin in Ireland: The Use of Pantomime in Somerville and Ross’s Irish R.M. Stories’, BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 11 (2000), p. 232. 20 Curtis, Apes and Angels, pp. 37–8. 21 Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. 157. 22 Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, p. 23. 23 Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. 75. 24 Mary Hickman, ‘Alternative Histories of the Irish in Britain: A Critique of the Segregation/Assimilation Model’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 236–53. 25 Pyngle Layne [Tom Turner], Mother Goose; or, Ye Queene of Heartes that Made ye Tartes, and ye Knave of Heartes who Ate ’em, 1864, Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, Book of Words, p. 6, Manchester Central Library. 26 M. A. Busteed and R .I. Hodgson, ‘Angel Meadow: A Study of the Geography of Irish Settlement in Mid-Nineteenth Century Manchester’, Manchester Geographer, 14 (1993), p. 5. 27 Layne, Mother Goose, p. 18. 28 Watt, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century Irish Theatre’, pp. 23–4. 29 Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, p. 7. 30 Fred Locke, Book of Words for Little Red Riding Hood and Bonnie Boy Blue, Theatre Royal, Manchester, 1892, Scene 1, p. 13, Manchester Central Library. 31 Locke, Little Red Riding Hood, Scene 2, p. 22.

English pantomime and the Irish Question 32 Harry F. McClelland, Book of Words for Jack and the Beanstalk, Theatre Royal, Manchester, 1895, Scene 1, p. 10, British Library, London, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 325.

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8 ‘Executed with remarkable care and artistic feeling’: popular imperialism and  the music hall ballet Jane Pritchard and Peter Yeandle

The curtain rises upon a capitally painted scene representing a naval and military port. We must pause to bestow a special word of praise upon this picture. It is executed with remarkable care and artistic feeling … First of all march on to the stage the British Grenadiers in their well-known costume. They are followed by the Highlanders (the Black Watch), by Irish Rifles, Royal Artillery, British sailors, and an Australian and Indian contingent, the latter being attired in the uniform of the Bengal Lancers; and we can hardly too highly praise the accuracy and attention to detail with which the uniforms of the different departments of the service have been designed … The banners bear the historical records of the successes of the regiments, the accoutrements are all well fitting and well made, and there is an air of ‘spick-and-span’ smartness about the combined forces which is perfectly in harmony with the military nature of the entertainment … [t]he eye was simply dazzled by a succession of brilliant uniforms … and the display of colour and detail was perfectly bewildering in its intricacy and brilliancy … the music is exactly suited to the purpose for which it is arranged.

S

o wrote the dramatic critic of the Era (26 December 1885) in a review of Joseph Hansen’s ‘Grand Military Spectacular Ballet’, Le Bivouac, which was the first of the patriotic spectaculars to be presented at the Alhambra in London’s Leicester Square. Created in the aftermath of the death of General Gordon in Khartoum and the failure of the Sudanese campaign, Le Bivouac sought to celebrate imperial unity. The four home nations were depicted in traditional song and national dances. Dancers, representing forces from the empire, joined the throng. Further members of the corps, in the military dress of America and European nations, arrived on stage to the sound of their national music (see Figure 6). Following re-enactments of military drills and a sham fight ‘the curtain descended upon a picturesque tableau, showing Britannia

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

enthroned, surrounded by troops’. The performance sold out and ran until November 1886, remaining in the eye of critics throughout.1 In the review in Bell’s Life in London (22 December 1885), ‘this stirring spectacle aroused the enthusiasm of the patriotic spectators’. For The Times (25 December 1885), the result was the ‘stirring of the house to a fever of patriotic enthusiasm’. In the context of late Victorian British imperialism, it is not surprising to find that the popular theatre reflected imperial politics and sought, in some cases, actively to engender patriotic responses. Marty Gould’s research into the nineteenth-century theatre ‘testifies … to the pervasiveness and popularity of imperial characters, situations, and themes in nineteenth-century drama’.2 Edward Ziter illustrates that Victorian ‘theatre was a principal space for the creation and dissemination of the modern geographic imagination’ that included careful attention to the theatrical representation of the landscapes, sounds and clothing of colonial subjects.3 Jeffrey Richards’s case study of Drury Lane, in this volume, determines similarly that the theatre reflected and responded to imperial politics. Scholars have convincingly traced propagandistic influences in three of the most popular performance genres of the period: the pantomime, the music hall comedy and the melodrama.4 One aim of this chapter is to highlight the extent to which music hall ballet – a particularly English performance genre – demands inclusion in this corpus. Balletic spectacles, such as Le Bivouac, have received far less attention in scholarly appraisals of the relationship between the theatrical arts and imperial culture than they merit. Le Bivouac was by no means atypical. Between 1884 and 1915, the Alhambra and Empire – the Leicester Square super-venues – presented at least 140 new ballets, a sizeable number of which, with explicitly patriotic intent and self-defining titles, sought to promote affection for the empire (Under One Flag (1897), Our Army and Navy (1889), Soldiers of the Queen (1900) and Britannia’s Realm (1902) are but a few). They concluded with expensive military spectacles in which dancers, representing the home nations as well as the colonies, merged on stage in a climax celebrating the unity of the empire and Queen Victoria, often in the guise of Britannia, as imperial figurehead. Many more ballets were presented with less telling titles or decidedly non-imperial ambitions yet, as will be seen below, could be inclusive of pro-imperial material.5 As the extract and reviews of the Le Bivouac demonstrate, performances not only aimed to inculcate patriotic enthusiasm through extravagant displays of military achievement and imperial harmony, but had – in the judgements of the critics – noteworthy success. If we take patriotism to mean displays of affection for the nation, its

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Programme for Le Bivouac (Alhambra, 1885), dated 7 March 1886.

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monarch and its military, then it becomes clear that the ballet served a crucial purpose as a site for the transmission and cultivation of popular imperialism.6 Jeffrey Richards’s brief analysis of patriotic ballets at the Alhambra and Empire leads to a conclusion that: Empire was a legitimate subject for popular culture and dance … it was in the forefront of the popular mind at the time of the great royal events, both theatres staging ballets to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and the Coronation of King Edward VII. There are also recurrent themes: the association of Empire with progress; Empire as the logical culmination of British history; the unity of the Empire and within it the unity of the United Kingdom; the role of the army and navy in the imperial context; but also the wealth and exoticism represented by the Empire.7

Alexandra Carter’s study of dancers and dancing at these two theatres underlines that explicitly patriotic productions enacted the military, the flag, and other national symbols: in her words, the corps ‘symbolised the empire; Britain’s power in the empire and internationally; her military glory and her role as a keeper of the peace’.8 We do not aim, however, merely to echo Richards’s and Carter’s findings. Neither discusses imperially themed ballets in significant depth; nor do these studies extend analysis beyond the Empire and Alhambra into London’s other theatres. The music hall ballet merits further study both because it is a relatively underexplored form of mass popular culture and also because some of its most notable performances constitute explicit acts of imperial propaganda. Study of the ways in which the ballet made topical allusion to current affairs is therefore a fecund source for the study of popular imperialism, especially since analysis – when extended beyond the Alhambra and Empire theatres – demonstrates that the form was sensitive to contemporary politics in general and imperialism in particular. Although detailed research into programme notes and reviews in the theatrical and national press confirms Richards’s and Carter’s arguments about the presence of imperial content in productions, more might be said about the reasons that reviewers identify for the patriotic enthusiasm demonstrated by audiences. Some reviews assumed productions were of a zeitgeist and noted the ballet’s flexibility in adjusting content to reflect up-to-date imperial developments, thus taking advantage of public mood. A more complicated question arises, therefore, when we consider whether the ballet was instrumental in making audiences patriotic. Evidence suggests that reviewers thought it did – though some, as will be seen, acknowledged the beauty of productions while pointing out when they thought patriotic intent had become too crude. It was

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precisely the ballet’s appeal to multiple senses that made it a unique medium to promote imperial patriotism. Reviews of the operation, in tandem, of the sister arts – of set painting, costume design and music, and their confluence within the dance – suggest that the ballet exercised a profound effect on the emotions. Given the absence of the spoken word in these performances, emphasis was on visual spectacle in the form of both tableaux vivants and the carefully choreographed mass movement of casts of hundreds (the corps). The music to which the dance was set was of paramount importance. That the usually restrained Times critic, in his review of Le Bivouac, used the word ‘fever’ is no accident; nor is the use of adjectives such as ‘dazzling’, ‘bewildering’ and ‘brilliant’ in the Era. Moreover, that reviewers measured the success of productions by the extent of audience ‘enthusiasm’ is significant. The implication was that the collective audience response to performances was greater – like depictions of imperial harmony within the final scene of Le Bivouac – than the sum of its individual parts. We explore this issue below in case studies of ballets staged when patriotism was arguably at its peak: the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and the Second Boer War (1899–1902). There is a strong argument to be made that ballet – because of its especial appeal to the aural and visual senses – is a particularly fecund source for research into the sensory politics of imperial performances. Popular ballet in nineteenth-century London In spite of the volume of research reconstructing the social, economic and cultural histories of music hall,9 more needs to be said about the significance of ballet within the halls. The misleading tendency to identify the renaissance of ballet’s popularity in London with the arrival of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1910s has been corrected; so, too, has been the argument that the ballet ceased to be popular after the Romantic period.10 The ballet was not performed as an entertainment for well-heeled clientele in well-appointed theatres: the very fact that Victorian ballet became a form of commercially oriented popular entertainment explains its relative absence (until recently) from mainstream historiography (the same can be said for the absence of research into pantomime’s nineteenth-century histories).11 Its relative relegation to decorative interlude in music hall histories belies the extent of its popularity with contemporary audiences. The ballet – what became known as the ‘music hall ballet’ (or, retrospectively, in the words of one dance historian, ‘the people’s ballet’)12 – was performed in giant venues to audiences of thousands. The dance

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

dominated programmes in Leicester Square venues: the Alhambra’s capacity was 2,336 (following the theatre’s re-orientation as a music hall in 1884), the Empire’s 1,726. Both venues often sold out.13 Productions would often be performed six times a week and would run for several months, some of the most popular for up to a year. The ballet mattered not only to audiences, who kept returning, but also to proprietors, who were often able to make a lot of money as a result of its popularity. The above summary is useful since it establishes the significance of West End venues as sites of popular imperialism. Analysis of those other huge commercial theatres, absent in much of the extant literature, is – we argue – crucial to understanding the patriotic appeal of the ballet. This is especially so since these venues had larger capacities and drew audiences from a wider class range of spectator: the Canterbury (in Lambeth: capacity of approximately 1,500), the Metropolitan (Paddington: seating capacity of over 2,000) and the South London Palace (also in Lambeth: seating capacity of around 4,000).14 Coinciding with a period of increased urbanisation, population swell and the attendant rise in opportunities for leisure activities, vast music halls were erected in the 1860s. The Metropolitan (opened 1864) and South London Palace (re-opened 1869) were examples of the venues which Thomas Anstey Guthrie later described in Harper’s Magazine as ‘large bourgeois music halls of the less fashionable parts’ of London that attracted local audiences.15 It was from the outer London venues in the 1870s that the balletic spectaculars of the fin-de-siècle West End evolved. It was the outer London venues that introduced from the 1870s topicality and spectacle to music hall ballet – especially commentary on foreign policy and imperial affairs. This was a mode of topical referencing later adopted by the Alhambra and the Empire and was the origin of a mode of political commentary later given voice in the lyrics of music hall songs. The term ‘music hall ballet’, although now often used in a derogatory manner, was used by the theatres themselves to describe an entertainment for a large group of artists in which dance was the substantial element. The genre was sufficiently flexible to incorporate a wide range of works, from comic ballets, produced by itinerant groups, to lavish in-house creations drawing on a ‘house’ corps de ballet (a cast of dancers, sometimes numbering up to hundreds in size).16 On many occasions music hall acts, knockabout comedy, monologues, acrobatics and individual dance or skating ‘turns’ were worked into the presentation, helping to disguise the ‘plot’. As a result of the 1843 Theatre Regulation Act music halls were prevented from presenting narrative works described as ballet d’action. Clause XXIII of the Act defined a stage play

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as a ‘Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, Opera, Burletta, Interlude, Melodrama, Pantomime, or other Entertainment of the Stage’.17 Ballets were not singled out for specific mention, but as Albert Strong emphasised in a treatise of 1901 on the relationship between the performing arts and the legal system, they were understood to be included in ‘other Entertainment’: It has been decided in a court of law that there is a difference between a ballet divertissement and a ballet d’action in a music hall. The former has no story, but merely consists of poses and evolutions by a number of elegant ladies. The ballet d’action has a regular dramatic story, and probably comes within the meaning of a ‘‘stage play’.18

Thus, music hall managers took considerable pains to keep up the illusion that, while there was evidently subject matter in their presentations, there was no story. Music hall ballet – divertissement rather than d’action – was able to draw both from aspects of the French-based post-Romantic ballet (particularly for fantasy productions), but also from the Italian ballo grande (literally grand ballet). The ballo grande was of especial importance since it drew from dramatic music and explosive movement and lent itself to nationalist bombast. The phenomenon that was Excelsior, for instance, was first staged in London in May 1885 at Her Majesty’s to serious critical acclaim: its eleven scenes included dances illustrating the development of the transatlantic telegraph and the building of the Suez Canal. In the Italian original the ballet was a celebration of international fraternity; to a London audience, however, it was also a narration of British triumph on the global stage. The ballerina playing the role of ‘Civilisation’ was dressed in a tutu decorated with the Union flag. So well received was the production that ‘the cheering at the end of this ballet was so persistent that there was an attempt to repeat the final movement’.19 Although our focus in this chapter is the ballet’s engagement with, and articulation of, an imperial culture, it must be kept in mind that ballets made topical reference to other pressing issues, especially poverty and suffrage. This is not surprising given that dancing, for the female members of the corps, was precarious employment. Life (Metropolitan, 1875), for instance, displayed ‘dregs of the gutter, the outcasts, the pariahs of a wealthy city, the houseless, homeless, starving, embodiments of wretchedness, the shoeblacks, the match sellers’ (Era, 13 January 1875). Dolly (Empire, 1890) contrasted scenes set in the homes of the virtuous poor and the selfish rich. A Dream of Wealth (Empire, 1889) was based on A Christmas Carol. Ballets were also performed in fundraising matinees; La Danse (Empire, 1896) was presented in order to raise money for clothes for impoverished children in the Board Schools. Although

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‘“Round the Town”: The New Ballet at the Empire Theatre’, Black and White, 8 October 1892.

7

few productions explicitly took the suffrage movement as a central topic, with the exception perhaps of On the Heath (Alhambra, 1909), issues central to the campaign featured in a large number of ballets. The Revolt of the Daughters (Alhambra, 1894) and The Milliner Duchess (Empire, 1903) featured feisty female characters representing ‘New Women’. On Brighton Pier (Alhambra,

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1894) featured a knickerbocker-wearing dancer in the ‘Lady Cyclists Galop’ scene. What is noticeable, however, is that imperial sentiments were often fused with other topical concerns. It was not uncommon, as in the case of music hall treatments of Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ (1899), for fundraising for the poor and patriotism to become merged.20 Arthur Sullivan converted the poem into song and it was included in the spectacular ballet Soldiers of the Queen (Alhambra, 1900), which ‘rendered the house hoarse with applause’. Kipling records that about £250,000 was raised.21 Nor was it uncommon for critiques of poverty to be presented alongside commentary on foreign affairs. In Luiza Collier’s The Royal Russian Rink; or, John Bull in Russia (South London Palace, 1876), the prominent dancer Constance Alexander played ‘an English orphan selling matches’. This made possible the inclusion of the popular song ‘The Cigar-Light Boy’, which illustrated the circumstances of London’s ‘street arabs’ alongside comment on contemporary affairs in Bulgaria (Entr’acte, 29 April 1876; Era, 23 April 1876). Round the Town (Empire, 1892) wove its brief narrative about the hardships experienced by the labourer’s wife and child with the exploits of rumbustious schoolboys and their kind-hearted teacher. However, its fifth and final scene, ‘The Daughters of Empire’, was a pageant demonstrating the power of imperial unity. Programme notes list the procession, with each country made up of its own leading dancer and corps: England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, India, Australia, Canada, Cape Colony, British Columbia, West Indies, Gibraltar, Ceylon and New Zealand, to which were added several large British cities and seaside towns, the City of London financial district and Windsor and Eton schools (see Figure 7). The Era (1 October 1892) stated that the ballet was received with ‘frantic enthusiasm’ because the apotheosis of the production featured a Victoria-like Britannia symbolically embracing the whole: ‘when the stage is full of a bewildering galaxy of beauty, Britannia, mighty and majestic, strides to the front, and, clad in a cloak made of a gorgeous Union Jack, waves her commanding and protecting trident over all’. That the review of Round the Town draws attention to the emotional effect of the performance on the audience is striking. Note the language: ‘bewildering galaxy of beauty’; ‘gorgeous’. Credit was bestowed upon Katti Lanner, ballet mistress at the Empire since 1887, for arranging beautiful and ‘ingenious’ dances. The Era, in addition, reserved ‘special praise’ for [Carl] Wilhelm’s ‘emblematic costumes [which] are fanciful, ingenious and artistic’.22 The scenery was ‘entirely admirable’ (William Telbin, the famous set painter, is named), especially in conjunction with the ‘clever’ painting and carpentry.

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

Leopold Wenzel’s music was ‘exactly what was required’. For the reviewer, the success of the ballet, marked by the ‘frantic enthusiasm’ of the audience, was predicated upon each aspect of its artistic production serving its purpose. Such a structure for the review of the ballet was commonplace, as is demonstrated below in case studies of ballets presented during the Diamond Jubilee and the Second Boer War. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Given the pomp surrounding Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, it is not surprising to find ballets in Leicester Square glorifying the monarch.23 Victoria and Merrie England, first performed at the Alhambra at the end of May 1897, was premiered a few weeks before the Jubilee. Under One Flag, at the Empire, was first performed on 21 June, on the evening before Victoria’s Jubilee procession through London. Both ballets concluded with pageants celebrating the Queen as a symbol of British and imperial unity. Both remained true to the formula we have seen used in Le Bivouac and Round the Town. Both received plaudits. Yet attention to their timing as well as their critical reception is indicative. Reviews of Victoria and Merrie England occupied much more page space than those of Under One Flag. This was probably because, at the time of the Jubilee itself, all journalistic hands were on deck to report the myriad outdoor activities. Under One Flag was caught up in Jubilee fever and was not spectacular enough, in the context of other indoor and outdoor performances and in spite of its patriotic intent, to merit especial attention. Those papers that did offer a few lines of review of the Empire ballet, however, praised its patriotism and artistry, though they were less likely to provide detailed explanation. The review in the Era (29 May 1897) of Victoria and Merrie England testifies to the ballet’s strong patriotic ambition: it was made up of eight historical tableaux, charting Britain’s rise to greatness. Its conclusion, as in other patriotic ballets, was a grand homage to imperial unity: the piece was brought to a close in ‘blaze of light, colour and patriotism’ by dancers representing constituent nations of the United Kingdom and its colonies. According to the critic, the production ‘appeals entirely to our patriotism, our love of the beautiful, and our delight in active and graceful movement’, especially since it was ‘certainly one of the most splendidly artistic achievements which have ever been made at this popular place of amusement. It is not only a beautiful and gorgeous spectacle; it is a lesson in history and historical costume, accompanied by some of the best music ever written for ballet purposes’ (Era, 29 May 1897).

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The Daily Mail (26 May) noted that the production was so successful that ‘the applause was frantic at the end, and everybody was called again and again’. The presence of members of the Royal Family in the audience, suggested the Pall Mall Gazette (28 May), may well have contributed to the fervour. The critic of The Times (26 May) thought that the ‘dresses in the final tableau, many of them splendidly embroidered with coats of arms, are gorgeous’. The Liberal Daily News (26 May) worried that, to some, the piece ‘may smack of aggressive jingoism’, but was satisfied nonetheless – largely because of its unswerving praise of Sir Arthur Sullivan conducting his first music hall ballet at the venue – that the ballet was an ‘emphatic, well-won, and well-deserved success’. The achievement of the production was credited to the combination of its patriotic intent and its artistry. Whereas the Alhambra’s ballet anticipated Jubilee fever, the Empire’s offering, Under One Flag, was scheduled to be part of the festivities. For the Era (26 June 1897), the Empire – in ‘ministering to the enthusiasm of the hour’ – had produced ‘one of the most artistic things we have seen on stage for a long time’. The Daily News (22 June) suggested that the combination of extraordinarily hot weather and the ‘counter-attraction of the gaily coloured streets’ meant Londoners would find sufficient visual entertainment outside the theatre. This may explain why reviews of Under One Flag are either very short or non-existent. A subsequent issue of the Daily News (28 June), for instance, contains two sentences of plot summary and finishes by punning that the ballet ‘worthily maintains the traditions of the Empire’. ‘A brilliant symbolic spectacle of loyalty’, claimed the critic of the Daily Mail (23 June), in a review spanning only a few lines, also punning that it was ‘a credit to the Empire – and that means a great deal’. The venue’s name, clearly, presented too good an opportunity to miss in reviewing a patriotic performance in the context of Jubilee fever. The Morning Post (26 June), in another very short piece, mentioned the ‘lovely’ costumes, ‘melodious’ music and ‘extremely gorgeous’ painting but used more page space, in its gossip section, to report how the management of the Empire Theatre had offered Indian and Colonial troops free entry to the performance; as a result, the audience looked like a mirror image of the ‘picturesque uniforms’ and ‘the colour and sentiment of the patriotic ballet’. The most detailed review was the Era’s (26 June). By the conclusion of the ballet, ‘when the “National Anthem” peals from the throats of children, men, and women, and brazen instruments, the sympathetic audience standing, a culmination of song and spectacle is reached which is powerfully impressive’.

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

Both ballets in Leicester Square reflected the patriotic impulses of the Jubilee summer. That much is clear. Victoria and Merrie England anticipated a Jubilee fever, and Under One Flag was part of it. Both ballets led the audience to perform a patriotism of its own, whether through rapturous cheering or collectively singing the National Anthem. The lack of coverage of Under One Flag, however, merits further investigation. In February 1897, the South London had launched its Jubilee spectacular. According to the Era (27 February 1897), The Court Ball; or, God Save the Queen exhibited a thousand electrical lights (a spectacular feat) and depicted the monarch, illuminated on her throne, ‘surrounded by her sons in arms from around the world’. It was a roaring success, drawing crowds from all over London. Reynold’s (28 February) noted that it was ‘one of the grandest sights ever witnessed upon a variety stage’. The Alhambra ballet was also an unprecedented hit: the contemporary dance scholar and later historian of the art Mark Perugini recalled it as ‘a huge success … one of the finest “patriotic” productions ever seen on the London stage’.24 Under One Flag was not reviewed negatively but, despite meeting the formula of amalgamating patriotism and art, it was not praised with the same gusto as productions at the South London or the Alhambra. Its lack of media attention is suggestive that – in the context of Jubilee celebrations – it was caught up in what Tori Smith describes as an oversaturation of consumer spectacle.25 London was too busy. The Times, giving over four pages on both 23 and 24 June to review not only Victoria’s procession but also street decorations and fireworks, made no reviews of West End theatre in the Jubilee week. Other performance events, specially timed to coincide with the Jubilee, may well have eaten into the Empire’s usual audience share: Sanger’s Circus was putting on a show in honour of the Queen, for instance, and the Tivoli hosted ‘a matinee of gigantic proportions … as the tribute of the music hall profession to national commemoration of the Queen’s Jubilee Institute for Nurses’. The Times (reporting post hoc on 30 June), commented that over sixty acts performed to a capacity house, including much-loved veterans such as Leo Dryden, Leo Stormont and Billy Randall as well as a large number of presentday stars of the halls. Potential audiences, then, would most likely already have seen a Jubilee show – perhaps even the Alhambra’s offering – by the time Under One Flag was first staged. The image of the monarch dominated advertising, shops transformed themselves into repositories of souvenirs, and music halls invented (or re-invented) hundreds of new songs for the occasion. The forthcoming procession dictated press reporting. The Graphic (26 June), in a playful phrase,

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spoke of a ‘jubilousity of jubilation’; the Daily Mail (22 June) reported that Londoners had ‘jubilonged for the day’ (with such wordplay in the air it is little surprise that reviewers punned the Empire Theatre’s name). Under One Flag was a spectacle – to be sure – but in a context of heightened sensation and an assemblage of media and commercial entertainment, it was not spectacular enough to merit especial attention. It had merely moved with the times, not stood apart from them. The Court Ball and Victoria and Merrie England could be sensations because they were performed in advance of the actual Queen’s appearance. We might speculate that they had helped visually to prepare the crowd for seeing the Jubilee. By the time of Under One Flag’s first performance, the metropolis had been transformed into a giant viewing platform with miles of stands to seat approximately 25,000 people constructed along the procession route to form a vast performance space in which the Queen and her entourage were the stars.26 The procession featured servicemen from the four home nations, foreign dignitaries including princes and prime ministers, representatives of British settlers and subject peoples – most noticeably a seventeen-stone Maori, Bornean headhunters, Rajasthani troops mounted on camels, hussars from Niger and the Gold Coast and Cypriots who were hissed because their fezzes meant that some in the crowd confused them with Turks. One half of the procession was led by Frederick Roberts, no longer merely an earl heroised in popular culture for his military exploits in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but promoted to field marshal.27 The procession, then, was not dissimilar in its composition to the finale scenes of ballet spectaculars, apart from two crucial differences: it was the promise of the real that was on display rather than the symbolic; and this constructed reality promised to be far more spectacular than a ballet could ever have hoped to be. Ballet goes to war In the 1870s and early 1880s, outer London theatres pioneered ballets which depicted warfare. Britain’s acquisition of Cyprus following the Congress of Berlin in 1878 resulted in the creation of Cyprus by Luiza Collier for the South London, and Aphrodite by John D’Auban for the Metropolitan (the goddess was allegedly born in Cyprus). In the latter, D’Auban himself impersonated the Prime Minister, Disraeli, who fell asleep in his library and dreamed of visiting the new protectorate. The reviewer for Entr’acte (5 October 1878) commented: ‘Here he is supposed to enjoy the fulfilment of his dearest wishes and we see England’s dictator shaking a loose leg among the neat and prettily dressed

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

girls of Cyprus.’ Collier’s Cyprus was partly an adaptation from her ‘War’ (the final section of The Cross and the Crescent, which had played earlier) but she, too, included the figures of Victoria and Disraeli in the final tableau. Just how much either choreographer knew about Anglo-Cypriot politics is unclear as both D’Auban and Collier introduced elephants to Cyprus and D’Auban had his wife, Emma, perform with a snake. Nonetheless, that productions included comment on current affairs suggests a presumption of audience awareness. One is on more secure ground when assessing balletic responses to relations with Russia, not least because of the widespread popularity of G. W. Hunt’s song, popularised by the Great MacDermott (G. H. Farrell), which coined the phrase ‘jingoism’: We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too, We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople.28

Collier’s The Cross and the Crescent (Metropolitan, 1878) had been choreographed the previous year in response to the threat of Russia invading Constantinople. According to the Era (6 January 1878), it was ‘perhaps the most elaborate – and certainly it is the most beautiful – ballet ever seen at the Metropolitan’. It was the balletic equivalent of the song: Russians were ‘greeted with hisses’, ‘Turkey with sympathetic cheers’, and ‘enthusiasm culminating with “Rule Britannia”’. 29 Cabul (1882), at the Canterbury, also made comment on British ill relations with Russia. Its subject was a celebration of Roberts’s triumph in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). Its finale celebrated the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. A scene set in Khyber Pass was painted by the scenic artist H. Norman and based on photographs. For the Era (7 January 1882), the ‘music is excellent’ and the ‘wild beauty’ of the ‘gorgeous’ set painting ‘fully appreciated’: in ‘beauty of colour and in graceful arrangement Cabul is everything a spectacular ballet should be’. The periodical also noted that Cabul doubled as an educational piece as well as a patriotic interpretation of foreign policy: Not only is Cabul a very magnificent spectacle, but it was also a patriotic idea to give, in this attractive manner, a representation of events and places respecting which so much interest has, and will be again, taken. Cabul has, for many years, been a frontier line for the possession of which Russia has secretly, and England openly, struggled diplomatically.

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A step back into the decade before the Leicester Square super-venues began to stage intentionally patriotic ballets is, thus, illustrative. A tradition had been set for the merging of mass military spectacle and topical referencing, demonstrating the fusion of patriotic ambition and sensitivity to contemporary politics. The symbiotic relationship was made increasingly explicit in the grand ballets at the Alhambra and Empire after 1884 and nowhere more so than in productions staged during the years of the Second Boer War. Simon Popple, in a study of the complex relationships between news reporting and the cult of war, argues that the late Victorian communications revolution ‘allowed for a far more reactive set of cultural responses’ to war news.30 The increasingly visual culture of journalism, and the speed with which images could become widely circulated – including war photography and early film as well as the illustrated press – meant the theatre became a site in competition for the commercialisation of reportage.31 The theatre not only told the news but also negotiated ways in which news was negotiated. In doing so it was able to draw from a range of dominant visual tropes. At Christmas 1899, the Tivoli ‘unleashed … patriotic fervour’ by exhibiting scenes from the Cape in a panorama show (Daily News, 12 December 1899). In the Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime at Drury Lane, Jack found himself confronting the Giant Blunderboer, who had been made up to resemble the Boer leader Kruger.32 Photographs of Kruger had been widely printed in the press, and it is no surprise that the advertising poster for Jack and the Beanstalk, in vivid colours and clearly depicting the defeated Kruger, was to be seen all over London.33 The Canterbury, producing a mixed bill for its Christmas fare, featured both a short ballet entitled Briton against Boer which ‘nightly arouses enthusiastic applause’ and a song by a young lady, dressed in the colours of the Union flag, lamenting the departure of her sweetheart who has volunteered to fight in the Transvaal: the fusion of the visual on display in the ballet and the sentimentality of the song merged into a patriotic politics of affect. It did not take long for jokes, subjecting the war to comedic subversion, to appear: at the Oxford music hall, and with props, Gus Elen’s ‘Boer [Bore] of Bethnal Green’ thought that the ‘Orange Tree State’ was a desirable colonial acquisition for ‘the growth of its succulent fruit’.34 Marty Gould notes that plays, required to negotiate the dilemmas posed by the ethics of a war against other white, European settlers, were set the task of ‘marshalling public sentiment in support of the conflict’.35 Not all productions were successful since, as Popple’s evidence demonstrates, the press was often a source of criticism: not necessarily pro-Boer, but certainly critical of the effects

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of the crude jingoism that those displaying film, panorama or music hall skit sought to engender.36 Anxiety about the war is evident in the mixed reviews of Alhambra and the Empire ballets, denoting again the sensitivity of the ballet to contemporary politics. Reviews, nonetheless, commented on the fusion of patriotism and artistry and demonstrate an intent to sow imperial sentiments. Soldiers of the Queen opened on 11 December 1899 at the Alhambra. It was a series of ‘Military Snapshots’ that, like other ballets, culminated in a grand procession of troops from across the United Kingdom and the colonies. The show ran for forty-three weeks and was later revived, reworked neatly as Soldiers of the King, following Victoria’s death. One critic remarked that management had ‘a finger on the public pulse’.37 The Era (16 December 1899) applauded the execution of the ‘culminating scene of patriotism’. The critic of the Daily Mail (12 December) was emphatic in his admiration. The production was a triumph because it was beautifully presented: ‘the animation of the whole thing, all combine to make an exceptionally pleasing spectacle’. It was ‘a production which reflects the emotions of the moment, with all that is gloomy and sad and terrible refined away from them’. The Daily News (12 December) commented that ‘the Alhambra has entered heartily into the spirit of the time’, and the Dramatic World that the audience ‘simply screamed with delight, and cheered again and again in a frenzy of patriotism’.38 The Pall Mall Gazette (6 January 1900) noted that troops, including officers and non-commissioned officers from the 17th Lancers, were invited to the performance. So patriotic was the production, however, that the critic of the Morning Post (12 December 1899), after noting that ‘it was heartily applauded at every opportunity’, was concerned that ‘it is not a healthy sign that an audience should accept as patriotic a performance in which war itself is treated with the most callous levity’. Perhaps, he continued: If the Alhambra is really bent on putting its crowd of bright, comely young damsels to patriotic uses, the best thing it can do is dazzle not us but the Boers with them by sending them out to South Africa, with instructions to get themselves captured in large numbers.

On the one hand, this review indicates that the patriotism of the production was matched by an audience already whipped up into a state of fever. On the other hand, however, the critic’s caution at the production’s jingoistic ambition demonstrates not only a concern at the hall’s glorification of violence at a time in which British troops were suffering terrible setbacks, but the management’s commercial exploitation of the public mood. The immediacy of the ballet’s reactivity to events is evident in an annotated programme for a performance on

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1 March 1900 that reveals the relationship between patriotic display, multiple visual sources and real-time news: ‘News of Relief of Ladysmith received. House crowded, tremendous scenes of enthusiasm. Lady White present with Lord Lansdowne.’39 The previous day news had broken that General Sir Redvers Buller had relieved the four-month siege, rescuing Sir George White and his men. Lansdowne was the Secretary of State for War between 1895 and 1900. The ballet had been preceded by newsreel showing jubilant scenes. If the Alhambra’s lavish production – like its Jubilee ballet – had succeeded by both reflecting the mood of patrons but also offering spectacular fare, then the Empire’s offering was less bombastic but certainly no less flexible. Round the Town Again (1899) was a reworking of Round the Town (1892), about which we have already heard. It was first presented on 8 May 1899, a few months before the Second Boer War had begun. Unlike the Alhambra, the Empire did not stage an explicitly patriotic spectacle – perhaps because Lanner, the choreographer and dance mistress, had expressed her frustration at being required constantly to re-create military sequences.40 The ballet, like the original, represented scenes from London life. To the original, however, was added a scene in which a detachment of the 21st Lancers returning from Sudan were greeted by happy Londoners in front of a tableau of Charing Cross station. It was a celebration, reflective of up-to-date news, of the army’s decisive victory at the battle of Omdurman – a gesture appreciated in the press.41 Following the outbreak of war, the ballet altered its tableau and dance: those returning from East Africa to Charing Cross were replaced by soldiers leaving the Wellington Barracks for service overseas; scenes originally featuring the shops of Bond Street were replaced by a lavish ball for officers in the Carlton Hotel (Daily Mail, 9 December 1899). The amendment, seemingly minor, must have required huge effort and expense since it involved the painting of new scenes and alterations to costumes. According to the Daily Mail (31 January 1900), the effort was entirely appreciated: ‘the “second edition” of “Round the Town Again” at the Empire is more vivacious than the first. The scene in front of Wellington Barracks and the muster of the troops are finely animated … extraordinary.’ Conclusion: visual culture and the performance of patriotism Ballet, therefore, was sensitive to contemporary affairs and sought to reflect patriotic fervour. It is no surprise to find that the ballets – on the evidence of reviews – tapped into the public mood. Productions were praised for their blending of artistry and patriotic intent. Productions clearly made use of key

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet

imperial tropes – especially the monarchy and British unity – to promote imperialism. We have not had space in this essay to investigate the class composition of audiences or the history of the ballet outside London.42 Further exploration of how gender affected the symbolic depictions of home, nation and empire is also required, since – as this essay has demonstrated – the cultivation of imperial unity was grounded in the juxtapositions of local and colonial bodies depicted by the bodies of female dancers. In this context, additional research into balletic representations of national dress and the authenticity of costumes would be welcome: in addition to military uniforms, the ballet stage was graced by corps performing as Egyptian slaves, Zulu warriors, Indian Nautch girls, Chinese handmaidens and Moroccan and Spanish Gypsies.43 It is on the significance of the interplay of visual and the aural, and the significance of the ballet as a multi-sensory aspect of popular culture, that we offer some speculative concluding thoughts. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, music was increasingly understood as a communal cultural practice: when collectively heard, it was understood to effect a collective emotional response.44 That the quality of music was lauded by reviewers was important. Musical scores operated on two levels: to perform a variety of instantaneously recognisable national musics (note the deliberate plural); and to incorporate new melodies that would become expressive of key sensations.45 It was no accident, therefore, that ballets that depicted empire wove indigenous sounds – sometimes folk song, sometimes national anthem – into their musical narrative (to which suitably attired chorus girls would dance). Art, similarly, when witnessed through communal modes of seeing, could confer context-specific meaning. As Lynda Nead has argued for mid-Victorian London, the visual was a ‘universal language’, and key tropes, perhaps unrecognisable to us, would probably have provided common points of identification for Victorians.46 That this universal language should translocate to the theatre is not a surprise. Martin Meisel does not discuss ballet in Realizations, but does – nonetheless – demonstrate that stage dramas constructed sets and tableaux that signified a cultural circuit of ready identification of iconic images.47 Charing Cross station, for instance, used in Round the Town Again, evoked W. P. Frith’s The Railway Station (1862). Seaside ballets, such as Ramsgate! (Metropolitan, 1876) and By the Sea (Empire, 1891), re-imagined Frith’s Ramsgate Sands: Life at the Seaside (1854). The artist’s Derby Day (1856–58) found its way into visual representation in both Life (Metropolitan, 1875) and The Girl I Left Behind Me (Empire, 1893). While these common images might not immediately reference the empire, they do

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set a context for thinking about late Victorian ways of spectating. If Meisel’s formulation of the cultural crossovers of Victorian visual media is applied the very end of the Victorian period, then the foremost mode of seeing was likely also to be influenced by imperial signifiers: not merely in the war photograph, or the early film, or the illustrated newspaper or magazine with the specific focus on the war event, but in a vast array of consumer goods likely to be seen in the everyday life experience: toys, advertising and brand packaging, to name but a few.48 What significance, then, for thinking of the ballet as a mode of cultural visualisation and affective politics of spectacular display that both reflected and shaped popular culture? We might speculate, on this interpretation, that late Victorian audiences would be able to identify common tropes of imperial representation. Far-flung adventures and wars, reported as ‘facts’ and disseminated in myriad images circulating freely through popular visual culture, would reduce geographical distance: both by the immediacy of reporting and also by the speed with which the theatre retold and interpreted the news as cultural event. Ballet finales, grand military spectaculars, depicted the nations of empire in a microcosm that represented – to a suitable soundtrack – the global stage, the empire as a global family to be supported and enthusiastically celebrated. The ‘illusion of reality’, Edward Ziter argues, lay in audience ‘knowledge that the real was mixed with the theatrical’.49 Reviewers’ commentaries on the function of artistry as a crucial element determining the realisation of patriotic intent would suggest that the ballet served not only to heighten ‘the illusion of reality’ but to effect an emotional response. The music hall ballet was entertainment and education, but it was also inspiration and a site for inculcation. For this reason we believe it merits further study as a location for the representation and negotiation of popular culture in general and the politics of popular imperialism in particular. Notes 1 The Daily News (21 August 1886), for instance, made much of the visit by a group of Canadian Artillery Volunteers to the Alhambra. 2 Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 9. 3 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 165. 4 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of Public Opinion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), chapter 2; Jim Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions: The Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12:46 (May 1996), pp. 147–55; Michael Booth,

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet ‘Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism’, in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 3–20; Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 145–69; Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late-Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 16–43. 5 Alexandra Carter, Dance and Dancers in Victorian and Edward Music Hall Ballet (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–2, 20, 157–61. 6 On definitions of popular imperialism, see Stuart Ward, ‘Echoes of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 62:1 (2006), pp. 264–78. 7 Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 261. 8 Carter, Dance and Dancers, p. 89. 9 See, for instance, Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991); Joseph Donohue, Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005); Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Laurence Senelick, ‘Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music Hall Songs’, Victorian Studies, 19:2 (1975), pp. 149–80. 10 Amy Koritz, for instance, regularly uses the word ‘devalued’ to describe music hall dances. See ‘Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Halls, 1890–1910’, Theatre Journal, 42:4 (1990), pp. 419–31. 11 Carter charts historiographical lacunae in more detail: Dance and Dancers, pp. 8–26. See also Jane Pritchard, ‘“More Natural than Nature, More Artificial than Art”: The Dance Criticism of Arthur Symons’, Dance Research, 21:2 (2003), pp. 36–89. On pantomime, see Jim Davis (ed.), Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Jeffrey Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime: Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). 12 Jane Pritchard, ‘Collaborative Creations for the Alhambra and the Empire’, Dance Chronicle, 24:1 (2001), p. 56. 13 Statistics from the Theatre Trust website, www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/ theatres/show/3263-alhambra-theatre-london (accessed 23 May 2014). See also Diana Howard, London Theatres and Music Halls, 1850–1950 (London: Library Association, 1970). 14 Pritchard, ‘Collaborative Creations’, Appendix I, pp. 76–8. 15 Quoted in Benny Green, The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion (London: Pavilion, 1986), p. 36. 16 It should be noted that the term ‘ballet’ is here used in its wider sense of theatrical dance rather than the specific and exclusive sense of danse d’école or codified academic dance, for in many productions the academic ballet element was restricted to a few performers or just one dancer. Essentially, music hall ballets were works with an immediate appeal to a wide audience who enjoyed the music, spectacle, colour and dance. Occasionally the term ‘modern ballet’ was used by

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Politics in performance c­ ontemporaries to describe these productions. Some ‘ballets’ also included songs and would be worthy of a place in the discussion of the origins of musical theatre. 17 ‘Theatre Act, 1843’, reproduced in A. Strong, Dramatic and Musical Law (London: Era, 1901), pp. 97–102. 18 Strong, Dramatic and Musical Law, p. 57. 19 Excelsior, first performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in January 1881, became an international sensation, playing across continental Europe and both American continents before arriving in London. Review of London premiere from the Era (30 May 1885). 20 On theatrical fundraising more generally, see Catherine Hindson, ‘“Gratuitous Assistance”? The West End Theatre Industry, Late-Victorian Charity, and Patterns of Theatrical Fundraising’, New Theatre Quarterly, 30:1 (February 2014), pp. 17–28. 21 See Richards, Imperialism and Music, pp. 255, 357–8; see also Edward Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 188. 22 Wilhelm’s designs are held in collections of the Royal Academy of Dance, London. 23 John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: The First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 239–40. 24 Quoted in Richards, Imperialism and Music, p. 253. 25 Tori Smith, ‘“Almost Pathetic … But Also Very Glorious”: The Consumer Spectacle of the Diamond Jubilee’, Histoire sociale/Social History, 29:58 (1996), pp. 334–56. 26 The idea of the ‘performing monarchy’ has gained ground in recent years – referring not necessarily to the monarch acting, but, rather, to enacting a prescribed role. See Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Theatrical Monarchy: The Making of Victoria, the Modern Family Queen’, in Regina Schulte (ed.), The Body of the Queen (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), pp. 238–53. The provocation to consider Victoria as enacting a role was David Cannadine’s in ‘The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c.1820–1977’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 101–64. 27 Daily Mail (Golden Edition), 22 June 1897. For summary, see Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (London: Faber, 2008), pp. 16–21. 28 See Richards, Imperialism and Music, pp. 325–6; Russell, Popular Music, pp. 136–8. 29 The review also praises the choreographer, musical director and scene painter. 30 Simon Popple, ‘“Fresh From the Front”: Performance, War News and Popular Culture during the Boer War’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 8:4 (2010), pp. 402–3. 31 James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media’, Twentieth Century British History, 13:1 (2002), pp. 1–16. 32 Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions’; Jennifer Schacker, ‘Slaying Blunderboer: CrossDressed Heroes, National Identity and Wartime Pantomime’, Marvels and Tales, 27:1 (2013), pp. 52–64. 33 Several theatres staged pantomimes and melodramas throughout the war years that were either set in South Africa or involved troops or others with direct involvement in the conflict. In addition to those mentioned in Jeffrey Richards’s chapter in this

Popular imperialism and the music hall ballet volume, London theatre-goers had the option to go to see Sons of Empire (Britannia, 1899), Comrades in Khaki (Garrick, 1899), For Queen and Country (Princess’s, 1899), The War Special (Gaiety, 1900) and Fortune of War (St James’s, 1901). See Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 233 n. 2; Jonathan Schneer, London, 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 95–117. 34 Both venues reviewed in the Era (30 December 1899). 35 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 210. 36 Popple, ‘“Fresh From the Front”’, pp. 407–8. 37 Quoted in Richards, Imperialism and Music, p. 255. 38 Dramatic World (January 1900), quoted from Schneer, London, p. 96. 39 Pritchard collection. 40 Carter, Dance and Dancers, p. 20. 41 The review in The Times (10 May 1899) makes special mention of the return of troops from East Africa; so too does that in the Standard (8 May 1899). 42 On audiences, see J. Davis and V. Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–80 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001). 43 Carter, Dance and Dancers, pp. 86. 4 4 See Richards, Imperialism and Music, pp. 3–17, for discussion of contemporary approaches to music theory. 45 Tim Barringer, ‘Sonic Spectacles: The Audio-Visual Nexus, Delhi-London, 1911–12’, in E. Edwards et al. (eds), Sensible Objects: Material Culture, the Senses, Colonialism, Museums (London: Berg, 2006), pp. 169–70. See also Nalina Ghuman, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 46 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 59. 47 Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 48 Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011); Richard Fulton, ‘The Sudan Sensation’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42:1 (2009), pp. 37–63. 49 Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage, p. 188.

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9 Drury Lane imperialism Jeffrey Richards

W

hen it was published in 2004, Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists created quite a stir. In spite of the weight of evidence to the contrary which has been built up since John MacKenzie published his pioneering studies Propaganda and Empire (1984) and Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986), in the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series (which now exceeds 100 volumes) and in the work of a myriad of other scholars, he insisted that the working classes in Britain were ignorant of, indifferent to and uninfluenced by the British Empire. It is difficult to engage with Porter on any meaningful intellectual level because of his blanket rejection of all other scholars’ definitions of imperialism and his refusal to provide one of his own. Claiming that imperialism has had many different meanings, he declares: ‘The way to cope with all this confusion is not, of course, to decide how imperialism should be defined. There is no “right” way. Imperialism is not a reality … but merely a convenient label.’1 This constitutes a total abdication of a basic scholarly responsibility – to define your terms and construct your argument accordingly. Porter rejects in particular the definition which I have found most helpful – John MacKenzie’s ‘ideological cluster’ of ideas and values which together make up a definition of British imperialism. MacKenzie’s cluster comprises militarism, monarchism, hero-worship, racialism and social Darwinism, which he suggests ‘Together … constituted a new type of patriotism, which derived a special significance from Britain’s unique imperial mission’.2 In my own work, I have refined this cluster, replacing militarism with chivalry and adding Protestantism. But the cluster remains an invaluable tool. Porter is scornful of it, declaring that each of these values can exist independently and there is nothing inherently imperialistic about any of them.3 Of course they can exist

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independently. But the whole point about the cluster is that in British imperialism they do not exist independently but inter-relate and reinforce each other. Porter apparently does not understand the nature, function and effect of popular culture. As Arthur Marwick wrote of the popular feature film, ‘There is a law of the market; the bigger its commercial success, the more a film is likely to tell us about the unvoiced assumptions of the people who watched it.’4 The same could be said of popular theatre and popular music. In their lavishly illustrated study of printed imperial ephemera, Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins argue that a key theme of the book is ‘the extent to which empire and stereotypical views of the non-European world were part of the furniture of everyday life … assumptions about white people and non-white people … were seldom challenged … and millions of people grew up with an imperial mindset’.5 The evidence is all there in the advertising. Producers aiming to sell their products do not deploy alienating or unpalatable imagery in their posters and packaging, and empire and race were all over Victorian advertising. The books by Jackson and Tomkins, Anandi Ramamurthy and Robert Opie furnish abundant evidence of this.6 Tea, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, tobacco and soap are among the products regularly sold by appeal to imperial imagery. Cheerful faithful natives of various kinds harvest crops under the watchful eyes of white overseers; humble native servants serve beverages of different kinds to lounging British army officers, or memsahibs; grinning black boys wash themselves white with British soap; turbaned black mammies dress or bathe elegant white ladies; the imagery is consistent, the natives are always smiling broadly, and the whites are always in superior postures. It reflects and reinforces a racist worldview. Johnston’s Corn Flour advertised its product with a picture of the splendidly uniformed guards of the Viceroy of India. A series of Colman’s Starch advertisements featured scenes from the Prince of Wales’s tour of India in 1875–76. It was possible to buy Imperial Assorted Biscuits, Imperial Chocolates, Imperial Cigars, Mint Imperials, Empire Matches and Empress Condensed Milk. Porter dismisses advertising in a mere six lines on page 179. What about the stage? One of the most popular and successful chains of music halls was called the Empire. The Empire was to be found in cities up and down the British Isles, and there was not just a Leicester Square Empire in the West End of London. There was a Shepherds Bush Empire, a Hackney Empire, an Islington Empire, a Holloway Empire and a Holborn Empire, which covered a wide variety of audiences in class terms. What of the legitimate theatre? Porter claims, having consulted the list of play titles in the Lord Chamberlain’s collection, that ‘very few related to

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the Empire in any way’.7 Consulting the same list several years later, Marty Gould in his excellent recent book Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (2011) has identified 300 imperially themed plays, on such subjects as the Indian Mutiny, the Australian and South African Gold Rushes and the Second Boer War, not to mention 200 versions of the classic colonialist text Robinson Crusoe.8 Porter cannot be blamed for not having read Gould but he can be criticised for completely ignoring the work of Michael Booth. In his pioneering English Melodrama, published as long ago as 1965, Booth identified a genre of imperial melodrama which centred on the re-creation of imperial campaigns and expeditions. What could be more imperial than the 1885 melodrama Khartoum played at Sanger’s Grand National Amphitheatre? It contains all the classic elements: a disgraced British officer makes his way to Egypt to rejoin his regiment and die bravely; the hero’s wife seeking news of her husband is captured by the Mahdi; and a rousing climax in which the heroine’s party is attacked by Arabs in the desert and the husband appears to rescue her, as the stage directions read: ‘a gunboat works on at the back, flying Union Jack and manned by Blue Jackets with a Gatling gun – opens fire on Arabs … Arabs cower; English cheer; music “Rule Britannia”.’9 Booth developed his discussion of this genre in an article ‘Soldiers of the Queen’, published in 1996.10 Also missing is Edward Ziter’s thoughtful and detailed discussion of the Drury Lane melodrama and pantomimes inspired by British military interventions in Egypt and the Sudan by General Gordon and Lord Wolseley in his book The Orient on the Victorian Stage.11 Neither of these items appears in Porter’s bibliography. Sir Augustus Harris was the supreme impresario and showman of his age. The lessee and manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, from 1879 until his death in 1896, Harris was the only Drury Lane lessee to die rich. He left £23,677 2s 9d, over £1 million in today’s values. Universally known as ‘Gus’, Harris delighted in his Punch nickname Augustus Druriolanus, a name implying empire. The actress Dame Geneviève Ward deemed it highly appropriate: ‘In his nature, his power and the vast reach of his schemes he was truly of the imperial line’, she wrote.12 The Victorian theatre historian Macqueen Pope, writing in 1951, called him ‘a King of Pantomime, indeed an Emperor’.13 Bearded, rotund and frock-coated, Harris famously looked like the Prince of Wales. Harris’s fortune and success lay in giving people what they wanted: ‘My constant aim has been to gauge the taste of the theatre-going public with the greatest possible accuracy, and to follow intelligently in the matter of dramatic entertainment the unerring law of supply and demand.’14 So Harris

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based his theatrical regime at Drury Lane on a sensational autumn melodrama and a spectacular Christmas pantomime, both of them produced as lavishly as possible. His shows each cost between £5,000 and £6,000 to stage, and the pantomimes employed between 700 and 800 people. Drury Lane was not a West End theatre for the elite. It is generally agreed that it attracted a cross-class audience, with noisy working-class patrons packing the gallery. But also Harris’s melodramas and pantomimes played not just at Drury Lane but all over the country. For Harris sent out touring companies throughout the provinces with his imperial melodramas and sold the rights for production in the colonies and the United States. The non-West End venues of his autumn melodramas included theatres in the working-class areas of London, where they played, for instance, at the Britannia, Hoxton and the Surrey in Lambeth. Five of the autumn melodramas featured imperial military campaigns, and these were very much personal projects of Harris. He produced them, co-wrote them and, in the early productions, played a leading role. The first imperial melodrama, Youth (1881), has a hero Frank Darlington (played by Harris), who is falsely accused of a crime and imprisoned in Dartmoor. Released on ticket of leave after saving the life of a warder, he enlists as a private soldier in the army, sails to South Africa and, when the regiment is trapped, pinned down and outnumbered, rides for help, brings reinforcements in the nick of time and wins the Victoria Cross. The spectacular scene in which the troopship sailed from Portsmouth, loaded with soldiers, cheered by spectators and with military bands playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, would, thought The Daily Telegraph (8 August 1881), linger long in the memories of those who saw it. So too would the military engagement, complete with real Gatling guns and Martini–Henry rifles, at the fictional Hawk’s Point, which as The Daily Telegraph observed was a ‘thinly veiled’ reference to Rorke’s Drift, where in 1879 a small detachment of the South Wales Borderers had stood off a numerically superior Zulu army and which had been immortalised in paintings by Alphonse de Neuville and Lady Butler, exhibited in 1880 and 1881 respectively. The arrival of the relief force was accompanied by the playing of ‘Rule Britannia’. In just this one play you have a merger of the visual and the aural, aimed at triggering a series of emotional responses in the audience. Youth ran for 114 performances, being withdrawn only to make way for the pantomime. It was revived in 1882 and ran for another sixty-nine performances, receiving public endorsements from General Sir Frederick Roberts and Lord Wolseley for its military authenticity. The revival transferred the setting from South Africa to Egypt to capitalise on current events.

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The same events inspired the production of Freedom (1883), which was also set in Egypt. In September 1881 a nationalist army revolt had broken out in Egypt, led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi Pasha with the slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, aimed at ending foreign domination of the country. British fears for the security of the Suez Canal and riots in Alexandria leading to the deaths of fifty Europeans prompted military intervention by Britain. The Royal Navy under Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour bombarded Alexandria, and an army under General Sir Garnet Wolseley landed and defeated the Egyptian rebels at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir (12 September 1882), securing British domination in Egypt. Seymour and Wolseley were raised to the peerage as Baron Alcester and Viscount Wolseley respectively. In Freedom, Urabi Pasha was represented by Mohammed Araf Bey and – although he uses Urabi’s slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ – has far less noble motives than national independence. He seeks to profit from the slave trade (‘slavery is sanctified by our sacred books’) and is animated by desire for Constance, the beautiful daughter of banker Edward Loring and fiancée of Captain Ernest Gascoigne of the gunboat HMS Arrow (played by Harris). Araf Bey plans and initiates a native revolt, attacking the British consulate in an unnamed Egyptian town (presumed to be Alexandria) and arranging during the confusion the abduction of Constance. Gascoigne establishes the altruistic nature of British involvement in Egypt by freeing a boatload of female slaves and defying their Egyptian captors. (‘These girls were slaves; they are free. England has decreed it, and in England’s name I speak. Touch them at your peril. I defy you’). Loring tells Araf that Britain does not seek to take over Egypt, merely to trade and foster progress by means of British inventions. Gascoigne organises the defence of the consulate, refusing to haul down the British flag (‘No, rather nail it to the mast. We represent the name and honour of our native land. Let our enemies tear down our colours if they can.’). He finds a steadfast ally in the American millionaire Andrew Jackson Slingsby, stressing the Anglo-American alliance. Gascoigne tells Slingsby: ‘Our kinship makes us friends for ever.’ Ernest rescues Constance, and Slingsby rescues Lady Betty Piper and her daughter Amaranth, whom he loves. Ernest is aided in the rescue by Suleima, the rejected wife of Araf Bey. She eventually stabs him to death. Ernest falls into the hands of the slave trader Sadyk but is finally rescued by the arrival of a British gunboat, learns that the British have reached Cairo and restored order, is reunited with Constance and hangs Sadyk from the yardarm. Ernest declares: ‘Let Egypt be a pledge for the peace of Europe and her canal, a link in the girdle of her prosperity.’ The play ran for fifty-five

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performances, being withdrawn only to make way for another production that Harris had programmed, A Sailor and his Lass. Human Nature (1885), like Khartoum, focuses on the expedition to relieve General Gordon, which actually arrived three days after the forces of the Mahdi had entered Khartoum and killed Gordon. In this version, Captain Temple leads a British force which recaptures the unnamed desert city (evidently intended to be Khartoum) and frees the European prisoners from their Mahdist captors. The Arabs flee, crying ‘All is lost. The English are invincible’, and the play ends with a triumphant parade of troops through Trafalgar Square. No mention is made of the unfortunate General Gordon. The troops march in, cheered by the crowds, to the strains of ‘The British Grenadiers’. The Daily Telegraph (14 September 1885) reported: ‘Bells, bands and huzzas strive for the mastery of sound. The enthusiasm of the stage touches the electric sympathy of the house, and the curtain falls on a roar of applause that seems to shake the venerable walls of Old Drury.’ The production was accompanied by an exhibition at the theatre of artefacts, arms and utensils illustrating the Sudan campaign.15 In A Life of Pleasure (1893) two young men find themselves involved in the Third Burmese War of 1885 and another of those desperate military engagements with the British trapped and outnumbered and rescued in the nick of time. To get everything quite right Harris called on Major Sell and Captain

Promotional poster for A Life of Pleasure (1893).

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Dumfries, who had served in the Burmese War, and the war artists and correspondents Melton Prior and Julius Price, who had covered it. Interestingly the script called for the heroic Lord Avondale to assume the pose of the real-life imperial hero Colonel Fred Burnaby, coolly firing at the enemy, as he was shown in iconic pictures of him just before his death at Abu Klea in 1885 (see Figure 8). The Daily Telegraph (22 September 1893) used the opportunity of this production to defend the often criticised genre of melodrama, to laud Harris and to relate the imperial stage to the celebrations of empire in other media: There is some merit in poor old melodrama after all! They have endeavoured to spurn it, to crush it, and to hold it up to the contempt and ridicule of the public, and yet last night Sir Augustus Harris, knowing and understanding people, did more for the play of the people than has been done within the most elastic and comprehensive memory … by the mere exercise of stage craft we believe … he has done much for what we often so much need – English patriotism … We can conceive that, being an earnest and artistic man, he desired to make this despised melodrama a means of showing the people something about war, something about the devotion of English soldiers, something about the pluck of English officers … War was the theme of Sir Augustus Harris, and he concentrated his artistic devotion and energy on war. Why not? Our special correspondents describe war, our gifted artists illustrate war, our novelists imagine war, our painters idealise war. Why then should not the stage be strained to the possibilities of war? We hold it is a good thing to do, a noble thing to do, a right thing to do. In every audience, thousands strong on a crowded night at Old Drury, there is a considerable percentage that has given some dear lives and some precious loves to war. In their hearts, they are national, they are patriotic, they are English … They desire to see for themselves how war is done. Sir Augustus Harris has given us many battle– pieces at Old Drury before this … But never before … has a battle scene been presented so calm, so noble, so actual, and so eloquent with English resolution and daring as the scene that illustrates a plucky episode in the Burmese War.

A Life of Pleasure ran for 153 performances at Drury Lane and later at the Princess’s Theatre. The last imperial melodrama of the Harris regime was Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895), deriving its title from a celebrated song by Henry Russell. The Daily Telegraph (20 September 1895) wrote: Nearly fifty years have passed over our heads since Henry Russell stirred the pulse of the nation with his vigorous, manly and patriotic song ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’. We have changed very little since then. We are still devoted to Old England; we have still the strong colonising spirit amongst us. In the forties it was America … To-day it is South Africa, where brave men die and carry out

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the splendid old English tradition as they did in the old times. Sir Augustus Harris, with that knowledge of his country and the human heart which does him so much credit, has turned Henry Russell’s fine old English ballad to excellent dramatic account. There was no more genuinely pathetic moment in last night’s splendid success than when Miss Fanny Brough sat down at the piano with three young fellows around her and sang ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’ … Finely realised, no doubt, was the historical Wilson episode in Matabeleland. There were genuine and deserved tears when the young soldier, unable to write, dictated a letter to his dear old mother by the hand of his gallant commanding officer. A thrill went through the house when Henry Neville gave out the cheer ‘God Save the Queen’, when the Englishmen, ready to die, their ammunition spent, faced the inevitable, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder. But to our mind the one supremely dramatic moment of the whole evening was when Fanny Brough sat down to the piano and inflamed her audience to colonisation with the simple ballad ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’.

Much of the action took place in South African diamond mine country, but critics and spectators recognised the climactic event as based on the actual episode of Major Allan Wilson and the thirty-two-man Shangani River patrol in 1893 who, when surrounded by several thousand Matabele warriors and with their ammunition exhausted, shook hands and sang ‘God Save the Queen’ before being massacred. This had been immediately immortalised in a painting by Allan Stewart, There Were No Survivors. Once again, music was invoked. The orchestra played ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as the soldiers wrote their last letters, and ‘God Save the Queen’ was played triumphantly when, in a variation from history, British cavalry rescue the besieged patrol in the nick of time. The Theatre (1 October 1895), recalling the climactic scene as ‘certain to appeal to the heart and imagination of every Englishman’, predicted ‘the recollection of the gallant stand by Captain [sic] Wilson and his handful of men against the Matabele in the late war is still sufficiently vivid to ensure for the reproduction of this magnificent and deplorable incident a splendid and enthusiastic reception’.16 Cheer, Boys, Cheer ran for 177 performances at Drury Lane and later at the Olympic. The Drury Lane melodramas provided the model for imperial melodramas produced elsewhere, in both the West End and the East End. They frequently took their cue from military events in the empire. In 1896 the British and Egyptian armies under the command of General Kitchener began their expedition to avenge the murder of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. It culminated in 1898 in the destruction of the Dervish army at the battle of Omdurman. The Sudanese campaign, together with the memory of the heroic martyr Gordon and the avenging victor Kitchener, was embraced by the whole

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spectrum of popular culture. There were books, pictures, songs, poems, advertisements (for whisky, carpets and rheumatism pills among other items), all hailing the success of the expedition.17 The theatre was not left out of this celebration. In 1896, William Terriss, who specialised in true blue army and navy officers, starred in Boys Together by Joseph Comyns Carr and C. Haddon Chambers at the Adelphi. There was a characteristically contrived melodrama premise. Major Frank Villars (William Terriss) is in love with the widow Ethel Wood, whose reprobate husband (on the run accused of forgery) is believed drowned in the East Indies. But he turns up as a war correspondent under the name Hugo Forsyth and accompanies the military expedition to Sudan, bent on ruining Villars. Villars and Forsyth are among those captured after the forces of the Mahdi slaughter the army led by Hicks Pasha. While in captivity, they learn of the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon. Forsyth frames Villars for the theft of gold from another prisoner, and he is flogged by his captors and sentenced to die. Forsyth escapes and back in England blackens Villars’s reputation. But Villars too escapes, returns to England and pursues Forsyth to the Tyrol, where in a struggle on a precipice, Forsyth falls to his death, leaving Villars free to marry Ethel. The key sequence in the play was that set in Sudan, as The Daily Mail’s review revealed: The new Adelphi play was written to interest and amuse; it fulfils this, its primary purpose to the full. But it has another and a more important effect even than this. The great shout that went up when Major Villars – a prisoner in the Soudan – hears of the fall of Khartoum and refuses to believe the news – to believe that England has consented to desert Gordon, the bravest soldier that ever breathed; that, if his country has played so mean a part, English blood and treasure will sooner or later have to be spent to repair the fatal blunder – the great shout that went up was an object-lesson in patriotism. The British public does not forget. … The time when Gordon died is today in the minds of us all.18

The play achieved ninety-one performances. There was traffic in the opposite direction, from the East End to the West End. Tommy Atkins by Arthur Shirley and Benjamin Landeck achieved, according to The Theatre magazine, a ‘phenomenal success’ at the Pavilion, Mile End, and as a result was transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre.19 Inspired by Kipling’s poem, which is sung in the play by an Irish sergeant, Tommy Atkins opened on 23 December 1895. It concerned the adventures of one Harold Wilson, who is first seen as a curate committed to the wellbeing of the poor, but he is so disgusted by the intolerance, hypocrisy and lack of

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Christian charity exhibited by many of his parishioners that he throws up his church career and joins the army, serving in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. The play climaxes in Sudan, where in a fort besieged by Mahdist forces, the cowardly commander, Captain Richard Maitland, murderer and bigamist, agrees to surrender to the enemy in return for his life and £20,000. But when he orders his men to haul down the Union Jack, they refuse to obey orders and mutiny, preferring death to dishonour. Maitland is shot dead by the Dervishes trying to wave a white flag. Wilson, the second-in-command, takes command and the fort holds out, with the men singing ‘Rule Britannia’ until relieved by a British force. In the script, the author noted: ‘This incident actually occurred at the massacre of the Wilson party.’ He is referring to the massacre of Major Allan Wilson and the Shangani River patrol by the Matabele, which had inspired the finale of Cheer, Boys, Cheer, and this episode may also have influenced the choice of name for the hero. The Times (24 December 1895) expressed astonishment that an East End melodrama not intended for the West End (‘its plot, characterisation and crudity of sentiment show that’) should have turned up there. But the reviewer noted: ‘with all its crudities, Tommy Atkins may do well as a Christmas novelty, appealing to the holiday public. It was plain last night that it attracted the sympathies of the pit and the gallery.’ In the event, it ran for only nine days. But it was revived for fifty-five performances at the Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street, in 1897, no doubt to cash in on the current interest in Sudan. The Second Boer War achieved similar cultural saturation coverage to the Sudan campaign, with positive images of British imperial heroism to be found in music hall songs and sketches, magic lantern shows, newspaper illustrations, cigarette cards, boys’ books and magazines and the latest invention – silent films.20 Arthur Shirley was back on theatrical duty for the Second Boer War. Written as For Queen and Country, but performed at the Princess’s Theatre as The Absent-Minded Beggar to cash in on the phenomenal popularity of Kipling’s poem, his Second Boer War play was premiered on 25 November 1899 and ran for forty-three performances. The hero is Gilbert Hay, who loses an inheritance when he marries Kathleen Ivor and is reduced to poverty. He joins the army in the South African War as a gentleman ranker and distinguishes himself by delivering important dispatches under fire, rescuing a wounded general and saving a group of British prisoners from the Boers with an armoured train. His wife Kathleen also distinguishes herself by using her skills as a telegraphist when stranded in the veldt to send a message to the British calling for help. The villain is a half-English Boer, Karl

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Van Buren, who, having designs on Kathleen, poses as a British officer and denounces Gilbert as a spy for the Boers but is unmasked and shot trying to escape. The play climaxes with Gilbert rescuing his wife from the Boers. The Times (27 November 1899), reviewing the play, noted: The writers of melodrama have never failed to take advantage of the force of the appeal to patriotic emotion. We have had many a stirring drama built up mainly on this motive. It is the one and only motive which underlies The Absent-Minded Beggar or For Queen and Country, and so much success as the new Princess’s play enjoys depends upon the spectator’s heart, and not upon the playwright’s ingenuity. For, unfortunately, ingenuity is the last quality which distinguishes Mr. Arthur Shirley’s work … It is really a Maxim gun’s play. In the last two acts the din of firing is incessant, and all shortcomings are forgotten when a Boer position is taken at the bayonet’s point, in spite of treacherous flags of truce, and the curtain falls on a great victory, leaving the house filled with gunpowder fumes and the audience with frenzied feelings of patriotism and joy.

In constructing his script Shirley pressed all the right emotional buttons to stimulate the patriotic response, The Times reported. The play opens in a flag and banner maker’s workshop where Union Jacks and regimental colours are created, enabling the heroine Kathleen Ivor to declare of the Union flag, ‘Wherever it has waved it has brought peace and justice to all humanity – whether they be black or white.’ There is a Chelsea pensioner, Dan Napper, who served in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, and his drummer boy grandson, Nipper Napper, to stress the family tradition of service in the military. The hero Gilbert delivers a justification of British conflict with the Boers by declaring of the Transvaal: ‘What really made the prosperity of that most despotic republic – English brain – English muscle – English wealth – English labour. The British who live out in the Transvaal must and will some day have their rights.’ Gilbert is accompanied in his enlistment by Algy, a monocle-wearing ‘swell’ reduced to genteel poverty, Levi, a comic Jewish moneylender who had gone bust, and the cockney tough and ex-convict Bill Tosh. All of them are ennobled by service in South Africa. Not in the original script, but evidently added when permission had been obtained to include Kipling’s poem as set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, was a new scene. The Times (27 November 1899) described it and its effect. It was a review of the ‘Sons of the Empire’ – the boys of the Duke of York’s School: It is rather daring to introduce the Queen into a spectacle of this kind, and should not, we think, have been permitted by the censor of the plays. Her Majesty’s carriage is drawn up at the back while the red-coated urchins, who

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enjoy it enormously, go through their evolutions. Then of a sudden rushes in a ‘gentleman in khaki’, who bursts into song. In three verses with astonishing rhymes he so worked up the feelings of Saturday’s audience that they insistently demanded a fourth, and complied vigorously with the request of the management that they should join in the chorus. This performance of their own left them in such a good humour that they refused altogether to take Mr. Shirley’s wicked Boers seriously. At one period the running comments of the gallery bid fair to turn the piece into a farce.

This kind of audience participation did not, however, negate the evidently rapturous reception that the play received at the curtain. But imperial melodramas were not confined to the metropolis: very similar plays were to be found originating in the provinces and drawing on identical characters, incidents and attitudes as their metropolitan counterparts. For example, Sutton Vane’s For England first appeared at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester, in 1893 and was transferred later in the same year to the Pavilion, Mile End. It is set during the First Boer War in 1881–82. Its heroes are the gallant dragoons Lt Bevis Cranbourne, son of General Sir Felix Cranbourne, and Lt William Bembrose. The villain is Major Dangerfield, who has seduced, ruined and abandoned Lesbia, innocent daughter of the Quaker Matthew Penn. When confronted by Penn with his guilt, Dangerfield kills him. Having left the army under a cloud he turns up in South Africa as a war correspondent. When the action moves to South Africa, a wealthy farmer, Alma Dunbar, who earlier delivered a spirited defence of the Boers and their love of their homeland, realises the truth about them, admitting that she had sympathised until ‘they fired on women, and helpless, wounded men, till they starved the suffering and shot down children. I thought it despotism to deprive them of their country, and so it is, but there is a way to right a wrong, and that way is not slaughter, neither should war be made an instrument for cruelty, nor an excuse for murder.’ Her farm at Lydenburg is besieged by Boers, and Cranbourne and Bembrose, their sweethearts Alma Dunbar and Vera Cranbourne and the comic Jewish moneylender Manasses Marks hold the fort until the Boers capture them all, aided by Dangerfield, who has gone over to the enemy. The Boers despise Dangerfield as a traitor but he contrives to have Bevis sentenced to death. The sympathetic Boer farmer Paul Vosloo helps Bevis to escape and seeks to save the British colours from capture. Eventually a British relief force rescues them and Bevis receives the Victoria Cross for his gallantry. In the last act, back in England, Dangerfield, now hopelessly insane, tries to silence the witness to his murder of Penn but accidentally drinks the poison intended for the task. He is carried off dying, and with the

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two romantic couples united, the cast all drink a toast ‘For Duty – For Love – For Honour – For England’. J. P. Lallen’s ’Midst Shot and Shell, billed as ‘a military melodrama’, was written for the Queen’s Theatre, Workington, and performed there in 1899. It contains echoes of all the other examples of the genre. Captain Jack Neville of the 71st Highland Light Infantry is unhappily married to Edna, widow of Captain Ernest De Villiers, believed to have been killed in West Africa. But De Villiers turns up, having been a prisoner of the natives for eight years and having finally escaped. He is reunited with Edna but, being penniless and needing to make a wealthy marriage, he murders Edna and frames Neville for the crime. Neville flees and takes the place of his double, Private Jack Brown, when the regiment sails for West Africa. When the British fort on the Niger is besieged by rebellious natives and the garrison’s water supply is cut off, ‘Brown’ volunteers to breach the dam outside the fort and fill the water tanks. He does so fighting off overwhelming odds, and is rescued in the nick of time by bluejackets from a British gunboat. Back in England, he turns up disguised as an old soldier, finally exposes De Villiers, proves his innocence and marries the commanding officer’s daughter. When it comes to pantomime, another conspicuous absentee from Porter’s bibliography is Jim Davis’s 1996 article ‘Imperial Transgressions: The Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century’.21 Davis identified several imperially themed pantomimes. Jack and the Beanstalk (1899–1900), produced at the time of the Second Boer War, featured Blunderboer (made up to resemble the Boer president Paul Kruger), who is brought low by Jack (Violet Cameron) who has a patriotic ballad ‘Pretoria’; it culminates in the emergence from the fallen giant’s pocket of a stream of British and colonial troops, played by children. He points also to the 1893 Robinson Crusoe, which he says ‘unsubtly maintained a sense of imperial supremacy and the reinforcement of racial stereotypes’.22 This involved the midget performer Little Tich as Man Friday. The King of the Cannibal Islands, his Queen and the Prime Minister were played by a well-known blackface minstrel troupe and dancer, John D’Auban, blacked up as Noblulu in a fully fledged racial caricature, thick-lipped, grinning and wide-eyed. Marty Gould took up the subject of Robinson Crusoe in his illuminating discussion of the pantomime versions in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter.23 Quoting W. Davenport Adams, who in 1882 reported that Robinson Crusoe was second only to Dick Whittington in popularity among pantomime subjects, he provides the evidence. In 1876, 1877, 1882 and 1886,

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there were no fewer than seven Crusoes in production, and in 1897 the Lord Chamberlain reviewed ten new versions. Gould identifies one of the stimuli for this as being the ‘reflecting of Britain’s evolving overseas interests’.24 Daniel Defoe’s original novel, with its lone English castaway, using his skills and tools to transform a desert island into an orderly and productive settlement and acquiring a faithful native servant in Friday, has long been seen as a c­ elebration of colonisation. But examining a variety of nineteenth-century pantomime texts, Gould concludes that during the course of the century ‘The paradigmatic colonial Crusoe in the narrative tradition was replaced by an imperial adventurer who has no time to construct or expand his settlement. Having shed his colonising impulses, Crusoe began to take less interest in cultural reform and instead uses his time on the island to subdue a hostile native force and establish British political hegemony over the territory.’ Gould identifies a transformation of Crusoe from ‘colonist to conquistador’ and traces an increase in the British flag, British military valour and the process of imperial annexation.25 Geoffrey Thorn’s Robinson Crusoe (1886) at the Grand Theatre, Islington, ‘ends with the formal annexation of the island to the British Empire, complete with the raising of the Union Jack and the granting of a pension to the cannibal King’.26 Fred Locke’s Robinson Crusoe (1894) at the Surrey Theatre ‘has the cannibal King submit to the annexation by the British as a means of avoiding conquest by an unidentified “foreign enemy”’.27 Gould detects at the end of the century Crusoes critical of the effects of imperialism on native peoples, but whether critical or positive, he concludes that ‘Crusoe remained, throughout the century, a current and contemporary embodiment of British imperialism’.28 This was not just a London phenomenon. Robinson Crusoe at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, in 1882 had Crusoe rescued by ‘the military might of Great Britain’ and ‘the cannibal King … brought to England à la Cetewayo’, referring to the Zulu King’s visit to England in 1882 after the Zulus’ defeat at Ulundi in 1879.29 There was sometimes a direct connection between a theatre’s autumn melo­­ drama, its Christmas pantomime and current imperial events. This occurred notably in 1882–83. Just as the melodrama Freedom (1883) was inspired by the bombardment of Alexandria and the suppression of the nationalist revolt of Urabi Pasha in Egypt, so too was the 1882–83 pantomime, Sindbad the Sailor, scripted by the veteran E. L. Blanchard and produced by Harris. The Times (27 December 1882) complained that the Arabian Nights story was ‘frequently lost sight of altogether’ by the injection of current events. The story is set in Egypt, and one of the pantomime’s villains is significantly called

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Kybosh Arabi Pasha. A bankrupt slave dealer, he is sold with his nieces to the young Khedive Kabob and his tutor Professor Hankipanki. Sindbad and his crew rescue the girls but they are pursued and captured by the Khedive. The girls, however, are taken over by Kabob’s father, the sinister Padishah (also known as the Old Khedive). The Young Khedive enlists Sindbad’s help to rescue them. Sindbad does so but Kabob and his tutor pursue them in a balloon. The Diamond Prince explains to the Young Khedive that he should desist because Sindbad is a favourite in London. The Khedive and his tutor claim not to know where London is. So there ensues a procession at the Tower of London of the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria, who parade to strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. Significantly the Victorian Age is represented by a parade of children dressed as policemen and by a review of juvenile soldiers representing the British and Indian troops, recently engaged in Egypt. The pantomime culminates in the appearance of Britannia singing a patriotic song. The background reality is that Khedive Ismail Pasha was deposed at the instigation of the British in 1879 because of his extravagance and despotic rule. He was replaced by his son Tawfiq. But protests mounted and there was a nationalist revolt under the leadership of Colonel Ahmed Urabi, known to the British as Arabi Pasha. The revolt was suppressed after a British army under General Sir Garnet Wolseley defeated Urabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir. Thereafter Egypt became a British ‘sphere of influence’, with Britain effectively running the country through a cadre of appointed officials. The Earl of Cromer, who was appointed British Agent and Consul-General and was de facto ruler of Egypt from 1883, enshrined the contemporary view of the participants in his book Modern Egypt (1908). Cromer’s view of Tawfik Pasha was that he was personally devout, kind-hearted, amiable and opposed to ‘all arbitrary, oppressive or cruel acts’ but that ‘like most of his countrymen, he would shirk responsibility and would endeavour to throw as much as he could on the shoulders of others … apathetic, and wanting in initiative, he did not have the strength of character to be a great ruler’.30 His father, Ismail Pasha (1867–1879), according to Cromer: fell a victim to hubris, the insolent abuse of power. He squandered his wealth and when, finally, he was deposed at the behest of the Powers of Europe, there were not a dozen of his own countrymen, albeit they disliked the interference of the foreigner, who did not think that he had merited his fate.31

But his ‘sinister influence’ was felt long after his deposition.

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These characterisations are precisely reproduced in the pantomime. The Khedive Kabob is depicted as young and amiable but weak-willed and under the thumb of others. His father, the Padishah, who is still around in Egypt, is the real villain. Arabi Pasha is the bankrupt slave trader. Sindbad has the backing of Britain in rescuing the girls from the Egyptians. The spectacle included a parade of the victorious troops and the bombardment of ­Alexandria. Drury Lane was not alone in celebrating the bombardment of Alexandria and the victory of Tel-el-Kebir. Cinderella at the Pavilion contrived to introduce the events of 1882 at the ball, where the Prince Paragon welcomes and addresses guests made up to represent the Duke of Connaught and the Prince of Wales, the Khedive of Egypt, Sir Beauchamp Seymour and Sir Garnet Wolseley. Then there was a spectacle called ‘The United Kingdom United’ which saw groups of men and women, ‘brightly and picturesquely costumed’ as Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England, who in turn sang ‘Men of Harlech’, ‘The Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. It celebrated jointly the United Kingdom and the triumphant Egyptian campaign. Sanger’s Amphitheatre contrived to introduce the Egyptian campaign into its Christmas pantomime Bluff King Hal or The Field of Cloth of Gold, despite its ostensible sixteenth-century setting. The pageant of the Field of Cloth of Gold included a scene in which, the Era (30 December 1882) said, ‘the ­enthusiasm of spectators is … evoked by excellent counterfeits of Baron Alcester and Lord Wolseley, standing on triumphal cars, being pushed on the stage by diminutive blue jackets and soldiers to the music of a patriotic song and chorus.’ In Bluebeard at Liverpool’s Alexandra Theatre, the pantomime included according to The Daily Telegraph ‘some capital military scenes founded on episodes in the recent Egyptian war’. This included a tableau of the bombardment of Alexandria. In Sinbad the Sailor at the Theatre Royal Manchester, the transformation scene had Sinbad ‘extending a welcome to our soldiers and our Queen’.32 In 1875 Blanchard had scripted the Crystal Palace pantomime, Jack in Wonderland, which was a variation on the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, directly inspired by the Prince of Wales’s visit to India. Climbing the beanstalk, Jack is transported to India as the Era (22 December 1875) reported, and to the front of a gorgeous palace: with a host of characters suggestive of the reception of the Prince of Wales. This happy idea is carried out in a manner worthy of the event itself. There is a grand Indian ballet, with dances by Nautch girls and a shawl dance, arranged with great taste and skill by M. Espinosa, who, as Scarlet Runner,

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… figures prominently throughout the Opening. The shawl dance enables a group of coryphées to twine and intertwine with undulating motion, making a pretty and fanciful picture, while as a contrast there are palm trees, elephants, camels etc. The Midget Hanlon troupe do excellent service in this scene. Made up as monkeys, they climb the trees with wonderful agility, leap from branch to branch, tumble over head and heels, and gambol in the most approved monkey fashion. A group of Ethiopian minstrels – Bernard’s troupe of Christy’s – sing and dance in this scene, the conclusion of which is really splendid, the stage being filled with gaily–dressed figures, a good notion being that a number of natives are carrying flags, inscribed with the words ‘Tell mama we are happy!’ – a significant message for the Prince of Wales to carry home to the Queen, and one which we trust would be echoed by the natives in reality.

So the evocation of India is an exotic composite of Nautch dancers, palm trees, elephants, monkeys and black-face minstrels but with richly dressed natives carrying a message of loyalty to the Queen. One of the functions of the harlequinade in its heyday was to comment on the events of the past year. Topical allusions can tell us what the pantomime producers considered significant events, and the reports of the audience reaction can tell us about the popular attitude to these events. There was no more traumatic event in the history of the British Empire than the Indian Mutiny, and it inevitably featured in the pantomimes of 1857–58, both in the West End and the East End and south of the river. In Drury Lane’s Little Jack Horner by E. L. Blanchard, the Era (27 December 1857) tells us that ‘allusions to the prevalent topics embrace almost every subject that has lately attained notoriety’. The topics received ‘with the most relish’ were the Sepoy Mutiny and ‘the modern extravagances of dress’. At Astley’s the pantomime Don Quixote and his Mare Rosinante was preceded by a re-enactment of the storming and capture of Delhi. Turning to the suburban theatres, at Sadler’s Wells, Harlequin Beauty and the Beast introduced a scene in which a figure of Justice in a sign-painter’s establishment came to life and awarded a peerage and a pension to the Mutiny heroes General Havelock and Sir Colin Campbell. It was, said the Era, one of ‘the great hits’ of the harlequinade. At the Surrey, the pantomime Queen Mab had a scene in the harlequinade set in the United Services Club as the stage was filled with Union Jacks. Clown and Pantaloon play cribbage with giant playing cards featuring contemporary figures. When the card depicting General Havelock was played over Nana Sahib, the mutiny leader, there was ‘enthusiastic applause’. The pictures of ‘Wilson taking Delhi’ and ‘Florence Nightingale’ also elicited applause. Then there was a gruesome

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scene in which a sepoy was killed by Clown, dressed in antique Grenadier’s costume, stuffed into a mortar and fired at the butcher’s shop, where his disjointed body replaced the mutton and beef on the hooks. This reproduced in comic form the actual punishment being inflicted on captured mutineers. At the Marylebone Theatre, the pantomime Joe Miller included a view of Delhi ‘with incidental allusion to late events’, and this brought on ‘the hearty and unrestrained applause of the house’. At the City of London Theatre, where William the Second and The Fayre Maid of Honour was the pantomime, the show included the scene of sepoys being captured before Delhi, and Nana Sahib was blown from the mouth of a cannon into a thousand pieces, said The Times (28 December 1857), ‘to the great satisfaction of the delighted audience’. At the Standard, Shoreditch, Harlequin Georgey-Porgey Pudding and Pie contained a realisation of the Punch illustration of the British Lion and the Bengal Tiger headed ‘Caught at Last’. At the Grecian, Peter Wilkins and the Flying Indians had a scene in the harlequinade with British soldiers shelling sepoys and Nana Sahib, caught under an extinguisher, being labelled ‘out of Luck-now’. At the Victoria, whose audience according to The Times comprised ‘the very humblest class of community’, Harlequin Prince Love-the-Day and Queen Busy Bee contained reference to Nana Sahib, which was greeted, said The Times, with ‘a shout of execration. So spontaneous and characteristic was this ebullition of popular feeling that one could have wished no higher retribution for this arch-ruffian than that he should have been given over … to the fury of the crowd from whom it emanated.’ The pantomimes present no evidence of anything but general support for the suppression of the Mutiny and for the most savage reprisals against those who dared to challenge the might of the Raj. The finale of the 1886–87 Drury Lane pantomime The Forty Thieves was a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, depicted in imperial terms. The sequence began in a ruined Indian temple where an act of suttee is about to take place. Civilisation (represented by a flying dancer, Madame Aenea) flew to the rescue, and English pioneers planted the flag of St George to symbolise the advent of British rule. The scene changed to a British warship where the children of Madame Lanner’s National School of Dance appeared and performed English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish national dances. Finally in the temple of fame, where there was a statue of Queen Victoria, Britannia welcomed the colonies of the British Empire who arrived to pay tribute. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales led the way, followed by the knights of Malta, residents and natives of Cape Colony, Canadians dressed for wintry

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weather, Australian diggers bearing their nuggets of gold and with their rifle volunteers, ‘who, in remembrance of good service recently done, are welcomed with a special cheer’, New Zealanders, Straits Settlements (Malaya) colonists and then ‘all the gorgeousness of the East, in deputations from Burmah and Ceylon and India’. ‘There are heraldic devices and banners in abundance, and, particularly in the case of the representatives of the three places last named, wondrous richness and variety in the way of costumes and trophies, the Indian blue coming in for especial admiration. When the processions have been completed, and all are assembled, the stage presented another remarkable picture, fairly baffling description, its beauty and its variety being even more conspicuously brought out in the ballet which then commences’ (Era, 11 January 1887). A specially written song, with words by Clement Scott and music by Henry Russell, concluded the tribute: Victoria! Queen of a nation    That governs the heart of the world, Thy Empire of love is the station    Where liberty’s flag is unfurled. What son would not die to defend thee,    Who ruleth our loves and our lives? The heart of our manhood we send thee,    The blessing of mothers and wives.                 Chorus Victoria, star of our story,    Thou light of the days that have been, We cheer for thy reign and its glory;    We pray for our country and Queen.33

It was followed by ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. It was not just Drury Lane that celebrated the Jubilee, but also the transpontine theatres, with their largely working-class audiences. George Conquest’s pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk at the Surrey Theatre included ‘a grand procession of India and the colonies’ in the Silver Palace of the Monarch of the Moon, ‘the great scene of the production and likely to become widely popular’, said the Era (1 January 1887). Cinderella at Sanger’s Theatre contained a scene set in the Fairy Aldershot in which a review of the British forces is taking place and 900 children, ‘armed and equipped with great accuracy of detail, and drilled by regular military instructors’, performed their drill as the London Scottish, the Black Watch, the Grenadier Guards and the Naval Brigade, ‘whilst contingents of various uncivilised allies of Great Britain look on and admire England’s greatness … Indians from the East and the West, Negroes,

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Maories, in quaint costumes with queer weapons’, reported the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (1 January 1887). The pantomime concluded with a ‘grand Jubilee Apotheosis, emblematical of England’s greatness’ and symbolised by groups of representatives from various British colonies, with the animals of each country: elephants, yaks, camels, Brahmin bulls, a kangaroo, a deer, pelicans, cassowaries and other beasts and birds, ‘the Burmese “sacred” white elephant suggesting recent conquests in the East’. The Era (1 January 1887) pronounced it ‘a most curious, effective and unique spectacle … and it is no wonder that it was received with thunders of applause’. The Goblin Bat at the Britannia, Hoxton, concluded with a ‘grand jubilee transformation scene entitled Flora’s Palace in the Realms of Fancy’. Robinson Crusoe at the Grand concluded with ‘the final scene illustrating the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and half a century of Progress, Liberty and Marvelous Discovery’. In Jack and the Beanstalk at Sadler’s Wells representatives of Great Britain and the colonies assembled at Windsor Castle and were joined by ‘juvenile impersonators of prominent public men of the day, who were each addressed by Britannia in an admonitory speech’. At the Elephant and Castle, there was Jack-in-the Box. ‘The most pleasing feature in the pantomime is the Grand Jubilee Procession, which takes place in the Palace of Corduroy the Third, a well-designed and tasteful stage picture. Here we have an army of little people, divided into detachments representing the various countries under Britannia’s rule, who sing in chorus the national songs of each land. The effective arrangement of the colours of this scene and the clear voices of the juveniles uplifted in the wellknown airs roused the audience to enthusiasm.’ Robinson Crusoe at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Greenwich, contained an allegorical scene ‘Our Empire’, ‘a patriotic ensemble … that caused considerable enthusiasm’. In the light of such evidence as presented above it is hard to maintain Porter’s argument that ‘very few’ plays ‘related to the Empire in any way’. Notes 1 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought about the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 10. 2 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of Public Opinion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 2. 3 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 12. 4 Arthur Marwick, Class: Image and Reality (London: Collins, 1980), p. 22. 5 Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), p. 207.

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Politics in performance 6 Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Robert Opie, Rule Britannia: Trading on the British Image (New York: Viking, 1985). 7 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 140. 8 Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), pp. 3–8. 9 Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), p. 175 10 Michael Booth, ‘Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism’, in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopolou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. pp. 3–20. 11 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 164–95. 12 Geneviève Ward and Richard Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain (London: Cassell, 1918), p. 234. 13 W. Macqueen Pope, Ghosts and Greasepaint (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 281. 14 Augustus Harris, ‘The National Theatre’, Fortnightly Review, 38 (November 1885), pp. 630–36. 15 Ziter, Orient on the Victorian Stage, p. 183. 16 ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’, The Theatre, 26 (October 1895), p. 222. 17 Richard Fulton, ‘The Sudan Sensation of 1898’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42:1 (2009), pp. 37– 63. 18 Daily Mail, 27 August 1896, quoted in Arthur J. Smythe, The Life of William Terriss (London: Archibald Constable, 1898), pp. 135–7. 19 ‘Tommy Atkins’, The Theatre, 27 (June 1896), p. 102. 20 Simon Popple, ‘“Fresh from the Front”: Performance, War News and Popular Culture during the Boer War’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 8 (November 2010), pp. 401–18. 21 Jim Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions: The Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12:46 (May 1996), pp. 147–55. 22 Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions’, p. 152. 23 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, pp. 31–72. 24 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, pp. 50–1. 25 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 68. 26 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 68. 27 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 68. 28 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, p. 72. 29 ‘Notes on the Pantomimes’, The Theatre, 1 (January 1883), p. 17. 30 Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 327–8. 31 Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 1, p. 144. 32 ‘Notes on the Pantomimes’, The Theatre, 1 (January 1883), p. 17. 33 Clement Scott, Lays and Lyrics (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1888), pp. 197–8.

PART III The performance of politics

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he essays in Part II focused on topical referencing – on how theatrical performance, across popular entertainment genres, operated as sites for the transmission, in staged performances, of political ideologies. What becomes clear is the extent to which mass entertainments sought both to reflect and direct popular opinion and how they, in doing so, demonstrated the remarkable reactivity and flexibility of Victorian theatre to act as a location for the mediation of contemporary politics through popular culture. Popular performances, within the late Victorian theatre, might be seen to have made appeals to Tory populism at the expense of radicalism, invoking Burkean conceptions of the ‘people’ as repository of ‘culture’. As Rohan McWilliam writes: ‘In its way, Toryism offered a way of life akin to radicalism, based on a combination of deference, jingoism, monarchy, pub life, pleasure, family, sport and opposition to Irish Home Rule. Toryism was thus well equipped to appeal to popular culture in a way that high-minded radicals were sometimes unable to do.’1 The strong presence of imperial patriotism in pantomimes, melodrama and music ballet attests to a dominant conservative impulse at work within some popular performances. Yet, although there is one public, that public is made up of many individuals and collectivities. To ‘speak’ for public opinion was a political ambition, and to acknowledge and to frame ‘public opinion’ was a matter for both persuasion and representation: culture, itself, was a site of multiple meanings negotiated in myriad ways. Victorian politics was performative in so much as it was grounded in the visual and the spectacular but it was performative, also, because it was understood as a relationship based on the presentation of ideology and its reception. Three complicating factors need to be borne in mind, therefore: chronology, performance space and evolving conceptions of the political audience.

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Is McWilliam’s formulation of the seeming confluence of Tory appeals to populist culture and mass entertainment a particularly late Victorian phenomenon? The commercialisation of mass culture towards the end of the century, which has been subject to intense debates about working-class leisure and histories of class expression,2 denotes how commercial leisure had become a location for mass political engagement: whether by intent or effect, or by the fusion of populism and entertainment, the political was central to the fabric of Victorian life. Political campaigns had shifted in orientation across the century towards the appeal, by politicians and others, to an expanding electorate. Yet elections remained, despite the Secret Ballot Act (1872), the widening of the franchise and the development of concepts of individual conscience, profoundly public affairs. Politics mattered just as much at times other than national and m ­ unicipal elections. Can the theatricality of Chartist and other radical movements, discussed in earlier chapters by Robert Poole and Mike Sanders, be traced in the spectacle of late Victorian politics? The essays in this section problematise the notion of the ‘popular’ but, in doing so, demonstrate continuities as well as profound change. Politicians from Robert Peel to Keir Hardie conceptualised themselves as performers but did so in different ways; moreover, they were aware of the need to make appeals to an audience by what might loosely be labelled theatrical performances. Where we might demarcate change, then, is not so much in intent but in method. Those performances analysed in Part II were staged inside the theatre. Putting to one side the potential for nineteenth-century theatres to be interactive spaces – on this see Jim Davis’s analysis of the blurred boundaries of audience and performance – there was a clear delineation of actor, stage, and spectator.3 What happens if we turn to thinking about performance and theatricality outside the confines of the bricks and mortar of the theatrical venue – especially when early and late century mass politics are set alongside one another? What of the political strike, the protest march and the political campaign platform? If conservative populism may have influenced the popular theatre, what of the growing support for socialist movements in the context of the third Reform Act and increasing support for trade unions? What of other performance venues, including the grandest political theatre of all, Parliament? Did such delineations between actor and audience persist or did public spectacle, unregulated and mobile, break down boundaries between performance and spectatorship? What are the implications here for multiple performances within public space? And finally, what of the ‘performers’ themselves and the ways in which they conceptualised their spectators? As noted in our introduction, much

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recent research has interrogated the biographies of prominent Victorian and Edwardian politicians and revealed how they understood themselves as actors in a performance. Questions need to be asked both of technique on the one hand, including the use of props and costume, and about how public space itself was constructed in nineteenth-century political culture. What did the uptake of theatrical techniques and mobilisation of public space – as political arena – reveal about cultural constructions of audience? The essays in this section address these questions, and others. Malcolm Chase draws together political and cultural history in order to investigate how the various performances of 1820 not only provided contemporary comment on the highly significant events of the year, but were part of a broader cultural shift towards the development of political radicalism itself as essentially performative. In this way, Chase’s argument is the complement to Poole’s and Sanders’s chapters in Part I of this book. As Chase argues, the radicalisation of drama went hand-in-hand with the dramatisation of radicalism. Some continuities between early and late century become evident if we think of political performance as a form of street theatre. Janice Norwood’s essay, on the dock strike of 1889, finds that there was a surprising absence of topical referencing of industrial unrest within plays and pantomimes but that the strike and the protest march borrowed a series of performance techniques. Richard Gaunt’s and Marcus Morris’s essays both constitute revisionist biographical analyses. Gaunt is concerned to deconstruct Robert Peel’s self-promotion as an actor-dramatist and the development of the idea of Parliament as a theatrical space. Morris’s investigation of early leaders of the labour movement argues that scrutiny of clothing and other forms of non-verbal communication is required in order to understand the performative dynamics of late Victorian and Edwardian popular politics. Individually, these essays offer case studies of various moments in the nineteenth century in which the conduct of politics was profoundly theatrical. Together, they provide fresh insights into the relationship between politics and performance across the nineteenth century. Notes 1 Rohan McWilliam, ‘The Performance of Citizenship’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 375. 2 See, for instance, Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 13, ‘Stages of Class: Popular Theatre and Geographies of Knowledge’.

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The performance of politics 3 Jim Davis, ‘Boxing Day’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2007), pp. 13–31.

10 ‘Love, bitter wrong, freedom, sad pity, and  lust of power’: politics and ­performance in 1820 Malcolm Chase

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he year 1820 was one of European revolution and insurgency from which Britain was emphatically not exempt.1 Viewing these twelve months through the optic of theatrical performance considerably broadens our understanding of popular culture and opinion at this time. Freedom of political assembly and expression had been stringently curtailed by the repressive measures collectively known as the Six Acts, pushed through Parliament in the last days of 1819. Yet the much longer-established censorship of drama by the state counted for little as theatres and their audiences contrived to air profound questions about the nature of monarchical authority, the motives of the government that acted in the King’s name and the tendency of political authority, left unchecked, to over-reach itself. ‘Paine thought that he lived in the age of revolution, but the present moment better deserves that epithet’, wrote a leading radical in September 1820.2 In February the heir to the French throne had been assassinated. Although the consequences of this were contained, there were revolutions in Spain and the Kingdom of Naples in March and in July, and in Portugal in August. Continental events were scrutinised anxiously by the government as it dealt with the backwash of popular revulsion at the infamous Peterloo massacre of August 1819. Government policy is fully intelligible only in a pan-European context. Led by a Prime Minister (Lord Liverpool) who had witnessed the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the Cabinet was the intended victim en masse of an assassination plot in February. Named Cato Street, after the London mews where it was discovered, this conspiracy was just one episode in a national pattern of insurgency across the United Kingdom during the first half of the year. On Good Friday there was an uprising in the West Riding textile district centred on Huddersfield, followed on Easter Monday by a more serious insurgency

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in west-central Scotland. A second Yorkshire uprising occurred a week later. Each rising was accompanied by peripheral violence and other disconcerting episodes that suggested the maturation of a broader conspiracy. Meanwhile agrarian disturbances were endemic in western Ireland. The government also uncomfortably weathered a general election. Until 1868 the monarch’s death required one, and George III had died on 29 January (allegedly his last words were to quote Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Tom’s a cold’). 1820 should therefore also have been a coronation year; but the coronation of the former Prince Regent as George IV was postponed by a government fearful of disorder in London as it tried to cope with mutinous tendencies in the Brigade of Guards. In the capital especially the popular mood was caught up in support for Queen Caroline, estranged wife of the new monarch, from whom George scandalously – and ultimately unsuccessfully – now sought a divorce. The affair constituted a politically potent coda to the events of the first half of the year. Liverpool’s ministry, forced by the King, tried to push through Parliament a bill of pains and penalties (effectively a prosecution for adultery) against Queen Caroline. The proceedings took a deeply theatrical form with extra galleries erected in the House of Lords to accommodate those wishing to watch the spectacle.3 Meanwhile theatres themselves routinely became sites of contention between rival supporters of King and Queen. This was an extension of a well-attested tendency among contemporary audiences, in the words of the playwright Thomas Morton, ‘to force passages never meant by the author into political meanings … their applause is enthusiastic, and their dislikes very violently expressed. I do not know anything more terrible than an enraged audience.’4 It was probably events in 1820 that William Moore, a trustee of Covent Garden’s owners, had in mind when he told a parliamentary select committee: ‘sentences which have been uttered in old plays have been taken up at the time they were performing, which neither the proprietors nor the actors thought of till the audience caught at them’.5 Even before the curtain rose, audiences were typically partisan. Printed strips with alternative verses for the National Anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’, were clandestinely strewn around Manchester theatres as early as February, four months before Caroline returned to England after seven colourful years on the continent (Manchester Observer, 19 February 1820). Renditions of a similar lyric at Bristol’s Theatre Royal caused havoc. At Brighton’s Theatre Royal, yards from George IV’s new palace, the Pavilion, the management abandoned the National Anthem altogether rather than risk nightly rioting. At Cambridge

Politics and performance in 1820

theatre there was a riot (Courier, 16 October 1820).6 York’s Theatre Royal was beset by ‘violent scenes whenever the musicians were called upon to play … God Save the King and some other tunes’.7 Even at Bridgetown, Barbados, feelings ran so high that ‘in the Theatre in a Contest for singing “God save the King” or “the Queen” the parties came to blows’.8 A contemporary diarist recorded how in April he attended King Lear at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A farce, The King and the Miller of Mansfield, was performed after the main play: The health of the King being drunk [on stage], a fellow cried out from the shilling gallery – ‘The Queen’. The allusion was caught up, and not a word was heard afterwards. The cries for the health of the Queen were uttered from all quarters … not a syllable more of the farce was audible.9

The volatility of audiences was such that the new King stopped attending theatres altogether: the risks were simply too great, especially as the proceedings in the House of Lords drew to an end. When the case against Caroline collapsed on 11 November, the company of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, abandoned all attempt to complete the evening’s bill: ‘The result was complete submission to the will of the audience’, and the management ordered the orchestra repeatedly to play the National Anthem, its words of course amended to ‘God save the Queen’ by an audience who had all risen, ‘gentlemen waving their hats, and ladies their handkerchiefs’. At Drury Lane ‘not a note, even of the drum or trumpet, could be heard … the majority of voices demanding “God save the Queen” to the tune of “God save the King”’ (The Times, 13 November 1820). Across the Thames, at the Coburg (London’s leading ‘illegitimate’ theatre), when the leading comedian gave three cheers for the Queen, it was ‘responded to nine times by the audience, in a voice of thunder! All the actors rushed upon stage, dressed and undressed’ (Observer, 13 November 1820).10 As news of the government’s failure to secure the King’s divorce spread, initially spontaneous celebrations gave way to carefully planned and elaborately choreographed processions, tableaux vivants, mock trials and ritual burning of effigies in village and towns across Britain.11 John Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, was highly sensitive to the reverberations and tightened censorship on anything remotely political as the year drew to its close. For example, on 28 November Drury Lane premiered an innocuous comedy, Justice; or, The Caliph and the Cobbler; but when the management submitted the text for licence, Larpent struck through a passage which was a scarcely inflammatory re-hash of a standard trope about venial officeholders. The offensive words were those of a sinecurist: ‘I may fill my place though I

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know I’m not fit for it … What I can’t do, I can get others to do for me – as long as I can do one thing [–] take the money.’ The passage, Larpent explained, was ‘perhaps objectionable in the present times but not the common times’.12 Among the features of the Queen’s trial had been, first, a succession of foreign witnesses – mainly Italian – testifying to the Queen’s scandalous behaviour abroad and, second, the daily arrival of a voluminous green bag in which prosecution evidence was stored. Green bags swiftly became a staple point of reference in street theatre (where their incineration stood in for the riskier incineration of effigies of the King or his ministers), and a plethora appeared elsewhere. Shelley incorporated an especially loathsome one into the properties required for his (unstaged) 1820 drama Swellfoot the Tyrant.13 Almost 100 graphic satires deployed a green bag as a central feature.14 Among them were scenes of St Stephen’s Theatre (i.e. Parliament) presenting ‘A new Italian farce called the Green Bag’ and ‘The Cauldron – Or Shakespeare Travestie’ in which a green bag stuffed with lies is emptied into the cauldron stirred by the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth. The witches are depicted as Lord Liverpool and his Home and Foreign Secretaries. Into the cauldron they ‘mingle, / What shall make great Macbeth single, / Oath of an Italian slave … Blood of Radicals and last, / In let the Divorce be cast.’ Macbeth of course is played by George IV.15 Discussing the popular reactions to the royal divorce, historians typically reference this graphic material, along with journalistic sources, rather than the abundant pamphlet literature on the subject. Cartoons are seen as having an immediacy and demotic reach denied to more sober print forms. In a similar way David Mayer emphasises how pantomime offered ‘immediate and specific comment’ on politicians, ‘celebrities’ and topical events of the day.16 But this capacity was not in any way limited to pantomime, nor to the so-called ‘illegitimate theatres’ that, by specialising in melodrama intercalated by musical interludes, evaded the controls exercised by the Lord Chamberlain over serious drama. Productions on the legitimate stage were also replete with political meanings. For example in October, at the height of the Caroline trial, Covent Garden presented Cymbeline with the actor William Macready, then on the cusp of his career as one of the century’s great tragedians, playing Iachimo. Shakespeare’s drama of a chaste British princess (Imogen), the victim of a vengeful husband, turns on malicious claims by the Italian, Iachimo, that he had ‘tasted her in bed’. At the denouement of the play, Iachimo is tricked into publicly admitting his duplicity. What the audience has known all along – that the purity of the princess is unassailable – is revealed at last to her husband and the whole royal court.

Politics and performance in 1820

In his autobiography Macready glossed over the production, saying merely that ‘to Iachimo I gave no prominence’. But the play’s reception in the London press suggests the very opposite. Macready’s ‘Iachimo has all the disbelief in principle that belongs to real vice’, thought the Examiner, and ‘the audience do not fail to apply the prominent passages about the calumniated princess and “false Italians”’ (Examiner, 22 October 1820). One passage of the play relating to the exposure of ‘bed chamber evidence received three distinct rounds of applause’. The Times reported that when a minor character, Pisanio, suggested to Imogen’s husband that the supposed evidence of her infidelity had been either accidentally dropped or stolen from her, the actor was rewarded by several minutes of ‘the most vehement applause’. Audience approbation reached a climax in response to Iachimo’s penitential speech in the final act: ‘The heaviness of my guilt within my bosom / Takes off my manhood. I have belied a lady, / The Princess of this country’ (The Times, 19 October 1820). The loyalist Morning Post called for the play’s cancellation because of ‘the manner in which certain passages’ had been acclaimed ‘by the radical part of the audience’ …(19 October). Three days later, the paper elaborated, ‘we do not think that in times of public agitation, the source of our amusements should be poisoned, and that profit should be sought at the risk of public discord’ (October 1820). If the audience needed a cue for its tumultuous response, one could be found in Non Mi Ricordo, William Hone and George Cruikshank’s pro-Caroline pamphlet, which went through thirty-one editions in four months. Its title page is headed by Iachimo’s words as he steals a bracelet (to act as proof of their adultery) from the sleeping Imogen: ‘this will witness outwardly, as strongly as the conscience does within’.17 Non Mi Ricordo referenced the repeated response (‘I don’t remember’) under cross examination of one of the most controversial Italian witnesses in the divorce proceedings. The loyalist press retaliated by using another quotation from Cymbeline in a sardonic allusion to Caroline’s spurious purity: ‘As chaste as unsunn’d snow’ (Courier, 14 November 1820; John Bull, 11 February 1821). Cymbeline was not the only Shakespeare play to resonate with popular politics in 1820.18 Every passage of Othello ‘that could be deemed illustrative’ of Caroline’s persecution was seized on and loudly applauded, to the embarrassment of Drury Lane’s usually dutiful management (The Times, 9 November 1820).19 Other managers deliberately exploited contemporary resonances. Productions of the Shakespeare–Fletcher history play Henry VIII gave particular prominence to the trial of Queen Katherine (Katherine of Aragon). Henry VIII, or, The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey, as it was invariably titled

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in 1820, had long been noted for its sympathetic portrayal of a dignified and wrongly accused Queen Katharine. The playwrights’ less than sympathetic treatment of her husband was tempered by the unmistakeable implication that Wolsey was ultimately to blame for the Queen’s persecution. This resonated with the recurring trope in contemporary commentary of a monarch misled by corrupt ministers. The popularity of Henry VIII also derived from ‘The Trial of Queen Katherine’, which was one of its central scenes, eminently suited for presentation as a set-piece spectacle and flagged on playbills as among its chief attractions.20 Cruikshank also referenced the play in his satirical print ‘the new FARCE – as performed at the Royalty Theatre’, with George IV inevitably shown in the title role.21 It is important, however, not to let the royal divorce over-determine our understanding of 1820. There is abundant evidence beyond the royal divorce plays, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, to suggest quickening theatrical engagement in the themes of liberty and freedom and resistance to the assaults of tyranny and privilege. The notorious Six Acts were particularly intended to suppress what loyalists routinely termed the seditious and blasphemous press; it is for that, and the creation of the unstamped press in response, that they are chiefly remembered. It is worth emphasising, therefore, that the Acts also rendered illegal any meeting, indoors or out, that discussed politics unless it had been formally constituted by a requisition of ratepayers to the lord lieutenant of a county or mayor of a corporation. However, the Six Acts left theatres untouched. It is here, with productions entering into dynamic dialogue with contemporary politics, that the greatest significance of the stage in 1820 resides. Sometimes this dialogue was explicit and intentional, as in the Coburg’s Giovanni in the Country! or, The Rake Husband, which included a version of La Marseillaise and the depiction of a parliamentary election culminating with women presenting a cap of liberty to the victor.22 Sometimes it was subtler but no less powerful. At Leeds, for example, Julius Caesar was presented in June ‘for the first time these thirty years’.23 The production at York’s Theatre Royal was the first in the city since 1813.24 These revivals are consistent with a renewed interest in the play that had begun in Manchester a few weeks after Peterloo. While Julius Caesar is an ambiguous meditation on the conflict of tyranny and freedom, it was a common point of reference in discussion about the justice of resisting tyranny. ‘Brutus and Cassius were lauded to the very skies for slaying Caesar’, the leader of the Cato Street conspiracy declared in a speech from the dock before sentencing, going on to deplore that the soil beneath which he would be

Politics and performance in 1820

buried ‘should be a theatre for slaves, for cowards, for despots’.25 Less ambiguous in its depiction of the descent into tyranny was Coriolanus. This was the more popular of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Nationally there were at least three times as many productions in 1819–20 as there had been the previous season, while two separate printed editions of the play were also published.26 Exploiting the momentary feminisation of public politics wrought by the popular campaign to support Caroline, advertising foregrounded the part of the leading women (consistently a source of good sense and moral probity) in the play. But there were other reasons why Coriolanus struck a raw nerve with the authorities after Peterloo. It may have struck a raw nerve before it, but there appears to have been no performance of the play during 1819 until 29 November, when Covent Garden presented it, with Macready in the lead. Drury Lane quickly followed suit with a double bill that paired Coriolanus with the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk; or, Harlequin and the Ogre. Coriolanus was in repertoire at Drury Lane until the end of January and the pantomime until April. Jack and the Beanstalk was itself replete with radical overtones: one of the most revolutionary periodicals of the war years had been Giant Killer, while Hone and Cruikshank’s The House that Jack Built was one of the best-selling political satires of the Regency period. The title was used by London’s Olympic Theatre for its winter season pantomime. Its managers had some difficulty in getting the play past Larpent on account of the anti-clerical content of the version submitted for examination. Larpent passed a revised version only three days before the premiere, insisting on the anodyne recasting of a venial parson and parish clerk into a doctor and his assistant.27 To return, however, to Coriolanus. Theatres staging the play during 1820 included those in Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Doncaster, Dublin, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Wakefield and York. Of these provincial productions little is known, but the capital’s theatres royal hit an extraordinary problem in January 1820 when Larpent prohibited them from staging Coriolanus ‘until the popular passages, most in favour of liberty, shall have been expunged’ (Hampshire Telegraph, 24 January 1820). Something of the official dilemma concerning Coriolanus becomes apparent when one considers Cruikshank’s depiction of George IV in the character of Coriolanus addressing the London plebs, in a caricature issued barely a month after his accession.28 The populace wear caps of liberty and carry banners bearing such slogans as ‘Burdett and Reform’, ‘Revolution and Plunder’ and ‘Liberty of the Press’. At first glance this is a sympathetic representation of the man whom – as regent and monarch

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– Cruikshank otherwise pilloried mercilessly as obese and debauched. But the very act of depicting the monarch as Coriolanus at all was hugely ambiguous, especially in the very week after the exposure of Cato Street. The viewer of this portrait could be expected to know that Coriolanus was a deeply flawed character, whose contempt for liberty in pursuit of his own aggrandisement would soon cost him his life. Cruikshank knew this, of course, and in case of doubt inserted himself into the picture, clutching a folio labelled ‘Caricature’. In front of him stands his collaborator William Hone, grasping a club labelled ‘House that Jack Built’ and ‘Man in the Moon’ (another of the pair’s popular assaults upon George and his ministers). However loyal the protestations of theatre managers, and however heavily censored the script, it would surely have been impossible to see Coriolanus innocently in 1820, even without Cruickshank’s graphic prompting. And of course, the act of representing tyrannicide on stage was itself daring. Even the representation of the violent death of wholly innocent royalty courted prosecution. On 27 December 1819 the Coburg, south London’s leading ‘illegitimate’ theatre, staged a daring production of Richard the Third. It was daring both because it infringed the legal stipulation that unlicensed theatres could not present serious drama except in excerpts interspersed with music, and because it very explicitly depicted what the playbill proclaimed in advance as ‘the Assassination of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York’ in the Tower. Shakespeare, of course, carefully located their murders off stage; the Coburg was teasing its audience with a veiled allusion to the Prince Regent and his eldest brother, the commander in chief of the British army.29 For presenting this production, the Coburg’s owner was found guilty the following year in a prosecution initiated by the Drury Lane management in defence of its Royal Patent.30 Though they too exploited popular interest in Coriolanus following its success at Covent Garden, Drury Lane’s managers were considerably more politically cautious and ostentatiously loyalist than Covent Garden’s. This loyalism was rewarded in February 1821 when the King conspicuously chose Drury Lane to resume his patronage of the stage (Morning Post, 7 February 1821).31 The experience of London’s patent theatres in mounting Coriolanus in January 1820 suggests that the revival of established dramas needs closer investigation. The activities of the Lord Chamberlain are usually viewed only with reference to new drama, a bias that derives from the nature of the surviving records: the Examiner’s annotated copies of the texts submitted for approval. The extent of voluntary censorship can only be guessed at, especially in provincial houses, as

Politics and performance in 1820

nervous managers bowdlerised dramas rather than risk performing potentially contentious passages. This consideration clearly prevailed at York in March, when John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was judged ‘too tough for the times, and objectionable scenes’ were excised.32 There was an element of risk in such selfcensorship for, as the Coburg’s proprietor argued, ‘political allusions’ were ‘so much more popular to the frequenters of the theatre than any licentiousness’.33 Two other revivals especially encountered problems in 1820, Brutus and Venice Preserved. William Duncombe’s Lucius Junius Brutus, based on Voltaire’s work of the same name, had first been produced in 1735. Brutus, first consul of Rome (not to be confused with Caesar’s assassin), leads the Romans in the struggle against the Tarquins. Duncombe, a Whig, peppered his play with encomia to liberty and invocations to resist tyranny: [T]he Laws and Rights, of which we are the Guardians, Restrain our Hands from Arbitrary Sway. T’arrest a Roman upon bare Surmise, Would be to act like that outrageous Tyrant Whom we renounce, and take up Arms t’expell. Mean while, let us go forth to rouze the Slothful, To chear the Weak, to animate the virtuous, And terrify the Sons of Violence.34

Competing with Duncombe’s drama was John Howard Payne’s strongly derivative Brutus, or The Fall of Tarquin, premiered in 1818.35 Payne’s reworking accentuated the theme of Roman greatness having been achieved under enlightened rule. This was a popular idea with audiences. Playbills for Payne’s play on the Stafford circuit declaimed how Brutus roused ‘the People to break their chains of Slavery, and expel the Tarquins; which laid the foundation of Roman greatness and eventually made them MASTERS OF THE WORLD’.36 Voltaire supposedly observed that Brutus was ‘the subject, perhaps, of all others, the most fitted for the English stage’. To this the Tory Quarterly Review retorted: ‘it certainly seems to us objectionable in an eminent degree, and for many reasons’.37 Chief of these was that it was ‘too strictly political’. In Shakespeare’s English history plays, ‘it is not on public revolutions, a discontented people, or rival factions, that he suffers us to dwell’, claimed the Quarterly. However, his Roman plays could not be exempted from this criticism, while imitative works such as Brutus decidedly offended. Pointedly, the Quarterly reviewed Brutus along with a drama premiered in 1819, Evadne, by the prominent agitator for Roman Catholic emancipation, Richard Lalor Shiel. Evadne centres on the King of Naples, ‘of good dispositions, but corrupted by pleasure’, and on

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Ludovico, a treacherous courtier. It concludes with Ludovico’s assassination at the hands of a high-minded Neapolitan patriot. The Quarterly’s assault on Evadne preceded the revolution in the Kingdom of Naples, but its message was clear even without that added contemporary resonance. Despite its popularity in 1819, no London house presented it in 1820. It was, however, performed at Liverpool and on the York circuit, until news of the Neapolitan revolution appears to have prompted its judicious withdrawal.38 Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (first staged in 1682) fared rather better. While it had had only a single private production in 1819,39 Drury Lane’s 1820 revival saw it in repertoire for over three months, though the supposition must be that it appeared with passages such as this one cut: I am a villain … To see our senators Cheat the deluded people with a show Of liberty, which yet they ne’er must taste of. They say, by them our hands are free from fetters; Yet whom they please they lay in basest bonds; Bring whom they please to infamy and sorrow; Drive us, like wrecks, down the rough tide of power, Whilst no hold’s left to save us from destruction. All that bear this are villains, and I one, Not to rise up at the great call of nature, And check the growth of these domestic spoilers, That make us slaves, and tell us, ’tis our charter.40

Venice Preserved was also revived in March for the York circuit, and so also played at Hull, Sheffield, Wakefield and Doncaster. It was yet another drama that centred on conspiracy and betrayal. Although the republic of Venice is preserved, those who conspire against it are given the best speeches, and all of them die noble deaths. Ever since the French Revolution, Venice Preserved had been a controversial work. Elizabeth Inchbald, in her preface to it in her British Theatre (1808), remarked that it ‘is played repeatedly, except when an order from the Lord Chamberlain forbids its representation, lest some of the speeches … should be applied, by the ignorant part of the audience, to certain men, or assemblies, in the English state’.41 When John Thelwall was tried for treason in 1793, one of the charges against him specified the uproar he had caused at Drury Lane by loudly applauding this passage in Otway’s play: We’ve neither safety, unity, nor peace, for the foundation’s lost of common good; justice is lame, as well as blind amongst us; the Laws (corrupted to the ends that make ’em) serve but for instruments of some new tyranny.42

Politics and performance in 1820

Two years later The Times commented on how the drama ‘feed[s] the flame of lurking sedition’ (27 October 1795). ‘Who will dispute that the Tragedy of Venice Preserved was not prudentially suspended, in times of the greatest ferment?’ demanded the Examiner of Plays, defending the periodic suppression of the play in 1829.43 Alongside Godwin, Paine and Rousseau, the play was quoted in one of the most cogent arguments for universal suffrage published in 1820, The Rights of the People, issued by the exuberantly irreverent William Benbow. Several copies of Rights of the People exist in Home Office papers, for the government seriously considered it for prosecution. It is an extraordinary collision of philosophical and polemical texts, prose, drama and poetry, published in wrappers that detailed Spain’s revolutionary constitution and advertised Benbow’s scurrilous pro-Caroline publications. Among these was the memorably titled Lucretia and Runjumdildopunt, ‘as not performed at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane and Covent Garden; it being thought likely that the Lord Chamberlain would refuse his licence’. Predictably George IV is Runjumdildopunt, but innuendo alternates with political allusion, to Burke’s infamous notion of the ‘swinish multitude’ for example.44 Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant similarly cast the gouty monarch in a title role and cast swine as the defenders of Caroline. Another Benbow publication, The Queen and the Mogul … as Performed at a Theatre-Royal, depicted an obese George quoting Hamlet (‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt’). Its title page quoted the same passage from Venice Preserved that had so enraptured Thelwall.45 This juxtaposition is itself further evidence for the creative collision of the high-minded and the scurrilous, and drama with the graphic and the printed word, which makes such productions so difficult to pin down and categorise. Street literature might blaze dramatic quotations beneath a title, or be presented as a play on the printed page. Swellfoot, The Queen and the Mogul, Lucretia and Runjumdildopunt and other ‘plays’ such as The Green Bag were written for the theatre of the reader’s imagination rather than the stage.46 It is a challenge for us to understand what the conditions of reception were for such pseudo-dramas. Histories of the theatre are inevitably stage-struck, being largely confined to formal performance. However, newspapers were read aloud in pubs, at political meetings and in workplaces; ‘free and easies’ blurred the boundary between sociability and performance; and there was a whole world of popular amateur dramatics of which (in contrast to ‘polite’ domestic theatricals) we know nothing.47 It is most unlikely that publications like these were consumed through the act of silent reading alone. There is seldom a clear boundary between reading

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and performance. In the pro-Caroline literature of 1820 there was barely a boundary at all. However, we have also seen that theatrical performances created meanings that were dormant or even unintended in the texts they played. ‘It is not by quotation that a play of this sort can fairly be understood’, one critic observed of Virginius, the most sensational of all the premieres of 1820. ‘It depends much, and purposely we have no doubt, upon the aid of representation.’48 Virginius, or The Fall of the Decemviri, was the work of the Irish playwright James Sheridan Knowles, whose father was cousin to the outspoken Whig dramatist Richard Sheridan. Premiered at Glasgow, where the author was a teacher, in March 1820 Virginius was then revised for Covent Garden in May. Later in 1820 it was presented at Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh and Newcastle. Drury Lane also mounted a feeble rival.49 The context in which this depiction ‘of love – of bitter wrong / Of freedom – of sad pity – and lust of pow’r’ was first staged rendered it hugely controversial.50 The Decemviri was a commission of ten patricians who ruled Rome who, when their term of office expired in 459 BC, refused to stand down. Knowles depicts the Decemvirate as debauched and corrupt. Unlike the heroes of the other Roman plays in vogue in 1820, Virginius was a common citizen – a point of some significance for audiences in 1820. A soldier serving away from Rome, he leaves his teenage daughter Virginia in the care of a nurse. The chief of the Decemviri, Appius Claudius, seized by unbridled lust for Virginia, kidnaps her, and when she repels his advances initiates rigged court proceedings to have her declared the fatherless slave of one of his cronies. Virginia and her supporters are powerless to influence the outcome. At the play’s climax Virginius, unexpectedly returned from war, stabs Virginia through the heart as she lies in his arms, rather than see her fall victim to the lust of Appius. Thus abridged, Virginius has perhaps only passing resonance with politics in late Regency Britain. But from its inception, audiences seem to have interpreted it contemporary terms. One critic mused: In what consists the interest and force of [t]his popular play of ‘Virginius’? The domestic feeling. The costume, the setting, the decorations are heroic. We have Roman tunics, but a modern English heart, – the scene is the Forum, but the sentiments those of the ‘Bedford Arms’.51

It mattered not that it needed a well-informed audience to know that Virginius had a basis in fact and that there had been a popular revolt against the Decemviri and the restitution of constitutional rule. Knowles’s depiction of debauchery and despotism in the highest realm of the empire, melded to

Politics and performance in 1820

a tale of persecuted innocence, was a potent drama, and the title role drew from Macready a powerful, self-defining performance.52 Not only was Appius depicted on stage as shamelessly dismissive of all legal propriety or conventional morality, but the Roman plebs were thrust into the action of the play to an extent without parallel, even in an age that relished spectacular crowd scenes in its drama. One review indeed complained about ‘the frequent introduction of the populace on the stage’ (Mirror of Fashion, 18 May 1820). One of the functions of this crowd is to offer increasingly vocal dissent at the court hearing, as Appius claims repeatedly, ‘The law is just – most reasonable – I framed that law myself – I will maintain that law.’53 In a preface to the play, James Sheridan Knowles related that he wrote it in great haste: ‘it was resolved and executed in about three months’.54 Those three months included the fall-out from Peterloo, Parliament’s passing of the Six Acts and Cato Street. Its premiere then preceded the Easter rising in Scotland by only a few days (Glasgow Herald, 27 March 1820). The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner passed Virginius for performance on 9 May.55 However, according to Macready, on the eve of its London premiere a week later, the script was requested by ‘Carlton House’ (George IV’s London residence). It was returned the next morning with several deletions of lines in which Appius Claudius lauded tyranny.56 It is possible that whatever lines offended Carlton House were permanently excised from all renditions, on stage or in print. Alternatively, they may have been a soliloquy that concludes, ‘at our feet array / The wealth, and power, and dignity of Rome / In absolute subjection! Tyranny! / How godlike is thy port!’57 Conolly’s history of English stage censorship casts doubt on Macready’s claim, citing the lack of evidence for it in Larpent’s copy. Macready, however, makes clear that the play had already passed the Examiner, and that it was the text as approved that was supplied for ‘royal approval’ (Glasgow Herald, 22 May 1820). Newspapers also reported rumours that, having ‘passed the ordeal of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the manuscript was demanded for inspection in a high quarter’.58 It may also be significant that the originally contracted publisher declined to publish the text. Macready clearly wanted his reader to believe that last-minute censorship was the personal intervention of the monarch. This ultimately unverifiable claim should not distract us from the more important general point that theatres in 1820 offered abundant ‘immediate and specific comment’ on the politics of the day, and that this function was limited neither to pantomime nor to illegitimate theatres. It was specifically Virginius that prompted Hazlitt’s outburst:

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In the printed play, we observe a number of passages marked with inverted commas, which are omitted in the representation. This is the case almost uniformly wherever the words ‘Tyranny’, or ‘Liberty’, occur. Is this done by authority, or is it prudence in the author, ‘lest the courtiers offended should be?’ Is the name of Liberty to be struck out of the English language, and are we not to hate tyrants even in an old Roman play?59

Productions detailed in this discussion of politics and performance in 1820 have been limited to those with documented contemporary political resonance. It has avoided speculation about plays whose titles suggest political content but about which evidence is unavailable. We can only guess at the reception of Beverley theatre’s The Curfew, or The Norman Banditti, its title hinting at the long-established radical trope of the Norman Yoke.60 How did Dibdin’s comic opera The Cabinet go down in the Suffolk market town of Bungay?61 Or The School of Reform; or, How to Rule a Husband in Durham (Durham Chronicle, 29 July 1820)? And how did Barnstable audiences perceive Carline (sic), heroine of The Young Hussar; or, Love and Mercy?62 Context is all, and the context in which the stage operated in 1820 was extraordinary. Many histories do little more than note that, following the death of George III, it was once again possible to stage King Lear. But this is almost the least interesting thing about theatrical performances in 1820. The revival of interest in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Henry VIII and Julius Caesar, the tumultuous audience reception of those plays and of others no longer familiar to us, such as Lucius Junius Brutus and Venice Preserved, and the controversies surrounding the new dramas Evadne and, especially, Virginius – all these point to a heightened awareness among managers and audiences of the radical potentiality of the stage, at a time when the more conventional political media of newspapers and public meetings were being savagely curtailed. It is not without irony that this potentiality was realised in a context of state censorship. Events in 1820 reveal just how fallacious is the conventional (and still current) view that state censorship ‘was remarkably effective in stifling any expression of political criticism on the London stage’.63 Notes 1 For a detailed study see M. Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 2 Richard Carlile, Republican, 15 September 1820, p. 79. 3 Chase, 1820, pp. 10, 146–9, 171, 173–86. 4 House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on

Politics and performance in 1820 Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1831–32) (hereafter SC Dramatic Literature), p. 219. 5 SC Dramatic Literature, p. 225. 6 K. Barker, The Theatre Royal Bristol, 1766–1966 (Salisbury: Compton, 1974), p. 98; C. Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 156. 7 S. Rosenfeld, The York Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 2001), p.  210. 8 K. Cave (ed.), The Diary of Joseph Farington,: vol. 16: January 1820–December 1821 (London: Yale University Press, 1984), entry for 22 July 1821, p. 5704. 9 T. Sadler (ed.), Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: Macmillan, 1872), p. 161. 10 Joe Cowell, Thirty Years Passed among the Players in England and America (New York: Harper, 1845), p. 48. 11 Chase, 1820, pp. 186–93. 12 Microfiche copy of Larpent’s annotated manuscript in British Library, Department of Manuscripts, MSS Sur F254/641. See also L. W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama, 1737–1824 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1976), p. 112. 13 Œdipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy. In Two Acts. Translated from the Original Doric (London: Johnston, 1820); J. Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open, 2010), p. 233. 14 British Museum, London, Department of Prints & Drawings (hereafter BMDPD), on-line catalogue, at www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/departments/prints_and_ drawings/research/catalogues.aspx (accessed 10 August 2013). 15 ‘A new Italian farce called the Green Bag by Permission’ (Fores, 22 July 1820) and ‘The Cauldron – or Shakespeare Travestie’ (Fairburn, August 1820), BMDPD, catalogue nos 1975,0621.17 and 1948,0214.817. 16 David Mayer, Harlequin in his Element: the English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 2. 17 Non Mi Ricordo, &c. &c. &c. (London: Hone, 1820). 18 On this theme in the Victorian period see A. Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Popular Politics’, Historical Journal, 45:2 (2009), pp. 367–79. 19 See also E. A. Smith, A Queen on Trial: The Affair of Queen Caroline (Stroud: Sutton, 1993), pp. 138–9. 20 Theatre Royal, Hull, playbill for 15 December 1820, University of York, Borthwick Institute, Raymond Burton Collection, 29/20; Leeds Theatre, playbill for 13 June 1821, Leeds Central Library, Local Studies Library, Playbills Collection. 21 ‘A Scene in the new FARCE – as performed at the Royalty Theatre!’ (Cruikshank, 14 February 1821), BMDPD, catalogue no. 1862,1217.392. 22 D. Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 206–7. Worrall suggests that the play ‘was almost certainly intended to create an allusion to the philandering Prince of Wales’. 23 Leeds Theatre, playbill for 30 June 1820, Leeds Central Library, Local Studies Library, Playbills Collection. 24 Rosenfeld, York Theatre, p. 209.

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The performance of politics 25 G. T. Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy, 2nd edn (London: Kelly, 1820), p. 338. 26 Shakspeare’s Coriolanus … from the Prompt Copy of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (London: Tabby, 1820); Coriolanus: or, The Roman Matron, a Tragedy, Oxberry’s New English Drama, 39 (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1820). 27 ‘The House that Jack Built’: microfiche copy of manuscript in British Library, Department of Manuscripts, MSS Sur F254/657. On the politics of Jack and the Beanstalk pantomimes see Mayer, Harlequin, pp. 61–2, 64, 91, 197, 203, 242–4, 370, 372–3. 28 G. Cruikshank, ‘Coriolanus Addressing the Plebeians’, 29 February 1820, BMDPD, catalogue no. 1859,0316.152; J. Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 102–3. 29 Royal Coburg Theatre, playbill for 27 December 1819, British Library, Playbills Collection; Theatrical Inquisitor, and Monthly Mirror, 16 (February 1820), pp. 84–94. 30 SC Dramatic Literature, evidence of Davidge, p. 76; see also Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 119, 202, 213–14, and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 119. 31 Significantly George chose to attend Arne’s opera Artaxerxes. Artaxerxes, King of Persia, succeeds his assassinated father and, just as he is swearing to maintain his subjects’ rights, almost dies himself at the same assassin’s hand. He graciously remits the death penalty for this treachery. 32 Rosenfeld, York Theatre, p. 209. 33 SC Dramatic Literature, evidence of George Bolwell Davidge, p. 85. 34 William Duncombe, Lucius Junius Brutus (1735). 35 British Stage and Literary Cabinet, 3 (February 1819), pp. 40–3. 36 British Library, Playbills Collection, vol. 306, Drayton (24 May 1819); see also vol. 264, part 1, Stafford (3 December 1819). 37 Quarterly Review, 22:44 (January 1820), pp. 402–15, at p. 404. See also ‘Vindex’, ‘Mr Howard Payne and the Quarterly Reviewers’, Theatrical Inquisitor, 16:93 (March 1820), pp. 128–34 for an attack on the Quarterly’s criticism of Brutus. 38 Liverpool Mercury, 30 June 1820; cf. letter to the (Liverpool) Kaleidoscope, 22 (November 1820), p. 176, arguing for the revival of either Virginius, Tamburlaine or ‘the most judicious tragedy to select’, Evadne; York Minster Library, Playbills Collection, LT[A] 1820-08-YOR, 8 March 1820. 39 In September 1819 a comic travesty was presented at the Wilson Street Private Theatre, London, see Theatre; or, Dramatic and Literary Mirror, 2 October 1819. 40 SC Dramatic Literature, evidence of James Kenney, p. 229, specified only two dramas ‘that have been licensed [but] have been suspended in times of excitement’. Venice Preserved was one, King Lear the other, during the period of George IV’s insanity. 41 Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Venice Preserved’, p. 3, in The British Theatre: or, A Collection of Plays, vol. 12 (London: Longman, 1808). 42 The British Theatre, vol. 12, p. 251. 43 George Colman, Observations on the Notice of a Motion to Rescind Certain Powers of His Majesty’s Lord Chamberlain (privately printed, 1829), p. 3.

Politics and performance in 1820 4 4 Lucretia and Runjumdildopunt; or, John Bull in Search of the Pathetic. A Serious Musical Farce, in Three Acts (London: Benbow, 1820), title page, p. 16. 45 The Queen and the Mogul: A Play in Two Acts (London: Benbow, 1820), frontispiece and title page. 46 The Green Bag, a Farce. As Now Performing with Great Applause by His Majesty’s Servants. In two Acts (London: Onwhyn, 1820). 47 See C. Thomson, The Autobiography of an Artisan (Nottingham: Shaw, 1847), pp. 102–7, for young workers’ theatricals in Hull around this time. 48 Theatrical Inquisitor, 16 (October 1820), p. 303. 49 It lasted for three performances (29 May–1 June). See European Magazine & London Review, 77 (June 1820), pp. 531–2; Theatrical Inquisitor, 16 (June 1820), pp. 392–3; surviving poster in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Edison Collection. 50 The Dramatic Works of James Sheridan Knowles (London: Routledge, [1884?]), epilogue to Virginius, p. 111. These lines are omitted from the first edition: J. S. Knowles, Virginius: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (London: Ridgway, 1820). 51 R. H. Horne (ed.), A New Spirit of the Age (London: Smith, 1844), vol. 2, pp. 86–7. 52 See for example the review in Theatrical Inquisitor, 16 (May 1820), p. 324. Macready in the character of Virginius is one of only four illustrations in Macready’s Reminiscences and Selections from his Diaries and Letters, ed. F. Pollock (London: ­Macmillan, 1876). 53 Knowles, Virginius, p. 45. 54 Knowles, Virginius, p. 4. 55 Microfiche copy of manuscript in British Library, Department of Manuscripts, MSS Sur F254/764. 56 Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 159. 57 Knowles, Virginius, p. 29. 58 Morning Herald, 19 May 1820, quoted in Conolly, Censorship, pp. 109–10. 59 W. Hazlitt, ‘The Drama’, London Magazine, 2 (July 1820), p. 91, reprinted in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt: Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1933), vol. 18, pp. 347–8. 60 T. Sheppard, Evolution of the Drama in Hull and District (Hill: Brown, 1927), p.  161. 61 Bungay Theatre playbill, 17 April 1820, Bungay Local History Museum. 62 Barnstaple Playbills Collection, 10 November 1820, Devon Heritage Centre, Exeter. 63 D. Thomas, D. Carlton and A. Etienne, Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 47. For detailed rebuttals of this convention see esp. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre and Worrall, Theatric Revolution.

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11 Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist Richard Gaunt

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n 2 May 1997, on leaving Downing Street as Prime Minister for the last time, John Major observed that ‘when the curtain falls, it is time to get off the stage’. There could hardly have been a more appropriate metaphor for the theatre of modern British politics. Standing on Downing Street outside the famous black door of No. 10 – both of which have become props in a political stage-set which forms the back-drop for national political life – Major addressed an audience composed nominally of television cameras and newspaper reporters who were in fact the medium through which his words and image would reach a global audience of millions. Whatever one thought of Major’s politics, or expected from the ‘grey’ popular image which had been created by his critics, nothing became him more than the manner of his political departure. From Downing Street, the outgoing Prime Minister travelled to Buckingham Palace, where he formally tendered his resignation before going to watch a cricket match at The Oval. As a piece of political stage-craft, Major’s choreography of the occasion appeared faultless, but as his memoirs tell us, his curtain-call was being scripted in the months before the general election which swept him from power.1 The tendency of modern British politics towards over-dramatisation, especially in respect of its central political actor, has long been criticised as a distortion of British constitutional practice and an unwelcome intrusion of celebrity culture into the serious realm of politics. The modern debate on the issue may be said to have begun with Richard Crossman’s introduction to Walter Bagehot’s classic The English Constitution. In updating Bagehot’s classification of the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ aspects of the constitution, Crossman argued that Parliament had now been rendered ‘dignified’ rather than ‘efficient’ by the increasing concentration of power in the cabinet and in the hands

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

of the Prime Minister.2 Today, in a twenty-four-hour news culture, political competence and capability are judged as much on the ability of individual politicians to deliver a media-friendly message which will resonate with the viewing public as on the ability to handle the pressure-house atmosphere of the House of Commons. For prime ministers, the now weekly routine of Prime Minister’s Questions (which was first introduced in 1881) imposes a central piece of dramatic theatre upon the parliamentary schedule which may hardly make for must-see television but is a key barometer in testing (on a regular basis) the political health of the nation.3 Parliament’s proceedings have been increasingly exposed to public scrutiny over the course of the last 200 years as the conduct and words of its members have been progressively made more widely available; first, through the concession which allowed parliamentary debates to be reported in newspapers after 1771; more recently, as a result of the introduction of live broadcasts of debates on radio and (since 1989) television. This exposure has helped to make more apparent what was always known to MPs themselves – that Parliament could be a rough, noisy and unforgiving site of political drama where survival and success depended on acquiring the requisite skills of presentation. In 1819, an aspirant to ministerial office was advised by his patron to speak more frequently in the Commons in order to make himself ‘known to the Ministers and useful to them’.4 MPs have become progressively more aware of this process to the point of obsession, with media and public relations advisers, spin-doctors and publicists spreading ubiquitously; for ministers, they have become an essential part of their political armoury. Historically, the close connection between the dramatic arts and politics – what Boyd Hilton has recently called ‘the politics of theatre and the theatre of politics’5 – has been evident in Britain since at least the time of Sir Robert Walpole. From the late eighteenth century, the Commons chamber became the stage-set upon which the theatre of national political action was played out and the cockpit of political drama between its leading personalities. Both Richard Brinsley Sheridan – the playwright and manager of Drury Lane Theatre – and George Canning, the son of an actress (Mary Ann Costello), forged conspicuous parliamentary careers during this period.6 The dissolution of the longstanding friendship between Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox was staged before the House of Commons in the debates on the Quebec Government Bill, in May 1791, while Burke’s theatrical politics led him to brandish a dagger in the chamber, eighteen months later (28 December 1792), in order to demonstrate the facility with which arms could be procured during a period of revolutionary

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turmoil. Sheridan spoiled Burke’s dramatic effect somewhat by observing, ‘the gentleman, I see, has brought his knife with him, but where is his fork?’7 ‘Politics was theatrical’, Hilton has argued – perhaps no more fatally so for all concerned than when the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812.8 In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, political life began to be ‘conducted in an increasingly public and performative way’ as the realms of politics and theatre converged with one another in terms of personality and style.9 This process was accelerated by a shift in the number and affiliation of newspapers and magazines. The ‘growth in the number of independent [titles] which looked to circulation rather than government subsidies for their profits and succeeded commercially by promoting the views and interests of their readers rather than those of ministers’ was a notable development in the post-Waterloo period, and one which differed in scale and scope from the political culture characteristic of the age of Walpole and the Elder Pitt. Ministers such as Liverpool and Castlereagh responded by assuming ‘increasingly ­authoritative tones in debate’ and through supplying copies of ‘important speeches … sympathetic articles … and specially written pamphlets’ for the press.10 Meanwhile, opposition speakers such as Henry Grattan and Henry Brougham forged parliamentary reputations for themselves as the ‘voice’ of particular popular causes. By the dawn of the classic era of ‘parliamentary government’ in 1830, the convergence between politics and performance was coming to be an accepted fact of political life. That era (which lasted for the next fifty years) had, at its heart, a focus upon the creation, survival and defeat of governments in the House of Commons, as a result of the government’s management and control of the chamber. This further amplified the importance of parliamentary debates and the necessity for ministries to secure the abilities of competent speakers.11 To some extent, the architecture of the Commons chamber had always made the emergence of a theatricalised politics likely. Sir George Hayter’s portrait of the ‘reformed’ House of Commons of 1833 (the last such illustration before the great fire of October 1834 swept it away for ever) provides a lasting testament to the compactness, crowdedness and adversarial organisation which gave rise to such famous personality clashes as that between Fox and Pitt. It was a mainstay of Regency radicalism to liken the Commons chamber to a theatrical arena.12 The Commons met in St Stephen’s chapel until 1834, when, following the fire, it transferred to the Lords’ chamber (the court of requests), while the peers sat from 1835 to 1847 in the painted chamber. One contem-

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

porary peer likened the latter, in an uncomplimentary simile, to ‘a private theatre’.13 The destruction of the Commons led to a series of debates about the type of chamber which should replace it, before the decision was made to replicate (with some improvements) the design and construction of the old House. Maintaining the adversarial construction of the Commons allowed for dramatic effects such as members ‘crossing the floor’ between government and opposition or back-bench rebellions against their putative front-bench leaders.14 This was a theatre of political action in which the boundaries between actors and audience were porous and all members of the cast were participatory – through not only through their words and speeches but also their reception of others’ efforts. The hooting-down of Benjamin Disraeli’s maiden speech, in December 1837, to the ‘hisses, groans, hoots, catcalls, drumming with the feet, loud conversation, and imitation of animals’ of his fellow members, was only the most famous example of what contemporaries called the ‘bear garden’ of the Commons.15 Little wonder that, over time, the chamber developed­ elaborate rules of procedure, etiquette and policing (the most famous of which designated that the lines separating the two front benches should be further apart than the tips of two out-stretched swords) and appointed officers such as the serjeant-at-arms and the speaker to ensure the maintenance of ‘fair play’.16 Two additional processes accelerated the emergence of parliamentary dramatis personae, in the early nineteenth century. First was the Act of Union with Ireland, in 1800, which centralised the political representation of the United Kingdom at Westminster, making it the nation’s only licensed political theatre. This brought 100 representatives of Irish constituencies into the chamber and materially increased its over-crowded state. The second ­important development was the gradual extension of facilities for journalists and parliamentary reporters. By the 1830s, some fifty parliamentary reporters were covering the work of the House of Commons.17 Parliament appointed Luke and Thomas Curson Hansard as its official printers in 1812 – a decision subsequently reinforced by the courts when it extended parliamentary privilege ‘to cover any fair and full report of what was said there even if it was libellous’, following the case of Stockdale vs Hansard, in the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840.18 An understanding of the physical and political context within which parliamentarians were working in the early nineteenth century helps to explain why politicians were becoming, in Hilton’s words, ‘more like thespians’ in this period,19 and why they sought to use the techniques of drama to ‘sell’ their policies, both to their followers inside the House of Commons and to the

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newspaper-reading public out of doors. As Henry Brougham argued in 1812, parliamentary speeches established the ‘character’ of MPs in both Parliament and the country at large, and parliamentary debates were ‘a regular series of appeals to the people’.20 It was a small stretch of the satirical imagination to liken the ancient palace of St Stephen’s in which Parliament met to a sort of ‘St Stephen’s Theatre Royal’, whose manageress, Queen Victoria, opened proceedings each year in her annual speech from the throne. It was a conceit increasingly employed in satirical publications like Figaro in London and Punch. By the mid-nineteenth century, The Times thought it a truism to remark that ‘Parliament is our theatre’.21 Peel as actor-dramatist While Canning, Grey, Brougham, Stanley (the ‘Prince Rupert of Debate’) and Lyndhurst are all rightly cited by Hilton as exemplars of the new type of political dramatist engendered by these changes, the man widely regarded as the dominant political personality of the period 1830–50 – Sir Robert Peel – is strangely omitted from his list. All those listed, excepting Stanley, were attacked as opportunists, at one time or another, in part because of their abilities as Commons speakers. The nearest Hilton comes to according Peel any dramatic tendencies is his contention that, after 1827, ‘the Commons was a stage on which Peel would parade … the injured innocence of his beaten breast’.22 Peel’s absence appears the more telling, given that, in a parliamentary career spanning four decades (1810–50), he addressed the House nearly 5,000 times and gained an intimate knowledge of its personalities and procedures not only as its leader (1828–30) but through regular interventions in his capacity as Home Secretary (1822–27, 1828–30), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1834– 35) and Prime Minister (1834–35, 1841–46).23 As one contemporary observer noted, the House of Commons was ‘the theatre of [Peel’s] public life’.24 At first sight, Peel’s omission from the cast of early nineteenth-century actor-dramatists may seem entirely justifiable. Few politicians were more widely regarded for their un-dramatic seriousness. A statesman to his fingertips, Peel in his private life lacked any of those exotic qualities which qualified Palmerston and Disraeli for celebrity status; Gladstone maintained that Peel was one of only four prime ministers he had known who had not committed adultery. Proud, stiff, haughty and humourless, Peel appeared to be the very model of mid-Victorian decorum, whose overwhelming sense of public duty was forged in the era of pre-Reform politics and whose essentially ‘execu-

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

tive-minded’ view of government made him uncomfortable with the gradual emergence of organised political parties in the aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act.25 Peel was, famously, the last Prime Minister never to have been photographed; his relative anonymity – in spite of a steadily increasing number of portraits, prints, engravings, cartoons, busts, medallions and household objects bearing approximations of his resemblance – allowed him to escape the would-be assassin Daniel MacNaghten, who proceeded to kill his private secretary Edward Drummond as a result of misidentifying the premier in 1843.26 Peel’s speeches appeared entirely suited to the official frame of mind which he inhabited for two thirds of his life. According to Donald Read, Peel was fairly described as a great speaker rather than a great orator. His best speeches were clear in their language, sequential in argument and cumulatively persuasive … Peel himself usually avoided personalities in his speeches, although he was capable of speaking ad hominen when he felt it to be deserved.27

A characteristic Peelite technique in debate was to explore the different alternative courses open to him, usually three in number, proceeding to examine the advantages and demerits of each so as to make the course which he had fixed upon appear ‘to be dictated to his audience by necessity rather than to have been chosen for them’.28 Though this was part of the classical style of oratory, which stressed an appeal to the audience’s reason based on persuasion, converting the listener through the factual exploration of the pros and cons of an argument, it left Peel open to the charge of having no fixed principles of his own. This criticism was lent substance by his role in the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 after twenty years of persistent hostility to the measure. Thereafter, Peel was regularly referred to, in caricatures and satirical publications, as a harlequin, a rat, a Jesuit and a mountebank, and suspicions regarding his dissembling nature and lack of fixed principles led him to be likened (in suitably dramatic metaphors) to the character Joseph Surface in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775) and to Molière’s hypocrite Tartuffe (1664).29 The occupational hazard of the actor-dramatist was to be seen as dissembling or performing a role. If Peel was accused of being an actor, on the one hand, because he did not appear to be representing his true or authentic self, then he was also charged, on the other, with adopting a role or format suited to his audience or stage. Peel himself did little to argue against the latter charge by his actions. During the repeal of the Corn Laws, in 1846, Peel was unsettled to discover that Prince Albert had kept a memorandum of their conversation on political subjects:

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[for] he had … spoken quite unreservedly, like an advocate defending a point in debate, and then he had taken another and tried to carry this as far as it would go, in order to give me an opportunity of judging of the different bearings of the question. He did so often in the Cabinet, when they discussed important questions, and was often asked: ‘Well, then, you are quite against this measure?’: ‘Not at all, but I want that the counter argument should be gone into to the fullest extent, in order that the Cabinet should not take a one-sided view.’30

One of the most serious charges levelled against Peel’s parliamentary speeches was that they were ‘plausible’ – a contemporary euphemism for untrustworthiness – but their contents were more usually noted for their ‘practicality’.31 According to John Prest, ‘Peel’s method of presenting a case came to maturity’ in presenting his criminal law reforms to the House of Commons on 9 March 1826: There was an apology … for a topic which could ‘borrow no excitement from political feelings’ and appear ‘barren and uninviting’. There was a reference to a hypothetical fresh start … there was a glance at more radical progress … His own proposals were then presented as a middle way.32

Desmond Brown has described Peel’s speech upon the occasion as ‘a virtuoso performance’, and, significantly, a day after the speech was delivered, John Wright approached Peel to produce a published edition for sale, on condition that the Home Office would take some copies.33 However, in a famous character sketch published in his biography Lord George Bentinck (1852), Benjamin Disraeli argued that, by comparison with the great parliamentary orators who had preceded Peel, the latter had ‘gradually introduced a new style into the House of Commons’ – that of the didactic lecturer, who lacked the ability to move the higher passions: His speeches will afford no sentiment of surpassing grandeur or beauty that will linger in the ears of coming generations. He embalmed no great political truth in immortal words. His flights were ponderous; he soared with the wing of the vulture rather than the plume of the eagle; and his perorations, when most elaborate, were most unwieldy. In pathos he was quite deficient; when he attempted to touch the tender passions, it was painful … Orators certainly should not shed tears, but there are moments when, as the Italians say, the voice should weep.34

Disraeli’s portrait was undoubtedly motivated from the political schism over the Corn Laws and his first-hand observation of Peel’s increasingly autocratic and high-handed treatment of his back-benchers. Nevertheless, while historians have been at pains to counter Disraeli’s more serious charges, one need

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

not construct Peel’s credentials as an actor-dramatist purely upon the basis of rhetorical flourish.35 Peel’s ability to move his audience was affected less by emotional immersion in his own speeches than, among other things, by the strength and melody of the voice that delivered them. Disraeli himself acknowledged that Peel possessed ‘an admirable organ; perhaps the finest that has been heard in the House in our days … [he] also modulated his voice with great skill. His enunciation was very clear, though somewhat marred by provincialisms’.36 Similar comments had been made by William Huskisson, who remarked (in 1819), that Peel ‘oped too often, and talked of the ouse, as Staffordshire men are apt to do’, while Thomas Carlyle later remarked on the ‘cooing’ and ‘persuasive’ qualities of Peel’s voice. Though he was the product of an expensive education at Harrow and Oxford, Peel never lost his accent, a combination of Lancashire roots and Staffordshire breeding. However, this was an age in which the notion of ‘Received Pronunciation’ as a mark of sophisticated breeding had yet to emerge.37 Conversely, Peel had been schooled in the techniques of public performance required for an arena like the Commons. When he was a young boy, his father had made him memorise (and recite back to him verbatim) the Sunday lesson delivered by the local vicar in Drayton, Staffordshire. A famous apocryphal story also relates that the young Peel was taken into the chamber by Pitt the Younger (a close friend of Peel’s father) for a debate in which Charles James Fox also participated. As a sixteen-year-old scholar at Harrow, Peel had declaimed the role of Turnus, the chief antagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid, opposite the young Byron. Nevertheless, in spite of Peel’s academic training in the arts of rhetoric and debate (which was an established part of the scholarly training of his class), his attempts to deploy humour in his speeches often failed to be understood when they were reported in print. According to G. H. Francis, Peel usually ‘choked’ jokes in the utterance ‘by chuckling over them before hand’.38 While a gulf of misunderstanding could separate a spoken performance inside the Commons from the printed report published in newspapers, part of Peel’s repertoire as a parliamentary performer was dependent upon non-verbal devices: for example, his habit of banging the dispatch box in front of him or the fact that he began important speeches with his left hand resting on his side.39 This enhanced the importance of the parliamentary sketch-writer as a mediator or ‘critic’ of political performance – the sketch-writers’ word-pictures describing the physical appearance, vocal habits and expressions adopted by parliamentarians in the act of addressing the House of Commons became a new and important sub-species of political journalism, and sketch-writers

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like James Grant (and, more famously, Charles Dickens) became important conduits between the worlds of journalism and politics. They were the equivalent of theatrical critics, penning reviews of political performances.40 Through them, newspaper readers recovered those parts of a speaker’s performance which would otherwise have been lost to the historical record. For example, one admiring sketch-writer noted Peel’s ‘bland smile, the exquisite irony of the arched and elevated eyebrows, the power of expressing scorn when to do so is part of the role, and yet the intellectuality, the refined shrewdness, and the commanding intelligence of the whole expression’.41 Peel addressed his speeches almost entirely to his audience in the House of Commons rather than to the country at large and perfected a style which, while it lacked some of the higher passions desired by Disraeli, was admirably suited to his immediate needs. For example, by contrast with the speeches of Peel’s predecessors, his speeches were relatively free of Latin quotations.42 An important consequence of Peel’s dry, unadorned style of address was that his points were intelligible to a wider public. Peel’s most distinguished biographer culled six pages of aphorisms and political sayings from his subject’s pronouncements (many of them deriving from Commons speeches), while Asa Briggs memorably observed that Peel’s maxims were ‘almost as succinct as those of Mao Tse-tung’.43 In 1828, Peel defined a ‘House of Commons argument’ as one which was addressed to ‘people who know very little of the matter, care not much about it, half of whom have dined or are going to dine, and are only forcibly struck by that which they instantly comprehend without trouble’.44 A particularly good example of Peel’s method arose during his speeches on the Bank Charter Act of 1844. Particularly evocative was the ‘What is a pound?’ section in his speech of 6 May, in which Peel attempted to establish the history and definition of the pound sterling as a contract between the bank and the note-bearer to pay in gold bullion of a standard weight and value.45 That this was an effective method by which to obtain the support of his followers was testified by Captain Henry Martin, in an account published in 1850: When [Peel] was perfecting an argument which he considered conclusive of the question, [he would] turn round to his supporters, with his back to the House, his hands under his coat as before, and address his ‘point’ to them, with a delightful chuckling expression, as much as to say ‘Is not that a good hit?’ … The average intelligence of the members being practical, they naturally inclined with a favourable feeling towards one who would condescend to meet them on their own peculiar ground.46

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

Peel’s dislike of the hunting, shooting and fishing fraternity among his followers and his intellectual condescension towards them is well known. That Peel perfected a style in which he talked down their level of comprehension while talking up his intellectual distinctions may be contrasted with his regular ability, through doing so, to gain their support and acclaim. In 1835, Grant noted Peel’s unrivalled mastery of the ‘serious mode of address’ and his ability to ‘appeal … to the fears of his audience’. Like Martin, Grant also drew attention to the thespian qualities in Peel by noting his love of applause and desire to cause a ‘hit’ with his auditors.47 That this was a style well suited to the chamber of the House of Commons, rather than an extra-parliamentary environment, was well appreciated by those more versed in platform oratory. In spite of a deceptively accessible style, the Chartist Robert Lowery considered that Peel ‘would not have commanded the attention of a working man’s meeting’.48 By the same token, those extraparliamentary radicals and opposition speakers (like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt and William Cobbett) who cut their teeth as orators on the mass platform during the 1820s found that these techniques did not translate in to the House of Commons after they were elected MPs following the 1832 Reform Act.49 However, Peel was innovative in using set-piece speeches to expound policy: his orations as Rector of Glasgow University (1837) and at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall (1838) were considered important moments in the forging of a new conservative party, but the number of such appearances declined after he became Prime Minister in 1841.50 For all his effectiveness as a parliamentary operator, Peel’s own followers were never unanimous in praise of his abilities. Lord Ellenborough felt Peel retained ‘great faults’ as a Commons speaker: ‘He is too slow in his delivery. He drops his voice frequently, & having once got possession of his audience he sometimes drops them. He has no élan – but he is a powerful reasoner & has great tact.’51 Lord Ashley paid Peel the double-edged compliment of describing him as a ‘master in the art of talking’, while the political diarist Harriet Arbuthnot, in an observation shared by many commentators, distinguished between Peel’s abilities as a speaker and his inefficiency as a debater: ‘[he] can make good speeches when he can prepare them beforehand, very classical and fine language, but he never can answer’.52 The most serious charge to be levelled against Peel and the one which materially touched the dramatic tendencies which could characterise his performance was the egotistical and self-referential tone which imbued many of his speeches. The habit had begun early in Peel’s parliamentary career and

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intensified thereafter. ‘He opens a great speech – as, for instance, in introducing the Income-tax, or his currency plans [George Henry Francis noted] – with a pompous pretension, an exaggerated solemnity, a half inaudible tone of breathless importance, that is itself almost burlesque.’53 In introducing his criminal law reforms in March 1826, Peel referred to the ‘legitimate ambition, to leave behind me some record of the trust I have held, which may outlive the fleeting discharge of the mere duties of ordinary routine and … confer some distinction on my name’. He followed this up with a defiant defence of his record as Home Secretary, after resigning from office a year later.54 By the 1840s, the preponderance of the first-person pronoun in Peel’s speeches formed a humorous point of reference for the writers of serious journalism and satirical weeklies alike, while the author of a mock-Peel speech observed: Reader! Sir Robert’s now upon his legs, And your polite attention therefore begs; All he requests is of your ears the loan, Of I’s he has a plenty of his own.55

In the same refrain, Punch began portraying Peel as the political equivalent of Seth Pecksniff, the hypocrite in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), who was never slow to ‘puff’ his own achievements. In one fictitious episode, Peel convinced himself that he was performing the role at the Strand Theatre to such an extent that ‘on the succeeding Saturday he absolutely presented himself at the treasury of the theatre to take his week’s salary’.56 Peel’s parliamentary performances provided a mixture of studied seriousness designed to persuade and overwhelm his audience with the superiority of his reasoned intelligence with a dramatic ego-politics which was the more remarkable for the occasions upon which it was deployed. The latter reached its apogee with the resignation speech which Peel delivered on Monday 29 June 1846, following the successful repeal of the Corn Laws. The speech came at the end of a parliamentary session in which Peel had lost control over his followers and broken the Conservative Party in two through his actions. In the face of bitter and virulent personal attacks from a range of hitherto mildmannered or unresponsive country gentlemen, titled lords and agricultural squires, led by Lord George Bentinck and Disraeli, Peel’s once seemingly impregnable methods of obtaining parliamentary consent deserted him. Disraeli later observed that Peel had encountered ‘an opposition which he had not anticipated and partly carried on in a vein in which he did not excel’.57 Gladstone noted that Peel was ‘altogether helpless in reply’ and could only respond with ‘a kind of “righteous dullness”’.58

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

However, while Disraeli later published a highly coloured account of the final parliamentary vote on repeal, stressing the dramatic qualities of the occasion, it was Peel’s resignation speech which provided a suitably theatrical crescendo to events.59 Like Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech to the House of Commons in November 1990 and John Major’s departure from Downing Street in May 1997, Peel’s performance was the more memorable because it seemed so unexpected and so self-revealing. Like them, Peel’s words appear to have been deliberately chosen.60 Samuel Wilberforce left a memorable impression of the scene as it unfolded: Peel came, in, walked up the House: colder, dryer, more introverted than ever, yet to a close gaze showing the fullest working of a smothered volcano of emotions … By-and-by he rose, amidst a breathless silence, and made the speech you will have read long ere this. It was very fine: very effective: really almost solemn: to fall at such a moment. He spoke as if it was his last political scene: as if he felt that between alienated friends and unwon foes he could have no party again; and could only as a shrewd bystander observe and advise others.61

Peel’s peroration, with its denunciation of his protectionist enemies and wish to be remembered in the homes of those ‘whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow’, revealed him at his most melodramatic – a style then much in evidence in theatre and literature.62 Further political drama was afforded when the ‘Bobbies’ stationed outside Parliament acknowledged Peel as he left – a silent tribute from the metropolitan police force to their founder. Peel’s speech was dismissed by critics for its insufferable egotism, with Lord Ashley complaining of Peel’s ‘immersion into himself ’ and The Quarterly Review offering a sardonic tribute to its likely impact.63 However, over the long term, and much as Peel had probably intended, the speech provided the key-note for all subsequent interpretations of his career. It also came to adorn the many monuments and statues which sprang up in Britain in response to Peel’s unexpected death, following a riding accident in July 1850. Peel’s death scene, with the three days of uncertainty which preceded it, itself became a dramatic tableau in future remembrance of the statesman.64 Punch responded to Peel’s resignation speech with an artful testament to ‘Manager Peel taking his farewell benefit’ (see Figure 9) – so named after the fashion for the managers of a theatre to take the proceeds from a benefit performance – in which he was shown taking his curtain-call on a theatrical stage. Yet as Richard Altick has perceptively observed, at the moment of Peel’s ultimate triumph, Punch afforded him an equivocal tribute.

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‘Manager Peel Taking his Farewell Benefit’, Punch, 11 July 1846, p. 25.

The stage upon which Peel stood was littered with rotten vegetation as well as rose-laden bouquets, and while Disraeli was being bundled away unceremoniously from the crowd of seemingly rapt spectators by a couple of policemen, most Punch readers would have drawn the intended analogy between Peel as manager of a political stage company and the self-publicising manager of Drury Lane Theatre, Alfred Bunn. Bunn’s ‘magniloquent speeches’ and curtain

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

calls, heavy with florid hyperbole and ‘excessive conceit’, had already marked him out for ridicule in Punch. He remained a continuing point of reference for the magazine’s treatment of political events.65 A direct analogy between Peel and Bunn had already been made a year earlier, when Bunn’s characteristic puffing of his theatrical productions in a ‘Blaze of Triumph’ were made directly analogous with Peel’s puffing end-of-session reviews of his ministry’s achievements. As a reviewer for The Times noted (11 August 1845), Peel’s annual self-reverential ministerial audits reminded one of some of those neat, though rather hackneyed, conclusions of other dramas, in which just before the curtain falls the hero or chief actor distributes poetic justice and praises to all the virtuous characters remaining on the stage, and expresses his hopes that the audience will ratify his panegyric.66

Like many leading politicians of the day, Peel was subjected to a range of satirical contexts within Punch. As Leslie Williams has argued: they all appeared in absurd settings as school boys, as pantomime figures, and as ballerinas in tutus. Suggesting inappropriate appearance, behaviour or displacement is a standard comic device [and] part of the essentially healthyminded satiric scepticism with which Punch regarded men who were inclined to take themselves very seriously.67

Peel was cast in a variety of such roles during his political career, assuming some three dozen separate identities in caricatures between 1830 and 1832 and a further thirty in H.B.’s Political Sketches (by John Doyle) between 1841 and 1844. In Punch, Peel appeared in various guises which owed their origins to theatre, literature and popular entertainment, thereby reinforcing the analogy between the two spheres of action. At various times, Peel was portrayed as a latter-day Captain MacHeath (the chivalrous highwayman from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera), an alternative Andrew Ducrow (the famous horseman and proprietor of Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre) and a shady Robert Macaire (the versatile con artist who had become a stock-in-trade anti-hero of English literature through the success of G. W. M. Reynolds’s novel Robert Macaire in England of 1840). Peel, who was always introduced as ‘Sir Robert Peel Bart’ [i.e. baronet], was also likened to Dickens’s character ‘Sir Joseph Bowley Bart’, a pompous character from the Christmas book The Chimes. Bowley was habitually described in playbills as ‘the friend and father of the poor – perhaps’. More often than not, however, Peel was cast as a latter day quack-doctor, ‘Dr Rhubarb Pill’, whose origins derived from a mid-eighteenth-century satirical novel.68 The centrality of theatrical tropes in the mockery of political figures no longer appeared a conceptual leap of the imagination by the end of Peel’s

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lifetime, considering politicians’ increasing flair for the dramatic.69 In 1848, the diarist Charles Greville complained that Disraeli had summoned an audience to St Stephen’s to witness his ‘theatrical display’, and that he had sent word to John Thaddeus Delane (the editor of The Times) ‘in order that he might have one of his best reporters there’ to witness the performance.70 Greville’s disdain was misplaced, for Disraeli was merely acknowledging the necessities incumbent upon any aspiring politician in the age of the newspaper. Peel’s supremacy in the House of Commons, between 1830 and 1850, had been a reflection of the emerging political situation in which high politics, popular culture and the newspaper press had converged to create a dramatic political theatre which was increasingly widely regaled to the nation. This development did not go unheeded by Peel’s ultimate political legatee, William Gladstone. Historians are increasingly aware of Gladstone’s success as a parliamentary orator and of his shrewd appropriation of the mass media of his day. Through it, Gladstone reached out to an audience beyond Parliament to create a constituency of support which would be the bedrock of his mature political career.71 Gladstone performed multifarious roles as a speaker, whether in Parliament or on the hustings; his love of the theatre and awareness of the dramatic skills required of the political performer were clearly part of his repertoire as a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary performer.72 Gladstone used the lessons of theatrical performance to good effect and was sure to get a good airing for his speeches from the assembled members of the press. For example, according to one contemporary: [Gladstone’s] dark eyebrows were singularly flexible, and they perpetually expanded and contracted in harmony with what he was saying … His voice was a baritone, singularly clear and far-reaching. In the Waverley Market at Edinburgh, which is said to hold 20,000 people, he could be heard without difficulty; and as late as 1895 [confided to the writer]: ‘What difference does it make to me whether I speak to 400 or 4,000 people?’73

Like Peel before him, Gladstone managed to extract dramatic potential out of seemingly unpromising political materials. As Colin Matthew argued, Gladstone’s first budget speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1853 set the tone for many of his subsequent performances: the presentation of the annual account of the nation’s financial health was like one of Charles Dickens’s readings of his novels, a dramatic rendering of an intriguing plot. Gladstone made the annual financial budget report … a central occasion of the British parliamentary year: his battered dispatch box was symbolically used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on budget day for most of the twentieth century.74

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist

At the same time, Gladstone did not always distinguish between the different registers required by his performance: a fact reflected in Queen ­Victoria’s immortal phrase ‘he speaks to me as though I were a public meeting’. Much as Peel had done in 1846, Gladstone also faced a challenge to his mastery of the Commons from the talking-strategies of his opponents. Unlike Peel, however, Gladstone found a mechanism for controlling them – in particular, through the introduction (in 1882) of the ‘guillotine’ to counter the ‘filibustering’ employed by large numbers of Irish MPs under the leadership of Joseph Biggar.75 More intriguing, perhaps, is the fact that Disraeli also learned from Peel. In the character sketch quoted earlier, Disraeli remarked that ‘posterity’ would acknowledge Peel to have been ‘the greatest Member of Parliament that ever lived’, less for the qualities of his oratory than for the fact that he could ‘play’ on the House of Commons ‘as on an old fiddle’.76 By the 1860s, Disraeli was astounding visitors to the Commons chamber less for the oratorical flourish and Byronic looks which had characterised his early years as an MP than for a sober-minded manner of dress, speech and deportment which ran counter to the received public image. As Disraeli himself commented, ‘the English being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful middle class require grave statesmen’. In this, at least, Disraeli appears to have emulated his old foe.77 Notes 1 John Major, The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 726–7. For the hitherto untapped vein of dramaturgy in Major’s family, see John Major, My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall (London: HarperPress, 2012). 2 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, introduction by Richard Crossman (London: Collins, 1963; 1867); for the connection between Bagehot’s conception of the ‘dignified’ and the theatre of display, see Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 31–40. 3 Michael Cockerell, Live from Number Ten: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television (London: Faber, 1989); Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Mind Your PMQs’, BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 22 October 2011. 4 Arthur Aspinall, ‘The Reporting and Publishing of the House of Commons’ Debates, 1771–1834’, in Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 235; Charles James Fynes Clinton, Literary Remains of Henry Fynes Clinton (London: Longman and Co., 1854), pp. 123–4. 5 Hilton, Mad, Bad, p. 3. 6 David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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The performance of politics 7 William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 29 (London: Longman and Co., 1791–92), columns 361–3 and 375–98 (Debate on the Quebec Government Bill, April–May 1791); Clare Wilkinson, ‘Politics and Topography in the Old House of Commons, 1783–1834’, in Clyve Jones and Sean Kelsey (eds), Housing Parliament: Dublin, Edinburgh and Westminster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 156–8. 8 Hilton, Mad, Bad, p. 33. 9 Katherine Newey, ‘Reform on the London Stage’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 238. 10 Norman Gash, ‘1812–1830’, in Anthony Seldon (ed.), How Tory Governments Fall: The Tory Party in Power since 1783 (London: Fontana, 1996), pp. 60–1, 78–9. 11 Hilton, Mad, Bad, pp. 31–8; Angus Hawkins, ‘“Parliamentary Government” and Victorian Political Parties, c.1830–1880’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), pp. 638–69; Angus Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (forthcoming). 12 David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 13 Richard A Gaunt (ed.), Unrepentant Tory: Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, 1827–1838 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), p. 264. 14 For the Commons chamber as amphitheatre, see Wilkinson, ‘Politics and Topography’, pp. 141–65; Caroline Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15 W. F. Monypenny, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1913), pp. 8–12; Gaunt (ed.), Unrepentant Tory, p. 207. 16 Christopher Jones, The Great Palace: The Story of Parliament (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1987). 17 Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 32; Aspinall, ‘Reporting’, pp. 227–57. 18 E Stockdale, ‘The Unnecessary Crisis: The Background to the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840’, Public Law, 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 30–49. For Peel’s defence of parliamentary privilege during this crisis, see Matthew Cragoe, ‘Sir Robert Peel and the “Moral Authority” of the House of Commons, 1832–41’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 55–77. 19 Hilton, Mad, Bad, p. 35. 20 Read, Peel, p. 22. 21 Figaro in London, 30 September 1837, p. 154; The Times, 4 February 1859. Direct analogies between MPs and actors were made in H.B.’s Political Sketches, 175, 226, 239: A Key to the Political Sketches of HB, Numbers 1–300 (London: T M’Lean, 1832); Numbers 301–400 (London: T M’Lean, 1835); Numbers 401–500 (London: T. M’Lean, 1838). 22 Hilton, Mad, Bad, pp. 35, 372. 23 Read, Peel, p. 28. About 20 per cent of these speeches were published in Speeches Delivered in the House of Commons by the Late Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Peel, 4 vols

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist (London: G. Routledge and Co., 1853; reprinted New York Kraus Reprint Co, 1972). One estimate (using Parliamentary Debates) suggests that Peel was one of 870 named speakers in the Commons in 1828–30 and made 500 of the 38,000 speeches delivered in this period: D. R. Fisher, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 1, p.  315. 24 Dr Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1854; reprinted London: Cornmarket, 1970), p. 397. 25 Richard A. Gaunt, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010) provides a recent re-evaluation. 26 Richard Moran, Knowing Right from Wrong (New York: Free Press, 1981) covers the resulting murder trial; also see Sian Busby, McNaughten: A Novel (London: Short, 2009). 27 Read, Peel, p. 23. 28 Read, Peel, p. 23 (quoting Peel’s grandson George); cf. Punch, 15 (1848), p. 10 for an ‘anticipated speech’ from Peel in the same vein. 29 For one example among many, see The Satirist, 27 December 1840, on a ‘Grand State Pantomime’. 30 Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher (eds), The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837–1861, 3 vols, vol. 2 (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002; 1911), pp. 76–7. 31 Read, Peel, p. 24. 32 John Prest, ‘Peel, Sir Robert, second baronet (1788–1850)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn (May 2009), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21764 (accessed 22 June 2015). 33 Desmond H. Brown, ‘Abortive Attempts to Codify English Criminal Law’, Parliamentary History, 11 (1992), pp. 14–18; Aspinall, ‘Reporting’, pp. 247–8. 34 Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998; 1852), pp. 205–6. 35 Read, Peel, pp. 25–30; Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 79–83. 36 Disraeli, Bentinck, p. 206. 37 Read, Peel, pp. 26–7. Margaret Escott states that Peel ‘generally masked’ his ‘Midlands accent’: Fisher, Commons, vol. 1, p. 316. Her authority is James Grant (see n. 40 below). It might be noted here that Peel’s ‘provincialism’ – a form of cultural and class snobbery – was usually remarked by Peel’s putative political followers rather than among his opponents. 38 Lawrence Peel, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert Peel (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1860), pp. 43–6, 51; George Henry Francis, Sir Robert Peel as Statesman and Orator (London: John Olliver, 1846), pp. 12–13. Also see Angus Hawkins and John Powell (eds), The Journal of John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley for 1862–1902, Camden, 5th series (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 1997), p. 46. 39 Read, Peel, p. 27. 40 James Grant, Random Recollections of the House of Commons, from the Year 1830 to

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The performance of politics the Close of 1835, including Personal Sketches of the Leading Members of all Parties (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1836); James Grant, The British Senate; or, A Second Series of Random Recollections of the Lords and Commons, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1838); James Grant, Portraits of Public Character, by the Author of Random Recollections of the Lords and Commons (London: Saunders and Otley, 1841). Charles Dickens worked as a parliamentary reporter on The Mirror of ­Parliament (between 1830 and 1832), which his uncle John Henry Barrow had founded in 1828; he proceeded to the more radical True Sun and, after August 1834, John Black’s Whig Morning Chronicle. See John Drew, Dickens the Journalist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 41 Read, Peel, p. 27. 42 Meisel, Public Speech, pp. 79–83. 43 Norman Gash, Sir Robert Peel (Harlow: Longman, 1972), pp. 717–22; Asa Briggs, ‘Sir Robert Peel’, in Herbert van Thal (ed.), The Prime Ministers. vol 1: Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), p. 373. For a contemporary collection of these ‘maxims’, which hints at their wider popularity, see W. T. Haly, The Opinions of Sir Robert Peel, Expressed in Parliament and in Public (London: Whittaker, 1843). 44 Lord Mahon and Edward Cardwell (eds), Memoirs of Sir Robert Peel, 2 vols (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969; 1856–57), vol. 1, pp. 66–7. 45 Peel, Speeches, vol. 4, p. 351. 46 Captain Henry Martin, A Personal Sketch of the Late Lamented Sir Robert Peel, as a Parliamentary Speaker and Party Leader in the British House of Commons &c (Hamburg: n. pub., 1850), pp. 17–18. 47 Briggs, ‘Peel’, pp. 382–3. 48 Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis (eds), Robert Lowery. Radical and Chartist (London: Europa, 1979), p. 140; for the effectiveness of Chartist orators, see R. G. Gammage, History of Chartism (London: Holyoake and Co., 1854), pp. 11, 45, 282. 49 Daniel Green, Great Cobbett. The Noblest Agitator (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983); John Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 50 Meisel, Public Speech, pp. 231–2. 51 The National Archives, Ellenborough Diaries, PRO 30/12/28/5, p. 252, entry for 3 April 1835. 52 Southampton University Library, Broadlands Papers, Shaftesbury Diaries, SHA/ PD/1, fol. 83, entry for 6 May 1834; Francis Bamford and the Seventh Duke of Wellington (eds), The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820–1832, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1950), vol. 1, p. 90 (cf. pp. 82, 92). Also see Arthur Aspinall (ed.), The Diary of Henry Hobhouse, 1820–1827 (London: Home & Van Thal, 1947), p. 100. 53 Francis, Peel as Statesman and Orator, pp. 12–13. 54 Peel, Speeches, vol. 1, pp. 410, 509. 55 Peel, Partridges and Potatoes; or Leash, Leases and Lashes. Dedicated by Permission to the Tamworth Farmer’s Club (1843), p. 5, a burlesque report of Sir R. Peel’s speech at Tamworth, 24 October 1843, originally from the Sussex Advertiser. See also The Economist, 16 March 1844, p. 596; Punch, 5 (1843), pp. 196, 230.

Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist 56 Punch, 7 (1844), p. 94; also see pp. 25, 100. 57 Disraeli, Bentinck, p. 206. 58 Quoted in Read, Peel, p. 22. 59 See J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches (London: John Murray, 1999), pp. 213–16. 60 Read, Peel, pp. 236–41. 61 Letter reproduced in Benson and Esher (eds), Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, pp. 82–3. 62 For an excellent summary of melodrama’s purpose of ‘making the moral accessible and legible to all’, see Patrick Joyce, ‘The Constitution and the Narrative Structure of Victorian Politics’, in James Vernon (ed.), Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 182–3. 63 Peel, Speeches, vol. 4, pp. 716–17; Shaftesbury Diaries, SHA/PD/4, fols 108–9, entry for 3 July 1846 (cf. 6 July 1846); Quarterly Review, 81:162 (August 1847), p. 566 (and see p. 577); cf. Quarterly Review, 81:161 (June 1847), pp. 313–14, and 78:156 (August 1846), pp. 553–77. For one example of the speech’s posthumous purchase, see Joseph Arnould, Memorial Lines on Sir Robert Peel (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850), p. 7. 6 4 Gaunt, Peel, chapter 8. 65 Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), pp. 280–2, 698–709; cf. Punch, 11 July 1846, p. 25. 66 It was the tradition for actor-managers to come on during the second scene to ensure that they got some applause. 67 Leslie Williams, Daniel O’Connell: The British Press and the Irish Famine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 65. 68 Punch, 1 (1841), p. 198; 4 (1843), p. 207; 8 (1845), p. 153; 10 (1846), p. 104; Rohan McWilliam, ‘The French Connection: G. W. M. Reynolds and the Outlaw Robert Macaire’, in Anne Humpherys and Louis James (eds), G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 33–49; Altick, Punch, pp. 248–55, 270–82. 69 They had been a mainstay of H.B.’s Political Sketches from their commencement in 1827 (see n. 21 above). 70 Quoted in Altick, Punch, p. 281. 71 Meisel, Public Speech; Joyce, ‘The Constitution and the Narrative Structure’, pp. 187–203; Chris Wrigley, ‘The Making of the People’s William’, Journal of Liberal History, 75 (2012), pp. 14–19. 72 Anselm Heinrich, ‘William Gladstone and the Theatre’, Theatre Survey, 52:1 (2011), pp. 83–103; Glynne Wickham, ‘Gladstone, Oratory and the Theatre’, in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London: Hambledon, 1998), pp. 1–32 and frontispiece. By contrast, Peel’s cultural hinterland was fine art: Richard A. Gaunt, ‘Robert Peel: Portraiture and Political Commemoration’, The Historian, 113 (2012), pp. 22–6. 73 Entry on Gladstone in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge, 1910), quoted by Craig Brown, ‘Rule Britannica … the Original Wacky-Pedia’, Daily Mail, 15 March 2012.

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The performance of politics 74 H. C. G. Matthew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’, in Matthew and Harrison (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 75 For which, see Edward Hughes, ‘The Changes in Parliamentary Procedure, 1880–1882’, in Pares and Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, pp. 289–319. 76 Disraeli, Bentinck, pp. 197–208. 77 Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Prion, 1966), p. 766; Michael Partridge and Richard A. Gaunt (eds), Lives of Victorian Political Figures (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), vol. 2, p. xiii.

12 The performance of protest: the 1889 dock strike on and off the stage Janice Norwood

T

he late 1880s are characterised as the era of ‘New Unionism’ as workers from various trades and industries banded together to demand higher wages and better working conditions against a background of growing socialist feeling. In Parliament a Select Committee of the House of Lords published five reports (1887–90) on the sweating system, a practice that was widely believed to exploit workers and lead to poverty. The East End of London was home to the most notorious of the sweated trades, including the furniture-making, clothing and footwear industries. The area became a crucible for the fires of activism, with significant disputes occurring in 1888 at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, in March 1889 at the Beckton gasworks (where the triumphant workers were the first to achieve an eight-hour working day) and, later in the same year, at the docks. Following on from studies that have identified significant links between East End theatres and the communities they served,1 this moment in labour history can therefore be examined as a case study to test how the local stages reflected such turbulent events. My initial assumption was that institutions such as the Britannia, Pavilion and Standard theatres, situated respectively in Hoxton, Whitechapel and Shoreditch, would respond by producing plays that dramatise the conflict of capital and labour and by showing solidarity, perhaps by hosting benefit nights. My research has unearthed a more complicated picture. If the industrial unrest had been confined to the matchwomen and the dockers there would be less justification for tracing any link to the theatre. In fact, these were just the most chronicled of a host of disputes, including a major one by Jewish tailors in 1889.2 A report in the East London Observer two and a half weeks into the dock strike refers to an ‘epidemic of strikes’, claiming:

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Indeed, the present week might not inaptly be called a week of strikes – coal men, printers’ labourers, match girls, parcels post men, Carmen, rag, bone, and paper porters, and pickers, and the employés [sic] in jam, biscuit, rope, iron, screw, clothing, and railway works, have all of them found some grievance, real and imaginary, and have followed the infectious example of coming out on strike. At times, the strike fever has approached the bounds of the ludicrous – as, for instance, when on Sunday the Wandsworth and Battersea washerwomen came out on strike. (East London Observer, 31 August 1889, p. 5)

In a triangular area marked roughly by Kings Cross, the City of London and Blackwall (approximately five miles apart), John Charlton identifies fifty industrial strikes occurring concurrently with the dock strike, which made this an unprecedented level of unrest in the capital.3 Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow’s demographic investigations identify the mixed local clientele of the Britannia and Pavilion between 1840 and 1880.4 Searches of roads near the theatres in the 1891 census indicate a similarly diverse social population in this later period. Thus a significant proportion of East End theatre audiences are likely to have had an interest in at least one of the disputes, either as participants or because neighbours, customers or family members were involved. This chapter focuses on the 1889 dock strike and its aftermath, looking for traces of the dispute in melodramas, pantomimes and dramatic sketches. The strike broke out as a response to the low pay and brutal employment practices in operation at the docks, particularly for those who competed daily for work from the gangers. The strike began on 12 August and lasted nearly five weeks. One reason why it was so significant was that the dock industry was the largest single employer of male casual labour in the East End.5 Charlton estimates that 150,000 families were dependent on work at the Port of London in the 1880s.6 One of the leading figures in the dispute was John Burns. He was famous for being gaoled for his part in the 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’ riot; by the time of the strike he had been elected to the London County Council, and he would later become Independent Labour MP for Battersea. A key speaker at strike meetings, he was easily identifiable because of his straw hat.7 He was also to feature in dramatisations of the strike. The strike in the theatrical repertoire In 1889 the major theatres in the East End were the Britannia, Standard and Pavilion (see Figure 10). The repertoire at these establishments was at this point heavily reliant on productions that had already proved successful in the West

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End, and these were often staged by visiting companies (though this is not true of the Britannia). They were usually booked up some time in advance, which reduced the theatres’ capacity to respond to developing events.8 In marked contrast to the practice earlier in the century, the theatres had virtually stopped commissioning bespoke work. The Era Almanack lists ‘New Pieces produced at the London Theatres’ during the twelve months from December 1888 and reveals only two at the Britannia, four at the Pavilion and one at the Standard.9 It is not surprising therefore that there was no full-length drama specifically about the dock strike. Significantly it, like the matchwomen’s strike the previous year, occurred in the summer when the Britannia’s influential actor-owner Sara Lane was on her annual break. This further decreased the likelihood of the performance of a specially commissioned topical play. Indeed the only piece at the Britannia that featured industrial unrest appeared on 11 September in the benefit for David Jacobs, the theatre’s bill inspector. This was The Long Strike, Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, which had been premiered at the Lyceum in 1866. Since benefit nights were arranged relatively close to the date of the performance and designed to raise the maximum profit, Jacobs must have calculated it would be a timely and popular revival. If the East End stage was not flooded with dramatisations of the conflict of capital and labour, what of the West End? According to a retrospective 2 1

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Map showing East End theatres and music halls producing strike-related material. The dock areas are shaded.

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article in The Times, Henry Arthur Jones’s play The Middleman was ‘the most remarkable success, native or foreign, of the year’ (The Times, 2 January 1890, p. 10). Opening at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 August 1889, it portrayed the middleman as ‘a parasite upon talent or industry’ and thus has an obvious relevance to the debates about the sweating system (The Times, 2 January 1890, p. 10). Chandler, the owner of a porcelain works, exploits the talents of the potter Blenkarn, who, after the seduction of his daughter by Chandler’s son, sets up on his own. Despite near starvation he ultimately discovers a new process that makes his fortune and enables him to switch places with his former employer. Although there is some mild criticism of the conditions under which the girls in the tiling room work (recalling perhaps complaints made against Bryant and May during the matchwomen’s dispute),10 there is neither the political combination of workers nor strike action. Instead Blenkarn’s individual situation is resolved by his hard graft and luck. The plot’s dramatic reversal of fortunes is typical of a number of Victorian melodramas that Jane Moody identifies as showing the risks posed by capitalism and financial speculation.11 A more thoroughgoing critique of worker exploitation appears in William Bourne’s Work and Wages. Bourne (1850–1925) was an actor and theatre producer who managed companies touring his own plays.12 His drama, subtitled The Great Strike, was premiered at the Theatre Royal, Hanley, on 27 January 1890, and then travelled the country in a gruelling tour including a week at the Pavilion in June. In May of the following year it was produced at the Grand Opera House in New York (Sun (New York), 5 May 1891, p. 2). Back in 1850 the Examiner of Plays had insisted on many changes to the script of an early stage adaptation of Mary Barton at the Victoria Theatre.13 This censorship was intended to negate the potentially incendiary impact of the workers’ call for action. In comparison, the striking workmen in Bourne’s play are permitted to make strong, emotive appeals for their cause. Although their leader, Sam Crumples, is later depicted negatively as a dangerous agitator, in his initial appearance he creates a good impression and makes persuasive speeches, arguing for example that ‘The Four Eights should be every working man’s ambition. Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Play, Eight Hours Sleep & Eight Bob a Day.’14 The language echoes that of the contemporary disputes. In Act II the hero, Tom Wentworth (played by Bourne), who works as a labourer in the foundry after falling on hard times, is invited to a luxurious reception in order that the villain and his gentlemen cronies can make fun of ‘Labour coming to meet Capital!’ (Act II, fol. 70). Wentworth’s extensive and impassioned speeches champion the cause of the oppressed worker and argue

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for fair treatment that would eradicate the need for strikes. He even quotes statistics about the pay and working hours of people in the match industry. He concludes: The scale of wage must be fixed by Rounds of Arbitration and conciliation. Questions of International import are now referred to arbitration and great wars avoided – then why not these two armed camps, Labour & Capital throw down their arms & seek the same solution for believe me more danger is threatening our Empire through this internecine strife than we shall ever fear from foes outside. There is no evading the question. You may put it aside from time to time but it will be still before you & I am as certain as that the sun will rise tomorrow that you must deal with it & speedily ! & the working classes will demand that it be no longer possible for Capital to grind the hearts blood out of Labour, that Sweating shall be punishable at Law, that where Justice demands it shorter hours & higher wages shall be made compulsory, that our Industrial Classes may be better housed, & better fed, that their children shall not grow up to be a burden on our Rates & I pray God that He may hasten the day when the eyes of the world will be opened to the just demands of Labour when we shall hear no more of these Strikes which bring nothing but Sorrow in their train & shed ruin & desolation on the homes of the men who have made our Country the Great nation it is & the envy of the civilized world. (Act II, fols 83–4)

The speech is clearly intended to be rousing but with a message against which few would argue. It could not be interpreted as advocating striking as a desirable course of action. The final curtain falls after Wentworth has again eulogised labour: And now that the storms of life are for the moment swept aside & the breeze of prosperity bids fair to waft us safely into the Haven of Happiness let us not forget the compact we have made to offer an example to the World of a True Union of Capital & Labour, one working for the other each to his own and until the day shall come when He to whom we look for all our mercies in this world shall according to our work so mete out our Wages. (Act V, fols 165–6)

As the reviewer for a provincial newspaper approvingly comments: ‘Mr Bourne’s effort is at once amusing and instructive, and its tone and influence, in so far as it teaches moderation and the doctrine of live and let live, admirable’ (Derby Daily Telegraph, 12 February 1890, p. 3). This fits with the conservative nature of theatrical entertainment in the period, with drama conforming to hegemonic ideas. A poster advertising a performance of the play at the Avenue Theatre, Sunderland, on 11 August 1890 suggests much of the appeal of the drama was the sensation of a murder carried out by the bigamous villain and witnessed

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through the floorboards of the room above in the split set.15 Nevertheless, the melodrama is a more extensive criticism of capitalism than is customary in such plays. Bourne successfully capitalised on the topicality of industrial disputes to create a conventional melodrama that would have broad appeal across the country. Arguably it is a truer legacy of the dock strike than The Middleman, though Bourne’s play was not published and has been forgotten. Although the dock strike was not used as a setting for a melodrama it did, however, have a limited presence in pantomimes. As a number of theatre historians (including Jill Sullivan) have noted, Christmas pantomimes were stuffed with topical allusions.16 Yet the scripts of the entertainments for Boxing Day 1889 reveal surprisingly few references to the great labour dispute of the year. Strikes do appear, but these references mostly relate to the wave of school strikes that occurred in the last quarter of 1889.17 Among examples in the pantomimes are one at the Crystal Palace, where the Era describes Aladdin as ‘the Burns among the schoolboys’ (28 December 1889, p. 6) and one in Cinderella at Her Majesty’s (The Times, 27 December 1889, p. 4). References to industrial strikes occur in the versions of Aladdin put on at the Marylebone18 and the Grand in Islington.19 In Dick Whittington and his Cat at the Surrey two lazy apprentices decide to strike but this comes to nothing when one sees the implications of the pun and fears that his master will ‘strike’ him with ‘stout ash sticks’.20 In a later scene set in the London docks Jack scoffs when a boy carrying his luggage falls: A great strong boy like you I should be ashamed And youre [sic] one of those Dock Labourers who the tanner claimed[.]21

Here the fact that the play is putatively set centuries before the dock strike does not seem to matter. Turning to the East End, in the Pavilion’s Whittington and his Cat the sole allusion comes when Dick vows that as Lord Mayor he will smile on both rich and poor, and ‘When Dockers they strike set ’em right.’22 This is a simple sop to the workers, not an endorsement of the legitimacy of the strike. At the Britannia John Addison’s The Bold Bad Baron and the Fairy Fountain of Enchanted Water opens with a twenty-six-line monologue from Father Time that assesses the past year, referring to events such as the replacement of the Metropolitan Board of Works with the London County Council, the visit of the Shah of Persia, a royal marriage and international relations.23 It seems almost perverse that the strike is not mentioned. Yet there are four references elsewhere in the pantomime opening. Eileen O’Deary, the Irish matron played

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by Sara Lane, encourages Eldred, the hero, to use his talents now that he is heir to the throne: Deal with strikes in every trade, And see the British workman is well paid. Regulate all commerce dues, and duty –                    (Scene 2)

This implies that striking is a legitimate action for oppressed workers. A more ambiguous statement is made by the heroine’s father, Miller Finegrain, who believes that striking is futile as Capital will always win: Aside – I’m ill at ease whene’er I see them mike, I fancy that they all intend to strike. And tho’ by strikes men hope to get their way, It strikes me capital will hold it’s [sic] sway. Those who possess it have the key I’m sure, To open golden gates to many poor                    (Scene 3)

The third allusion is specific to the dock strike, referring to the intervention in the dispute of the Lord Mayor of London. Eileen tries to dissuade the villain, Baron Deepenough, from forcibly marrying the heroine and suggests: I’ll get our own Lord Mayor to arbitrate. He helped the dockers in their hour of need.                    (Scene 4)

Finally when Eldred finds the Miller and his wife are not at home he declares: ‘Gone out on strike, the two of them I fear’ (Scene 6). Although the author does not advocate striking, he consistently aligns the ‘goodies’ with those on the strikers’ side, which is what we might expect given the Britannia’s likely audience. A general conclusion is that pantomime allusions to the disputes are insubstantial and there are no significant differences between East End and West End offerings. Music hall sketches Unsurprisingly, especially given the proximity of many venues to the docks, music and variety halls also responded to the strikes. In September 1889 the music hall star Jenny Hill, whose sobriquet was ‘The Vital Spark’, was entertaining packed houses at the Paragon on the Mile End Road with a sketch called ‘The Little Stowaway’. She played the eponymous male character, who ultimately ‘lay[s] down his life to save captain and crew’ (Era, 7 September

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1889, p. 15). This revival of a sketch based on Clement Scott’s poem ‘The Stowaway’ now included a new song about the strike written by Fred Bowyer (author of four of the Britannia Theatre’s pantomimes). The verse is sympathetic towards the dockers: With faces gaunt with hunger, a mighty crowd there waits, Thousands of honest toilers, outside the dockyard gates. The cry goes up for justice, fair work, and honest pay. They shall not sell their manhood for a few odd pence a day. To give the men their ‘tanner’ I’d quickly be the planner And make make [sic] the dock directors their luxuries forego. I’d teach the monied classes To help the toiling masses, And make life’s battle easier, if I only bossed the show.                  (Star, 11 September 1889, p. 2)

Hill sang this nightly at the Paragon and the Canterbury, while also appearing in variety at the London Pavilion (Era, 14 September 1889, p. 24). In October the piece was withdrawn from the Paragon on the grounds that it was a stage play rather than a musical sketch. The minutes of the Licensing Committee record this decision being overturned and describe the sketch as ‘one of the most admirable pieces that have been presented on any stage for a long time. It certainly had a very great effect upon the audience at both places as testified by their cheers etc. and also by the very large number of persons who came to view it.’24 ‘The Little Stowaway’ also made topical reference to the sensational contemporary trial of Florence Maybrick for the murder of her husband.25 This indicates that the inclusion of the dock song was most likely to be opportunistic topicality rather than a sincere reflection of the audience’s sentiments. Laurence Senelick argues that the musical numbers put on in the halls ‘often avoided or distorted the true concerns of the working class’.26 He cites Percy Fitzgerald’s view that the topical song based on current events or personalities had vanished from the halls by 1890,27 a point that this evidence refutes, as does an Era review that states that ‘references to John Burns and the “dockers’ tanner”’ made by ‘topical vocalist’ James Merritt ‘went down’ during a variety performance at Queen’s in Poplar in October 1889 (26 October 1889, p. 15). Jenny Hill’s was not the only music hall sketch based on the dispute. The Christmas programme at Marlow’s New Palace of Varieties on Bow Road featured ‘an entirely new Realistic Entertainment entitled “On Strike”’, starring Miss Emily London, Fred Bough and George Roberts (Era, 21 December 1889, p. 15). Another piece, The Dock Strike, written by William Glenney and

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performed by the J. B. Howe group, appeared at the Variety, Hoxton, in March 1891 (Era, 28 February 1891, p. 16). Howe, Glenney and Julia Summers were regular actors in the Britannia’s company but during the pantomime period presented ‘realistic dramatic sketches’ at the music halls (Era, 27 September 1890, p. 16). In this sketch Howe played three parts: John Scares, an agitator moulded on John Burns; the villain Gideon Westwood; and Ben Dockley, the father of the heroine. Glenney meanwhile played the heroic docker Jim Stanley, while Summers doubled as the twin sisters Nell and Bess Dockley. The plot of The Dock Strike is a standard melodramatic one with the villain seducing a twin and confusion ensuing when her sister is assumed to have sexually transgressed; there is even a sensation scene when the heroic docker is locked in a burning cottage. The opening scene, set at Tower Hill by moonlight, is clearly based on the real-life gatherings during the strike (see Figure 11). The Stage reviewer describes the action as John Scares addresses the men: After much sound advice as to their future movements, John bids the strikers depart, which they accordingly do, with the exception of one, Jim Stanley. Jim is hungry; he has given his relief ticket to one who wanted it badly, and has had to go without himself. He tells the tale to Scares, and Scares is so delighted at Jim’s behaviour that he gives him a shilling. Scares wants to shake hands with Jim; but no, the unselfish striker will not allow of such familiarity – his hands are dirty. Then it is that Scares rises high in the estimation of the audience. ‘‘I would sooner clasp your hand, dirty as it is, than a hundred kid-gloved hands of your oppressors,’ says Scares, looking every inch a Burns; and the boys at the Variety howl and shriek with delight and approval. (Stage, 12 March 1891, p. 12)

In this portrayal of the striking dockers as oppressed, honest workers, Glenney shamelessly appeals to the audience’s class consciousness. The strategy was clearly successful, as the Stage review confirms. Audience members responded to the familiar narrative binary of melodrama, which as Rohan McWilliam argues ‘provided a cultural resource, a language and set of themes and narratives that enabled the nineteenth century to understand itself ’.28 They would anticipate the moral certainly of the ending, set at the Dock Gates and Wharf, where Jim Stanley foils the villain’s scheme and forces him to ‘agree to the dockers’ demands’, thus bringing about the end of the strike (Stage, 12 March 1891, p. 12). The final variety piece that can be directly linked to the 1889 strike did not appear until Christmas 1893. Described as a ‘pantomime’, The Dock Strike was performed by the Fred Boisset Troupe (who specialised in humorous acrobatics; see Figure 12) at the Royal, Holborn, and then at the Paragon

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‘Mr. John Burns Addressing the Men on Strike at the Gates of the East and West India Docks’, Graphic, 7 September 1889.

Theatre of Varieties, Mile End Road, until the middle of 1894. The following year Fred Boisset died prematurely, but the family continued as the Boisset Troupe, playing this entertainment in 1896 at the Metropolitan, the South London Palace, the Canterbury Theatre of Varieties and back at the Royal and the Paragon. It was favourably reviewed at the Palace, Bristol, in March 1897 and revived at the Middlesex Music Hall, Drury Lane, in September 1898. A review of the performance at the Metropolitan appeared in the Era: We see a gentleman made up like the member for Battersea gesticulating to a posse of dockers; but there is no serious intent in this, for even ‘plain John Burns’ is swayed by the spirit of practical joking which rules the conduct of every member of the company, and especially of the clever trio Frank, Willie, and Albert Boisset. We admit the difficulty of describing exactly what these gentlemen do. Cold analysis in black and white is simply impossible. We know that they troop on as dockers, and in the wild whirl of a capitally managed absurdity they never spare themselves. They flip-flap, somersault, rally, and dance, and enter into each little bit of business with an energy that is simply prodigious. There is more fun in The Dock Strike than in twenty harlequinades. It is all bustle and rattle from start to finish; there is not a single dull moment in it. (Era, 11 September 1896, p. 16)

Carte de visite of the Boisset Troupe, c.1878.

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In this entertainment the strike is divorced from its political and social meaning and is simply employed as a subject for fun. It has become a folk memory rather than a call to arms. During the Victorian era the dramatic repertoire was not the only means with which theatres reflected contemporary events and issues; fundraising benefits were often used to support groups and individuals known to be suffering particular hardships. East End institutions might therefore be expected to have hosted theatrical benefits in aid of the families of striking dockers. Precedents for such undertakings included an occasion in 1841 when stonemakers working at the Houses of Parliament and on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square downed tools in a dispute with the contractor. The union hired the local theatre, the Victoria, and put on an evening to highlight their case, raising £50.29 In the case of the 1889 strike, the only evidence for similar activity comes from the balance sheet for the Dock Labourers’ Strike Fund, which lists the sum of £31 17s 4d under income for ‘Benefit at “Queen’s Palace of Varieties”.30 This was a music hall in Poplar, an appropriate venue since it was situated right in the heart of the docklands. An announcement in the Era confirms: ‘The Directors of the Queen’s Palace of Varieties, Poplar, have decided to place the use of their hall at the disposal of the London dock labourers for a benefit, and the entire receipts will be handed over to them without any deduction whatever’ (31 August 1889, p. 15). What form the evening took is unfortunately unknown. The amount raised was tiny in comparison to the £1,039 13s 3d given by members of the public in street collections (The Times, 4 December 1889, p. 7). The initial assumption that East End theatres had incentives to respond to the disputes was based on geography and profits. Since much of the audience was likely to live alongside the strikers there would be a sympathetic imperative, which might reap benefits later when strikers were back at work and remembered that the theatre had been ‘on their side’. Similarly managements want to make money, and since the general public was broadly sympathetic to the strikers there would be a commercial incentive to reflect this on the stage. Yet the assumption is not endorsed by the evidence. One disincentive may have been that managers feared provoking similar unrest among theatre employees, especially as it was a time of considerable actor unemployment.31 This is contradicted by Sara Lane’s endorsement of the idea of unionisation in an interview conducted for the Stage in July 1890.32 A more likely explanation is that since workers and others who normally attended performances were unable to do so because of straitened financial circumstances, it was not worthwhile

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to target their interests specifically. In the absence of financial documentation it is difficult to quantify the economic effects of this trade depression on the theatres, but the Era confirms the generalisation: ‘The dockers’ strike undoubtedly affects, more or less, business of every kind at the East-end’ (7 September 1889, p. 15). A reviewer of Hubert O’Grady’s Irish drama The Fenian at the Standard in early September 1889 regrets that it was ‘so indifferently patronised’ and hypothesises: ‘The great strike, among many things that it has to answer for, has contributed to this result’ (East London Observer, 7 September 1889, p. 3). Understandably theatre managements therefore concentrated on established commercial successes. Although the response of the local music halls was stronger than the theatres’, even this was less than might be expected, possibly because some halls were censored. According to the 1892 Select Committee report on Theatres and Places of Entertainment, the Royal Albert in Canning Town censored its own material, not allowing performers to refer to ‘political, religious, or local matters’.33 This is significant given that this particular hall was on Victoria Dock Road just above the docks, and reviews refer to the loyalty of dockworkers in the audience.34 Gareth Stedman Jones attributes the lack of radicalism in the music hall to Toryism.35 Alternatively, Marc Brodie contends that ‘The dominant working experience in East London was of being subject to the oppression, fraud, and demands for bribery of the local, low-level, contracting middleman’ and that thus workers’ ‘anger would be directed at a corrupt foreman rather than the employer’s system of wages or indeed the capitalist economic structure itself ’.36 Brodie argues that this accounts for voting patterns but his contention could equally be applied to melodramas such as The Middleman that attacked poor employers and middlemen rather than calling for systemic change. Instead of looking for militants on the stage a more fruitful approach is to look for the theatrical in the dock strike itself. Tellingly, Ben Tillett, one of its leaders, describes John Burns as ‘our best showman’, thus implicitly recognising the importance of performativity.37 Tillett is referring to Burns’s skilled oratory, seen in the many speeches made at the dock gates (see Figure 11). These were important not only for relaying information to the strikers but also for maintaining morale. The speakers were addressing both the audience that was physically present and the wider public, as the content was widely reported in the press. Joseph S. Meisel describes the late nineteenth century as the ‘great era of platform oratory’ and contends that ‘platform events must be viewed not only as political communication, but also as a cultural experience’.38 When

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regarded in this way, the dockers listening to the speeches are constituted like a theatrical audience. That showmanship was vital for morale and propaganda purposes is equally evident in the money-raising processions that took place daily during the strike. The theatricality of the strike In his edited volume The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century Matthias Reiss defines protest marches as ‘organized and choreographed processions of groups in the public sphere with the aim of making a statement. They usually also feature a rally at the beginning or end, or both’.39 The essays in Reiss’s book adopt various approaches – social psychological, geographical and sociological – examining aspects of the crowd, space and society, yet none look at theatricality per se. Nevertheless, the dockers’ marches can be read as a daily performance. The processions started in the docks, traversed the City of London and on Sundays continued to Hyde Park. Dieter Rucht argues that ‘marches convey the symbolic sense of moving forward and approaching a goal’.40 In this case the route is circular, beginning and ending at the docks. The men embody their plight in their arduous walk and present it both to enlighten outsiders and to express their solidarity to each other. In traversing the streets of the City they symbolically penetrate the financial powerhouse of the nation. Given that this is the height of the British Empire, the marches make a telling parallel with the carefully choreographed state procession that marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee just two years earlier (21 June 1887). The drab dock marches contrast with the lavish ceremonial of that festive occasion, but their symbolic power is equally eloquent. A local newspaper, the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, describes a typical procession of over 70,000 that took place on Friday 23 August: About noon contingents of men with bands and banners, gathered at the usual starting point [the docks] ... There were eight brass bands and many drum and fife bands, and a large number of allegorical groups in wagons, representing the coal heavers, the ship scrapers, the hydraulic men, and the lightermen, who brought some boats, all fully manned. Represented in the procession, too were the dockers’ children, thin and ill-clad, contrasted with sweaters’ children, well fed, plump, and well dressed. Then there were illustrations of the sweaters’ well supplied dinners, contrasted with the bones, offal, and garbage which were represented as forming the dockers’ dinners. (26 August 1889, p. 3)

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Scenes from a procession supporting the strike, Illustrated London News, 7  September 1889.

Figure 13 depicts scenes from a similar march later in the strike. Viewed as a theatrical performance, the march has no equivalent of the dramatic script because it takes place outdoors and is not static. Instead the subject is conveyed through the visual juxtaposition of props and performers. In a dispute about wages the issue is dramatically realised in the physical embodiment of what

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money can buy – healthy children and nutritious food. The latter was carried on poles as totemic items (East London Observer, 24 August 1889), p. 5). Images of suffering infants were exploited to elicit sympathy for the strikers’ cause. The Penny Illustrated Paper carried an illustration of children awaiting breakfast at the kitchens set up to support the striking men and their families (Figure 14). In the processions it is unclear whether the children were dockers’ offspring wearing costumes to personate the more fortunate sweaters’ children or whether they were embodied in puppets as in Figure 13. Although it is possible that both may have occurred in different marches, it is more likely (especially given the arduous nature of the procession for hungry youngsters) that they were represented emblematically. An illustration accompanying an article about a strike at the Southampton docks the following year depicts a marcher holding a similar pole clad with clothing (Illustrated London News, 20 September 1890, p. 359). There is, however, pictorial and written evidence that some adults donned special clothing for the processions. In the lower image from the Illustrated London News (Figure 13) Neptune, Britannia, a doctor and a barber appear on one of the wagons. The medic, adorned with a box entitled ‘THE REMEDY’, is evidently an image of the physic needed to cure the ailing dock industry while the barber’s razor may suggest the brutality of the dock system. Neptune is a symbolic embodiment of the association with the sea, a reminder of the dockers’ importance to the maritime trading nation and an appeal to national solidarity. Britannia, another emblem of nationhood, has multiple figurative meanings, as Madge Dresser

14

‘Dockers’ Children Waiting for Breakfast in West India Dock Road’, Penny  Illustrated Paper, 7 September 1889.

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outlines in a study of her appearance in cartoons in Punch. Here Britannia might fit two of Dresser’s categories, functioning as both the ‘compassionate weeping madonna’ who ‘cares for the hopeless’ and ‘war-like Athena’, encouraging her followers into battle.41 The bearded male striker personating Britannia is shown smoking a pipe, a common feature in depictions of dockers, and wearing a Union Jack skirt.42 He sits passively. In contrast, an illustration in the Graphic (Figure 15) portrays a more belligerent figure, whose headgear is reminiscent of the Phrygian cap of the French Revolution.43 James Epstein argues that this cap of liberty was adopted by radicals in 1819 (the year of the Peterloo massacre) and again became a powerful symbol for those supporting the Chartists in the 1830s. He writes: ‘The obsessive concern with such symbolism was linked to questions of power: the power to move within public space, the power to speak, and the power to give definition to words, visual symbols, and actions.’44 The presence of such a potent symbol among the sea of working men’s caps links to the tradition of dissent. The headwear may also ironically comment on the unregal bonnet that Queen Victoria had worn in her Jubilee procession.



‘Parade of Coal Heavers on Strike’, Graphic, 7 September 1889.

15

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While recognising the symbolism of the exceptional figures (the star performers) on the wagons, it is equally important to acknowledge the majority of the cast – the men walking alongside, dressed in their usual clothing. Just as Marcus Morris interprets Keir Hardie’s choice of costume as emphasising ‘his separation from the existing system’ (Chapter 12, pp. 267–8) so the dockers’ outfits mark them out as belonging to the labouring classes and unifying them. The wagons introduce another theatrical element, functioning as portable stages or tableaux. The one most often reproduced pictorially was that representing the coal-heavers, with its masts and baskets indicating their trade. It features in a report of the march from Aldgate into the City of London on 5  September: there were as before the working derricks, illustrating the coal-whippers’ trade, and one of the vans … had an effigy of Mr. Norwood on a gibbet. A man with a pantomimic head was also made to represent the chairman of the great dock companies, and it was apparent that a strong endeavour was being made by the organizers of the procession to work the population into dislike of the chief of these companies. (The Times, 6 September 1889, p. 3)

Charles Norwood (no relation) was the hated chairman of the dock directors. This is the sole reference to the pantomime head and there is no evidence to indicate from where it had originated – a sympathetic theatre owner perhaps? Nevertheless, this suggests that the performers assumed that spectators share a common visual and cultural currency with the marchers. Five days later Ben Tillett addressed the strikers’ meeting on Tower Hill anticipating that they would soon be victorious. The Star (11 September 1889, p. 3) describes the scene: Whilst Ben was speaking, and just as he spoke the word Norwood, a detachment of the procession came along with Norwood in another effigy. Norwood did not like the representation of him on the scaffold. He won’t like the new one much better. He is shown as a dog muzzled and dressed up in convict’s clothes, with a label stating that he ought to have penal servitude for life.

Thus the effigies, pantomime head, costumed figures and enactments all demonstrate how theatricality was consciously harnessed to support the strike and influence public opinion. To draw on Joseph Roach’s ideas as expressed in Cities of the Dead, the dock labourers themselves are performing a cultural memory of previous workers’ demonstrations.45 They manifest organised solidarity. Significantly, these marchers were drilled so that they would not look shambolic or confrontational,46 thus disassociating them from the chaotic scenes that occurred on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (13 February 1887) when police attempted to prevent marchers attending a Social Democratic Federation

The performance of protest

meeting at Trafalgar Square. As Henry Hyde Champion wrote in his book The Great Dock Strike, published in 1890: though there was little public sympathy shown in the earlier days of the strike, as soon as it became widely known that thousands of the strikers had marched through the City without a pocket being picked or a window being broken, and that at the head of the procession was a man whose public position was a guarantee that ‘the mob’ had a responsible leader [Burns], the British citizen felt he might go back to his suburban villa when his day’s work was done with full confidence that his warehouses would not be wrecked in the night, and that he could afford to follow his natural inclination and back the poor devils who were fighting with pluck, good humour, and order against overwhelming odds.47

Rather than being seen as confrontational, the image of the disciplined dockers’ army became powerful propaganda in their favour. If, as Jim Davis has argued, Augustus Harris’s Drury Lane pantomimes of this period (which were particularly noted for their spectacular processions) ‘celebrate Britain’s imperial strength’, then the dock labourer’s processions make a potent political statement in dramatising where that power comes from. The marchers are the men whose labour facilitates the empire’s trade and hence its wealth.48 At a time of growing concern about the lawlessness of the underclass in the East End and fears of contagion from its hordes, the presence of the ranks of marchers embodied a counter-narrative of dignified but oppressed labour. The street audience responded by giving money, thus making possible the continuation of the dispute. On reflection, the search for theatrical versions of social dissent is an attempt to uncover the dock strike’s legacy when perhaps the paucity of the stage portrayals reflects the fact that the industrial action achieved little in the long term.49 More significant dramatic treatments of industrial unrest appeared later, notably John Galsworthy’s Strife (1909) and James Sexton’s The Riot Act (1914), which was set in the docks.50 The latter, written by an ex-General Secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, was based on the 1911 Liverpool general transport strike, which had included dockers.51 When the 1889 dock strike is regarded from a performance perspective, the moment of the event, particularly as embodied in the street theatre of the strike processions and rallying speeches, is more significant than its stage echoes.

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Notes

1

See Jim Davis, ‘The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia, 1863–74’, New Theatre Quarterly, 7:28 (November 1991), pp. 369–89; Jim Davis and Tracy C. Davis, ‘The People of the “People’s Theatre”: The Social Demography of the Britannia Theatre (Hoxton)’, Theatre Survey, 32:2 (1991), pp. 137–65; Heidi Holder, ‘The East-End Theatre’, in Kerry Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 257–76; Heidi J. Holder, ‘Nation and Neighbourhood, Jews and Englishmen: Location and Theatrical Ideology in Victorian London’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 103–20; Janice Norwood, ‘The Britannia Theatre, Hoxton (1841–1899): The Creation and Consumption of Popular Culture in an East End Community’ (PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2006). 2 William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914 (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2004), pp. 169–79. 3 John Charlton, ‘It just went like tinder’: The Mass Movement & New Unionism in Britain 1889 (London: Redwords, 1999), p. 98. 4 Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 41–95. 5 Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 90. 6 Charlton, ‘It just went like tinder’, p. 98. 7 The police had suggested he wore it; H. Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash, The Story of the Dockers’ Strike, Told by Two East Londoners (London: T. Fisher Unwin, [1889]), p. 177. 8 For example, an advertisement for the Theatre Royal, Stratford (Era, 15 September 1888, p. 12), lists bookings for 1888 and 1889 and mentions only one vacant date for 1888. 9 Era Almanack (January 1890), pp. 73–9. 10 Henry Arthur Jones, The Middleman, in Michael R. Booth (ed.), The Lights o’ London and Other Victorian Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Act II, p. 198. 11 Jane Moody, ‘The Drama of Capital: Risk, Belief, and Liability on the Victorian Stage’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 91–109. 12 His previous drama, Man to Man, featuring conflict between an employee at an iron works and the employer’s son, had been touring for five years. 13 Letter from David Osbaldiston, manager of the Victoria Theatre, included with Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life!, British Library, London, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 42038, fols 474–514b. 14 William Bourne, Work and Wages, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53445E, Act I, fol. 4. 15 University of Newcastle, Australia, Michael R. Booth Theatre Collection http:// hdl.handle.net/1959.13/32487 (accessed 12 June 2013).

The performance of protest 16 Janice Norwood, ‘Harlequin Encore: Sixty Years of the Britannia Pantomime’, in Jim Davis (ed.), Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 77–9; Jill A. Sullivan, The Politics of the Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). 17 Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 90–120. 18 Aladdin, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53442B. 19 Lloyds Illustrated Newspaper (29 December 1889), p. 3, and Aladdin; or The Wonderful Parraffin [sic], The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53442D. 20 Dick Whittington and his Cat, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53441O, Scene 2, fol. 7. 21 The term ‘dockers’ tanner’ refers to a key demand of the strikers, a minimum rate of pay of 6d per hour. Dick Whittington and his Cat, Scene 6, fol. 30. 22 Whittington and his Cat, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53442F, Scene 5. 23 The Bold Bad Baron and the Fairy Fountain of Enchanted Water, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53441B, Scene 1 (folios unnumbered). 24 London Metropolitan Archives, Sessions of the Licensing Committee, 3 October 1889, no. 126 Paragon, Theatre of Varieties, LCC/MIN 10,871, and 7 October 1889, no. 308 The Canterbury Music Hall, LCC/MIN 10,872. 25 Hill asks the captain if there is arsenic in the rum that he gives to the stowaway; Era (7 September 1889), p. 15. 26 Laurence Senelick, ‘Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs’, Victorian Studies, 19:2 (December 1975), p. 150. 27 Senelick, ‘Politics as Entertainment’, pp. 157–8. 28 Rohan McWilliam, ‘Melodrama and the Historians’, Radical History Review, 78 (2000), p. 60. 29 Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. xi; W.S. Hilton, Foes to Tyranny: A History of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers (London: The Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, 1963), p. 82. 30 Reproduced in Terry McCarthy, The Great Dock Strike 1889: The Story of the Labour Movement’s First Great Victory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson in association with the TGWU, 1988), p. 247. 31 See the letter suggesting that the lessons learned from the dock strike should be applied to the theatre for the benefit of unemployed actors, Era (28 September 1889), p. 9. 32 ‘An Actor’s Union, Views of Representative Men, (11) Mrs. Sara Lane’, Stage (25 July 1890), p. 11. 33 Quoted in Susan Pennybacker, ‘“It was not what she said but the way in which she said it”: The London County Council and the Music Halls’, in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 129.

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The performance of politics 34 Era, 15 September 1888, p. 15. 35 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’, in Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin (eds), Popular Culture: Past and Present, reprint (London: Croom Helm and The Open University Press, 1986), pp. 92–121. 36 Marc Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 202. 37 Ben Tillett, Dock, Wharf, Riverside, and General Workers’ Union, A Brief History of the Dockers’ Union: Commemorating the 1889 Dockers’ Strike (September 1910), p. 25, British Library, British Trade Union History Collections. 38 Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 265. 39 Matthias Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 2. 40 Dieter Rucht, ‘On the Sociology of Protest Marches’, in Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage, p. 55. 41 Madge Dresser, ‘Britannia’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 3: National Fictions (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 40. 42 Smith and Nash, The Story of the Dockers’ Strike, p. 85. 43 See Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), Musée du Louvre, Paris. 44 James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 98. See also Paul A. Pickering, ‘Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, 112 (August 1986), pp. 144–62. 45 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 46 Smith and Nash, The Story of the Dockers’ Strike, p. 81. Katrina Navickas identifies a similar instruction to make marchers look respectable in earlier trade union marches; “‘That Sash Will Hang You”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’, Journal of British Studies, 49:3 (July 2010), pp. 540–65. 47 Henry Hyde Champion, The Great Dock Strike: In London, August, 1889 (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), p. 6. 48 Jim Davis, ‘“Only an Undisciplined [Nation] would have done it”: Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Jim Davis (ed.), Victorian Pantomime, p. 101. 49 W. Hamish Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism 1700–1998 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 79. 50 Later renamed Democracy. I am grateful to the staff of the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, for alerting me to Sexton’s drama. 51 Viv Gardner, ‘Provincial Stages, 1900–1934’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 3: Since 1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 73.



13 Class, performance and socialist politics: the political campaigns of early labour leaders Marcus Morris

T

he political world of late Victorian Britain was in many ways a dramatic show, with politicians’ campaign performances appealing to a disparate audience. Many politicians conceptualised themselves as performers, including labour and socialist politicians, who are the focus of this chapter. They deliberately sought character types and roles for themselves to play, often along class lines. The use of theatrical techniques, including the manipulation of clothing as a political prop, were clearly crucial for politicians’ self-conceptualisation and in how they went about making their political appeals. These self-conscious acts, designed to appeal to specific audiences, form the main evidential base for this study. Through the examination of these it will be shown that performance and non-verbal discourses of political communication are particularly useful categories for analysis, especially since such approaches help us to reach a fuller understanding of late Victorian British politics. Class traditionally provided a full explanation for the practice of popular politics, with British politics invariably configured along class lines.1 It additionally provided the standard analytical category for the study of the early labour movement and the conduct of its representatives, with the ‘rise of class politics’ thesis emerging.2 Class is now seen, though, as an extremely amorphous category, which is unstable, context-specific and self-defining.3 The influence of the ‘linguistic turn’ is clearly central to this shift.4 In part, this has resulted in a ‘de-classing’ of British political history, with the focus, instead, placed on the exercise of power through discourse rather than economic determinism.5 To be sure, post-modernism has not swept all before it, but it remains the dominant influence on today’s historiography. Such approaches, though, remain centred on the place of class within the written or spoken word, privileging the verbal over the non-verbal and occasionally falling into the trap of

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linguistic determinism. In these approaches, moreover, politics can be seen to exist in a vacuum, situated in a series of unconnected and unrooted discourses, separate from popular culture. However, this study illustrates how they should not be abstracted from social and cultural realties and that the discourse should be broadened to include non-verbal political communication. James Vernon has thus noted that ‘historians’ fascination with the paradigm of language has tended to privilege readings of printed or spoken word, and, consequently, equally important symbolic modes of political communication … have largely been lost to view’.6 A large corpus of work now exists exploring visual and material culture, but the study of the non-verbal remains relatively marginal in examinations of class and politics. Moreover, the study of the methods and mediums by which politicians delivered their messages also remains limited.7 A number of studies, including Richard Gaunt’s recent revisionist biography of Peel and consideration of Parliament as a theatrical space, have treated politics as performative.8 Deborah Mutch’s work on socialist fiction, similarly, argues for an understanding of socialist development through the analysis of popular culture which informed the popular and political imagination.9 Little work, however, has been undertaken which examines the non-verbal and unwritten discourses of class articulated by early labour leaders. This is especially surprising given that the emerging labour movement conceptualised itself as a movement of not only spoken and written communication, but visual spectacle. Work on trade union banners, for instance, indicates that early labour understood its appeal as visual.10 This chapter seeks to expand on some of this work, examining the performative language of politics and assessing the link between class, political rhetoric, performance and electoral campaigns. It looks at the political campaigns of the two leading political actors of the nascent socialism movement, H.  M. Hyndman and J. Keir Hardie, focusing on the non-verbal, class-based elements of their campaigns. It illustrates how they conceptualised themselves as performers, how they conceptualised their audiences and how they simply put on a show. In doing so, it suggests that political language must be understood as more than ‘mere words’: it was a means of signification and communication, verbal and non-verbal in character. In an act of cultural borrowing, moreover, they and other politicians deliberately used a theatrical frame to convince their constituents, blurring lines between platform and stage as well as between audience and constituency. When this analytical lens is adopted, class returns to prominence. Hyndman and Hardie used props in the form of clothing (a top hat and cloth cap respectively), performed roles according

Class, performance and socialist politics

to distinct character types (or caricatures) and used set-piece performance to reinforce specific class appeals. They were actors playing a part, invoking rituals of class and using the platform as a stage in order to elicit an emotional response from their audience. The last two decades of the nineteenth century marked a period now characterised as the ‘socialist revival’. With the revival, socialism became a particular watchword of the period, while the cause of labour gained greater national prominence. Of course, many reacted negatively to this revival; others felt less threatened: Sir William Harcourt announced somewhat disingenuously in the House of Commons, for instance, that ‘we are all Socialists now’.11 Nevertheless, one contemporary commentator noted that ‘the word Socialism has perhaps merited its claim to be one of the great words of the modern world’.12 More importantly, another suggested that ‘men now generally recognize that socialism is one of the most remarkable forces of the age in which we live’.13 Socialist and labour politics mattered in late nineteenth-century Britain, and were developing into a major political force that illustrated the feelings, desires and expectations of the largest section of the population. The ‘revival’ and associated growth of labour politics also highlighted the greater prominence of class within social and political discourse, with direct appeals now made to the working class as political agents and attempts made to solidify and mobilise that considerable political base. The first political party established as part of the ‘revival’ was the Democratic Federation in 1881, which became Britain’s first avowedly socialist party in 1884 when it took the name Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and adopted a socialist manifesto at its conference of the same year. The leading figure in the creation of the party was Hyndman, and he would remain its most important figure for the majority of the party’s existence.14 Through the 1880s and early 1890s the SDF remained the leading British socialist political party and the only one to contest local and national elections. The Independent Labour Party (ILP), formed in 1893, however, would usurp the SDF’s position as the leading British socialist party in the 1890s. A grouping of disparate people and groups, the ILP quickly established itself as Britain’s ‘sentimental’ socialist party (which informed much of Hardie’s method discussed below), forging links with trade unions and becoming a political force of which mainstream politicians had to be wary. It was the leadership of Keir Hardie that brought those disparate groups together, and he would remain the party’s most important figure well into the twentieth century.15 Both Hyndman and Hardie were wholly committed to working within the existing political system, and so it

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is their appeals to that system that form the basis of this case study. These appeals highlight the variable, but constant, connections between performance, language and politics. Moreover, they highlight how performance was central to how they presented their respective messages to the electorate – messages centred on differing versions of class. Historians have long demonstrated the link between radical politics in various guises and the theatre.16 They have also highlighted the particular links between socialism and the theatre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.17 Of course, a number of prominent socialists have also been prominent in theatre too; Tracy Davis has examined the links with perhaps the most important of these, George Bernard Shaw.18 Indeed, many of the central figures in the movement wrote, directed or acted in plays, both socialist and non-socialist in subject matter.19 More generally, Chris Waters, Ros Merkin and Ian Britain, among others, have shown that in the late nineteenth century, theatre and performance were central to socialist groups’ activities, irrespective of party affiliation.20 We cannot be certain, unfortunately, exactly what Hardie thought of that link, but we can be certain that Hyndman saw this as a positive: he commented on it regularly in the pages of Justice, the SDF’s newspaper. Undoubtedly, this reflected Hyndman’s wider interest in contemporary theatre. He had been an anonymous critic for a short time, later noting how ‘my criticisms made a bit of a stir’, and as he was a member of the Garrick Club which he had joined in 1874, ‘it used to amuse me to hear the comments and guesses as to who the delinquent might be’.21 He regularly attended theatre productions throughout his socialist career and even devoted a number of chapters in his two memoirs to criticism of the dramatic world, in particular Bernard Shaw and Ibsen. Further analysis of socialists’ appropriation of the theatre, and the theatrical mode, for political purposes is thus merited. Hyndman believed that ‘to us English the political arena is the greatest dramatic show of the day and of every day’. He suggested that ‘the continual play of life and character in Parliament, with the best sounding board in the world, gives Englishmen a direct interest in politics’.22 Hyndman, and many other labour and socialist politicians, clearly saw a link between the platform and stage on the one hand and the audience and constituency on the other. It was for this reason perhaps that the Glasgow branch of the ILP chose to hold its meetings in the city’s theatres, an activist noting how ‘our propaganda was carried out in the finest theatres and picture houses … nine large meetings were running simultaneously every Sunday evening in the Metropole, Olympia, Palaceum, Seamore, Victoria, Prince’s, Gaiety, Lorne and Pavilion theatres’.23

Class, performance and socialist politics

In clearly conceptualising themselves as performers, labour and socialist politicians deliberately sought character types and roles for themselves; these were self-conscious acts designed to appeal to specific audiences. In viewing politics as performance, they also understood their audience in theatrical terms, which was particularly important in an era when popular lectures and speeches were mass entertainment.24 Mainstream politicians centred their performances on a variety of messages and ideas such as empire, religion and respect for tradition; labour and socialist politicians centred their performances on class. Class symbolised a vast array of emotions by which the population defined itself. Hyndman and Hardie consciously sought to manipulate those emotions and conceptions for their own political ends. They defined themselves through class and made class-based, non-verbal, appeals. Though they both framed their appeals around the ideas of transgressing class boundaries, Hyndman and Hardie fashioned quite different class-based appeals, and it is no surprise that they conceptualised their audiences differently. In hoping to establish an interactive relationship with their audience, both men simultaneously played with established rituals of class while trying to forge new ones. They did this in contrast to their surroundings – working-class Hardie in Parliament and upper-middle-class Hyndman at workers’ meetings – and thus can be categorised as ‘class explorers’, indeed, ‘class missionaries’. Ultimately, however, they were politicians and instinctively realised that breaking the rules over class boundaries was a very effective way of gaining notoriety. In their attempt to do so, their strategies personalised and dramatised politics, utilising personality and easily recognisable characters as a means to engage their electorate and encourage political participation. Their strategies and performances represented two different class transgressions, not only reflecting their distinct personal backgrounds, but also complementing their particular political objectives and their differing conceptions of class and their audience. In their appeals Hyndman and Hardie both used the complementary tactics of the verbal and non-verbal, adopting the rhetoric and visual imagery of class, while also attempting to dramatise it. The rhetoric can be seen in the class-based policies that they and their parties adopted, while the visual can be seen in their use of clothing and the style of performance in their political appeals. Clothing or costume, if we understand their appeals to be a form of performance, was a recognisable visual prop to the electorate. It illustrated the attitudes that they held towards class and also indicated the expectations that they held for their audience, thereby highlighting the characteristics that they thought best to play on in order to win working-class support. It was

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in this sense that Eric Hobsbawm labelled Hardie’s cloth cap an ‘invented tradition’, which saw clothing as a clearly recognised and understood indication of class assertion.25 With this aim, Hyndman and Hardie relied on the simplification of type, that is stereotyping, in the costumes they adopted as part of their performances. Their clothing was clearly recognisable while also being soothing and reassuring. Given that images of individualism could be seen as subversive and combative, they dressed according to accepted visual tropes of class identity in order to emphasise their own class positioning. This was an especially important technique since their primary platform was the large open-air meeting, where vocal projection was particularly difficult. As Jon Lawrence has highlighted, addressing such meetings was no easy task in an age before amplification: ‘actually delivering such speeches was a major undertaking’, with ‘only the strongest speakers’ able to address such vast audiences.26 Clothing as a visual medium thus becomes a rhetorical device, while also fulfilling the sartorial experience that the audience expected, for as one contemporary commentator would note, ‘costume has always aimed at expressing social rank’.27 Individual items of clothing, such as a top hat or cloth cap, may appear neutral or innocent; however, such props connote social distinctions. As props, the choice of clothing operated as a tool of inclusion and exclusion. Clothing is used to both uphold ideologies held by social groups and to oppose the other ideologies of competing groups within a social order. Clothes also have an important impact on the production and reproduction of society, as Thomas Carlyle noted in Sartor Resartus: ‘Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth’.28 In British society in the late nineteenth century, the social codes which clothing affirmed were gender and class. If clothing, as a cultural phenomenon, can be understood as a practice and an institution by which class relations and class differences are made meaningful, then Hyndman’s and Hardie’s choices of attire reveal particular class symbolisms.29 Clothing not only indicated group identity, but served as the means to develop and strengthen political solidarities. It was with these notions in mind that Hyndman and Hardie chose their costumes as part of their performances of class. The appearance and character that Hyndman adopted when making his political appeals very seldom escapes reminiscence; it is easy to see why, for it is quite an image: Hyndman, an archetypal upper-middle-class man in his top hat and frock coat, lecturing on the proletarian emancipation to the working man on street corners. Bruce Glasier, who was chairman of the ILP for many years, gave the following description:

Class, performance and socialist politics

Hyndman, striking in his appearance, with his long, flowing senatorial beard, his keen restless, searching eyes, and full, intellectual brow, dressed in the city best, frock-coat suit of the day, with full display of white linen – his whole manner alert, pushful [sic], and, shall I say, domineering – looked the very embodiment of middle-class respectability and capitalist ideology; a man of the world, a Pall Mall politician from top to toe.30

The Daily Mirror would reiterate this, noting how he had the ‘appearance and demeanour of a gentleman of the old school’, despite being ‘one of the most advanced of Socialists’ (25 November 1921). Indeed, this only made him more memorable and drew the curious-minded when he was speaking, indicating the importance placed on the personal stature of the speaker or the character they created. With Hyndman this also meant that he reflected the long tradition of the gentleman leader in British radical politics.31 To complement his appearance, at the start of any address to a working-class audience on a diverse political stage, Hyndman would always perform the same set piece that would play on the manifest social differences between him and his audience. This involved reminding his audience that he owed his wealth, position and, by extension, appearance to their labour, referring to ‘my class’ and ‘your class’, and then would chide them for their ‘wooden-headed ignorance, stupidity, and servility’.32 Hyndman’s appearance and performance, however, contrasted with his written word. He consistently commented on how ‘the revolution must come from below’ and stated that ‘the workers must achieve their own conquest’. He firmly adhered to a Marxist conception of class war, seeing the working class as the sole revolutionary agents in social and political change (Justice, 23 February 1884). The contrast between the verbal and non-verbal, though, represented differing tactics within the same broad class-based appeal. Hyndman’s tactics stemmed from an older discourse of class and codes of behaviour based on deference and paternalism. In its traditional model paternalism reinforced deference, and this in turn reinforced paternalism in a virtuous circle.33 Hyndman borrowed from this model, but sought to break the circle by combining deference with insult and provocation rather than paternalism. In this sense he was a conductor hoping to elicit a certain response from his audience, persuading through emotion rather than argument. His approach rested on the assumption that the working class was deferential. Hence he believed that his social origins, appearance and performance would appeal to a working man who held the belief, conscious or unconscious, that the views of a social superior should be given greater credence. Hyndman thus deliberately acted a contrived role of his own scriptwriting: he fully expected

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complicity between performer and audience. However, this was not his sole reasoning for adopting the appearance and performance that he did. Though Hyndman believed that the working classes were the raw material of revolution, he had concluded that within the working class ‘ignorance, apathy, physical deterioration, and the servility engendered by sheer hopelessness take a lot of shaking up’.34 His performance was thus intended to effect such a shaking-up, persuading once again through emotion. His aim was the transformation of an apathetic working class into a unified, antagonistic and militant working class. His speeches and self-presentation sought to dramatise the ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide in society: his audience would be roused by reacting against the character he had personified. Thus in his memoirs he recalled, for instance, that he ‘had been taunting a working-class audience with their apathy, indifference and ignorance’ when ‘at the end of my address one of those present … quite properly, objected to this attack upon himself by a wellto-do man like myself ’.35 Hyndman clearly hoped for some interaction with his audience, and for his purposes that did not necessarily have to be positive. A paradox remained: he expected deference in the form of votes. There was a final rationale for adopting such tactics. By not denying his class, Hyndman was not alienating those other potential middle-class converts; for though the revolution must come from below, ‘we appeal to the higher nature of all classes to take our side, to strive with us side by side with the wage-earners’ (Justice, 23 February 1884). Thus Hyndman had created different, multi-layered, classbased appeals and performances, recognising the heterogeneous nature of his audience. Keir Hardie publicly mocked Hyndman’s performance, suggesting, ‘it is a quaint spectacle to see a top-hatted, frock-coated member of the prosperous middle class sweating on a platform to prove his “class consciousness” with the poor worker’.36 If Hyndman stood as a caricature of the man in the top hat, Hardie stood as a caricature of the man in the cloth cap. In the lead-up to the 1892 general election Hardie had deliberately played on his workingclass origins; he had been a miner at a very early age and had entered politics through the unions, though he clearly no longer led the lifestyle of a worker. His most infamous performance came when he first entered Parliament after victory in the 1892 campaign. Hardie drove to Westminster from his West Ham South constituency in a cab which was crammed full of enthusiastic supporters. Mounted behind was a cornet player, who played the Marseillaise as they approached the Houses of Parliament. It was Hardie’s attire, however, that was to cause the greatest sensation. He entered the House in a cloth cap

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and tweed suit, rather than the standard top hat and frock coat. The Liberal editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner, attempted to sum up the sensation: I am not sure that when the historian of the future discusses our time he will not find the most significant event on that day in 1892 when James Keir Hardie rode up to Westminster from West Ham, clothed in cloth cap, tweed suit, and flannel shirt, and accompanied by a band. The world scoffed at the vulgarity, or shuddered at the outrage, according to its humour; but the event was, nevertheless, historic. It marked the emergence of a new force in politics. It was a prophet who came – a prophet in ‘ill-country clothes’, wild-eyed, speaking in accents as rugged and uncouth as his garb.37

Although there is some debate over what exactly Hardie wore, his dress has nonetheless entered into labour folklore. As Kenneth Morgan has noted, ‘his headgear in particular has become sanctified as the simple attire of a rough Scottish miner’, and contrasted deliciously against ‘the bourgeois conventionalism of a frock-coated, top-hatted House of Commons’. As such, ‘the cloth cap has always been revered in Labour mythology’.38 The contemporary press, meanwhile, jumped on the performance of Hardie and his impudent flouting of convention, and the next morning there appeared nearly as many versions of the performance and his attire as there were newspapers. Hardie would later insist that ‘I have always worn a tweed cap and homespun clothes and it never entered my head to make a change.’ He would also plead ignorance to the manner in which he arrived at Westminster, stating that ‘the incident was no scheme of mine – in fact, I knew nothing about the arrangements till asked to occupy a seat’.39 Nevertheless, to believe that Hardie was entirely unaware of the class significance of his performance and the visual incongruity of a cloth cap among the top hats is to credit him with an unrealistic naiveté. He would continue to don attire and put on performances that would cause a public sensation for many years after 1892. In 1905, for instance, he wore sandals in Parliament, an article in the Daily Mirror (5 August 1905) suggesting that this caused quite a stir. In 1908, meanwhile, he again courted controversy by wearing a different type of hat, his ‘new white cloth cap of a semi-nautical cut, which ’ brought him much attention: ‘everyone looked at it as Mr Hardie passed’ (Daily Mirror, 11 April 1908). Hardie would thus continually change his costume, though always with the intention of emphasising eccentricity and separation from the system of which he was now part. Hardie clearly intended to play a certain part by emphasising his class roots and had constructed an unambiguous character that could be understood by all, even though he was no longer a working man. Unlike Hyndman, Hardie

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did not need to interact with his audience: his aim was to communicate a straightforward message of class solidarity and he deliberately chose his clothing with that in mind. His choice of attire was entirely contrived, and his intention was to shock his fellow MPs by so flagrantly breaking with dress convention and, in doing so, mark himself out as distinct from the other MPs. In stressing his working-class origins, Hardie, through clothing, was also making the point that he felt no exaggerated awe of Parliament. He intended to act as an independent labour representative; he had been elected as a working man and was, therefore, making it clear that he would act solely in the interests of the working class. This was commented on by some in the labour press, Reynolds’s Newspaper (14 August 1892) noting that: A great deal has been said and written during the last fortnight upon the costume of members of the House of Commons. It is well that the public should take notice of this, for it indicates in a vivid manner the exclusive composition of this Chamber. Mr Keir Hardie, for instance, a Labour member, chose to go to his legislative work in the clothes which he ordinarily wears – the only clothes he can afford. He has an honest tweed suit and a decent cap, called a ‘deer-stalker’ in his native Scotland. The House of Commons – the representatives of the people – are scandalized; the wealth on both sides stands aghast … He [Hardie] is entitled to wear what he likes. The sneers and insults of the classes on both sides are what he might have expected. They wish to grind him and the other Labour members down to their own dead, monotonous, common-place level, and this is a tendency which should be steadily resisted.

Hardie’s costume and performance thus challenged traditional emblems and signifiers of class dominance in British politics. Whereas Hyndman was reinforcing traditional social hierarchies, Hardie’s image and performance clearly suggested an intention to destabilise the social hierarchies of British politics. Hyndman wore clothing that endorsed a system of deference; Hardie recognised that his audience consisted of a working class in whose dress he established clear visual tropes of class solidarity. Hardie was trying to conduct his audience, aiming to elicit a certain response. He was aiming to persuade through emotion, becoming the embodiment of everything the current ruling elite were not, hoping to convert working men to his cause. Like Hyndman, however, Hardie employed a range of performance techniques, which at times contrasted with the written and spoken word. The contrast between the verbal and non-verbal, though, again represented differing tactics within the same broad class-based appeal. Despite presenting a personal history and image that suggested class division and emphasising through his

Class, performance and socialist politics

performance the social differences between the average man and those who held power, Hardie offered a rhetoric of class conciliation. This undoubtedly reflected a more moderate socialism. Hardie was not seeking to intensify class conflict; rather his intention was the development of social harmony, and so he promoted inclusivity. ‘It is not classes but systems which are at war, and the possessing class on the one side and the disinherited on the other are but the victims upon whom the burden of the contest falls.’40 As with Hyndman, though, a paradox remained; Hardie’s portrayal of class differences was being used in the interests of conciliation. Voters, therefore, should be happy with the appearance rather than the reality of class conflict. In a similar way to Hyndman, then, Hardie presented a variety of class-based performances, each accorded to the specific audience and intended to appeal to the widest possible support base. In promoting his independence as a working-class candidate and MP, he could appeal to the more militant and class-conscious elements of the working class. In wishing to incorporate classes, he allowed for the middle-class support that would be necessary for electoral success. Hyndman and Hardie, therefore, in their differing rhetoric and performance, were constructing multi-layered, class-based appeals aimed at an audience which they perceived of differently, but also recognised as diverse. They were attempting to conduct the different sections of the audience, to persuade with emotion those sections affected by their performances to convert to the cause and, more importantly, vote for them at elections. The different and multi-layered appeals of Hyndman and Hardie met with quite varied levels of success. Hyndman stood as the parliamentary candidate for Burnley on four separate occasions. He was never elected, however, coming closest in 1906 when he missed out by only 400 votes.41 It is clear that Hyndman’s appeal and performance were attractive to some. He was a strong orator: the Weekly Standard and Express in Blackburn (1 September 1894), for instance, criticised his socialism but praised the power of his performances, claiming that ‘he is too well known as a fluent speaker and really able debater to need to comment’. Another newspaper suggested that he gave ‘a comprehensive and telling performance’ (Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 12 December 1896). Indeed, the Socialist Standard, the newspaper of an opposition group, noted how his performance ‘always fetches ’em’ (6 April 1907). Moreover, Hyndman drew large audiences when speaking, which he did multiple times in a week, with those in attendance often numbering in the thousands. This was because, as the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent commented (12 December 1896), ‘Mr Hyndman’s visit … was a big draw’, and ‘where he lectured … was filled

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by an audience, every member of which paid for admission’. Clearly, though, Hyndman’s performance did not appeal to all. The fact that he was never elected is important, especially when others from this national party of which he was leader were. Many, then, did not react positively to his class-based performance. Tom Mann, a leading labour activist, for instance, believed that he ‘brought in “my class” to an objectionable degree’, while another suggested that his performance was ‘apt to prove irksome’.42 The working class were clearly not as deferential as Hyndman believed, and neither were they always willingly complicit in his performance; nor was the audience’s response always what he hoped for. The Weekly Dispatch (14 February 1886), for instance, commented on a speech that Hyndman delivered during the unemployment riots of 1886, noting: ‘then came Mr Hyndman, who said they [his working-class audience] were asked to be moderate, but how could they be moderate when they were out of work and starving? – a description the inapplicability of which to the well-dressed speaker himself did not escape shrewd comment among the crowd’. For some, Hyndman’s performance simply made him seem part of the elite and therefore part of the problem. Hardie may have suggested that ‘it is a quaint spectacle to see a top-hatted, frock-coated member of the prosperous middle class’ performing in the manner that he did, but quaint did not win votes.43 In electoral terms, Hardie was much more successful than Hyndman; as we have already seen, he was elected in 1892 at West Ham South, and he was the MP for Merthyr Tydfil from 1900 to 1915. To be sure, Hardie’s performance did not meet with universal approbation. However, criticism tended to come from the mainstream press, undoubtedly reinforcing the image he was trying to cultivate. The County Gentleman called his performance ‘a Guy Fawkes show’ (6 August 1892). The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, exclaimed that ‘the House is neither a coal store, a smithy nor a carpenter’s shop; and, therefore the entrance of Mr Keir Hardie … left a painful impression’ (7 August 1892). The Star simply commented that ‘his get-up was very obtrusive’ (quoted in the Clarion, 4 February 1893). Interestingly, Hyndman would also pass judgement. He noted how ‘there was a little bit of theatricality about his first appearance’, adding that ‘I did not admire Hardie’s cap’ because ‘I, too, felt for the moment that my favourite prejudices were being raked over in a very unceremonious fashion.’ Indeed, Hyndman went further, commenting how ‘I thought his coming to the opening of Parliament … was a little in the line of a Punch-and-Judy show, or of the advance guard of a wandering circus.’44 Clearly Hardie’s performance had the desired effect, not only in terms

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of electoral success, but also in contemporary reaction from the ruling elite and their mouthpieces, from whom he undoubtedly distanced himself. Revealingly, this act of distancing seems also to have included Hyndman. The historical legacy of the two figures, moreover, clearly reflects contemporary reactions. Hyndman is often caricatured, with his class-based appeals and performances leading many historians to present him as an archetypal middle-class man who did not understand the working class and was thus both unappealing and unelectable.45 History, however, has remembered Hardie by the image he created. Indeed, the potency of Hardie’s non-verbal, class-based appeal can still be seen today. The 2008 Labour Party conference, for example, voted him the party’s ‘greatest hero’.46 This image of a working-class boy ‘made good’ clearly fits with the aims and aspirations of the modern Labour Party in seeking to play down social roots and current social positions that are more akin to Hyndman than to Hardie. Indeed, Labour politicians still act in the same or similar set-piece performances to prove their roots or to distance themselves from the elite whose interests are seen to be reflected in the Conservative Party. Most recently, a number of labour figures (including Labour Party members and others), most divisively the controversial George Galloway, sought to show their collective displeasure at the response to the death of Margaret Thatcher by wearing cloth caps.47 Emulating Hardie, they were therefore using the cloth cap as a symbol of opposition to the system and to the eulogising of an elite. It is evident, therefore, that both Hyndman and Hardie were actors, using a theatrical frame, creating characters and playing a part for dramatic and political effect. Class appeals in this sense were politics as performance, with a clear link made between platform and stage and audience and constituency. Indeed, in many ways theatricality was a precondition of politics and, as Jon Lawrence has highlighted, ‘theatricality and performance lay at the heart … of classic, face-to-face exchanges between voter and politician’.48 Hyndman and Hardie were neither alone, in the labour movement or in British politics more generally, in acting a part; nor were they the only politicians to play on the non-verbal signifiers and rituals of class in their election campaigns. Though many politicians disliked the need to play a part (and we might possibly place Hardie in this category), others clearly relished the opportunity to test their acting abilities (we can certainly place Hyndman in this category). In Blackburn, for example, ‘Sir Harry’ Hornby when electioneering would base his appeal on performances which displayed his command of the local dialect and folklore. In Newcastle, meanwhile, Joseph Cowen, a prominent radical and founder member of the Democratic Federation, manipulated his image

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through clothing, appearing in a costume of workman’s corduroy and fustian despite having considerable wealth and his place within county society.49 In many ways then, in consciously playing a part and in putting on a performance, Hyndman and Hardie were simply appealing to the general theatricality of British politics in the period. This study has highlighted how the non-verbal, especially performance, was central to the class-based appeals of two of the leading socialist politicians of late Victorian British politics. This analysis of non-verbal discourses of political communication suggests a clear agenda for further research into the use of clothing as a political prop. It has also shown that the use of a theatrical frame was clearly crucial to that non-verbal discourse, both in terms of how politicians conceptualised themselves and in how they went about making their appeals. They conceptualised themselves as performers, deliberately seeking character types and roles for themselves, often on class lines. The case study has thus demonstrated the use of performance as a particularly useful analytical category. Ultimately, discourses of class were inextricably linked to turn of the twentieth-century performance cultures. Thus, we should neither ‘de-class’ late Victorian politics, nor should we look only at politicians’ words: their non-verbal performances were just as integral to political communication as the written and spoken word. Notes 1 For example see Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 2 For an extended critique of this thesis see Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 11–69. 3 For example see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–64 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4 As is evident in Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 5 For example see Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1880–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994); Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Cultures in Salford and Manchester, 1900–39

Class, performance and socialist politics (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); Lawrence, Speaking for the People. 6 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815– 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 331. 7 The most recent, and best, study which engages with this and surveys other studies is Jon Lawrence, Electing our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8 Richard A. Gaunt, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 9 For example see Deborah Mutch, ‘Re-Righting the Past: Socialist Historical Narrative and the Road to the New Life’, Literature and History, 18:1 (2009), pp. 16–34. 10 See Nick Mansfield, ‘Radical Banners as Sites of Memory: The National Banner Survey’ in Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 81–99; Nick Mansfield, ‘The Contribution of the National Banner Survey to Debates on Nineteenth-Century Popular Politics’, Visual Resources, 24:2 (2008), pp. 133–43; Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850–1925 (London: Anthem Press, 2013). 11 Parliamentary Debates (series 3), vol. 319, cols 138–201, line 140 (11 August 1887), http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1887/aug/11/bill-329-secondreading#S3V0319P0_18870811_HOC_266 (accessed 23 June 2015). 12 William Clarke, ‘The Influence of Socialism on English Politics’, Political Science Quarterly, 3:4 (1888), p. 550. 13 Thomas Kirkup, An Inquiry into Socialism, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Greens and Co, 1909; 1887), p. 1. 14 For the history of the SDF see Martin Crick, The History of the Social Democratic Federation (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994). For Hyndman see Marcus Morris, ‘H. M. Hyndman and the Development of British Socialism’ (PhD dissertation, University of Lancaster, 2010); Chushichi Tsuzuki, H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 15 For the early history of the ILP see Pelling, Origins; David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1885–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); D. James, T. Jowitt and K. Laybourn (eds), The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party (Halifax: Ryburn Publishing, 1992). The best study of Hardie remains Kenneth Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975). 16 A good, if early, overview can be seen in David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt, Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 17 For example see Ros Merkin, ‘The Religion of Socialism or a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon? The ILP Arts Guild’, in Clive Barker and Maggie Gale (eds), British Theatre between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 162–89. 18 Tracy Davis, George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre (London: Greenwood, 1994).

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The performance of politics 19 John Burns, William Morris, Bernard Shaw, H.W. Lee, Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, Robert Blatchford and Philip Snowden are some examples of such leading figures. 20 For example see Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1893–1905’, History Workshop Journal, 4:1 (1977), pp. 5–56; Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Ros Merkin, ‘The Theatre of the Organised Working Class 1830–1930’ (PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, 1993); Ian Britain, Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c.1884–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 21 H.M. Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 222. 22 H.M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London: Macmillan, 1911), p.  236. 23 Yeo, ‘New Life’, p. 28. 24 For a wider discussion of this see Joseph Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Martin Hewitt (ed.), ‘Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, special issue of Nineteenth Century Prose, 29:1 (2002); Janette Martin, ‘Oratory, Itinerant Lecturing and Victorian Popular Politics: A Case Study of James Acland (1799– 1876), Historical Research, 86:231 (2013), pp. 30–52. 25 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 287–8. 26 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, p. 55. 27 James Sully, ‘The Natural History of Dress’, Cornhill Magazine, 42 (November 1880), p. 572. 28 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–34), ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 48. 29 See Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002). 30 J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1921), pp. 28–9. 31 See John Belchem and James Epstein, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited’, Social History, 22:2 (1997), pp. 174–93. 32 Glasier, Morris, pp. 28–30. 33 See Joyce, Visions of the People; Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34 Hyndman, Further Reminiscences, p. 260. 35 Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life, p. 343. 36 Emrys Hughes (ed.), Keir Hardie’s Speeches and Writings (Glasgow: Forward Publishing Company, n.d.), pp. 118–19. 37 A. G. Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings (London: Alston Rivers, 1908), p. 213. 38 Morgan, Hardie, p. 55. 39 Hughes (ed.), Hardie’s Speeches, pp. 22, 23.

Class, performance and socialist politics 40 Hughes (ed.), Hardie’s Speeches, pp. 108–9. 41 He also stood in 1895, polling 1,498 votes, the Liberal candidate winning with 5,454 votes. In 1906 he polled 4,932 votes, the Liberal candidate again winning with 5,288 votes. He stood twice in 1910: in January he polled 4,948 votes, the Conservative candidate winning with 5,776 votes; in December he polled significantly fewer votes, 3,810, with the Liberal candidate winning with 6,177 votes. 42 Tom Mann, Memoirs (London: London Publishing Company, 1923), p. 41; Joseph Clayton, The Rise and Decline of Socialism in Great Britain 1884–1924 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), p. 12. 43 Hughes (ed.), Hardie’s Speeches, pp. 118–19. 4 4 Hyndman, Further Reminiscences, pp. 251–2. 45 For example see Thelma McCormack, ‘The Motivation and Role of a Propagandist’, Social Forces, 30:4 (1952), p. 391; James Young, ‘H. M. Hyndman and Daniel De Leon: The Two Souls of Socialism’, Labor History, 28:4 (1987), p. 537; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 323. 46 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7629992.stm (accessed 28 May 2009). 47 For an example see George Galloway on the Daily Telegraph website: www.telegraph. co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9995573/George-Galloways-plan-to-stopMPs-attending-Margaret-Thatchers-funeral.html (accessed 10 May 2013). 48 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, pp. 3–4. 49 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, p. 4.

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activism 4, 12, 27, 50, 57, 111–12, 113, 115, 117, 124, 237, 262, 270 Actresses’ Franchise League 111, 115 Adorno, Theodor 76, 81 affect, politics of 7, 48, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 63, 156, 167, 170 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1886) 134, 191 Alhambra theatre, London 89, 105, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 167–8 anti-theatricality 10, 46, 54, 57 see also theatricality Arnold, Matthew 85, 97, 98, 99, 101 Bailey, Peter 11, 77, 81, 98 ballet 28, 135, 143, 152–70, 189, 192 Birmingham theatres 133, 136, 138, 142 Black Dwarf 33, 36, 37 Blanchard, E[dward] L[eman] 187, 189, 190 Bourdieu, Pierre 12, 81, 87 Bratton, Jacky 41n, 77 Burke, Edmund 24, 46, 54, 195, 209, 217 Burke, Peter 2, 5, 7 Butler, Josephine 113–14 Cannadine, David 76, 78–9, 81, 172n censorship 11, 26, 28, 45, 61–2, 66, 85, 91, 119, 149, 184, 199, 201,

206–7, 211, 212, 240, 249 see also Lord Chamberlain and ­Examiner of Plays Chartism 22, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 225, 253, Cheer Boys, Cheer (1895) 180–1, 183 citizenship 4, 8, 30, 101, 133, 144 class 5, 22, 31, 47, 56, 60, 68, 76, 77–8, 80, 81–2, 86, 97–8, 103, 105, 115–16, 120, 177, 192, 241, 244–5, 259–63, 267–8, 269 costume and clothing as performance 51, 54, 112, 115, 119, 121, 135, 142, 156, 160, 169, 192, 252, 254, 263–4, 266–7, 270 Covent Garden theatre, London 26, 62, 200 Crowhurst, Andrew 76, 83, 84 Crystal Palace theatre, London 189, 242 cultural capital 12, 75, 81, 89, 90 cultural memory 65, 180, 248, 254

Davis, Jim 63, 135, 138, 186, 238, 255 Davis, Tracy C. 11, 95, 262 Disraeli, Benjamin 137, 164, 219, 222, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231 Drury Lane theatre, London 26, 70, 91, 134–5, 136–9, 142, 166, 176, 180, 181, 186, 189, 201, 203, 205, 217, 228, 255

Index education and theatre 10, 70, 82, 85, 89, 97, 99, 100, 102, 114, 166, 170 femininity 112, 114, 119, 122, 140, 142, 143 feminist campaigns 9, 112, 114, 115 feminist playwrights 117–18, 120–1 Fenianism 132–4, 136, 138, 141, 148, 249 Gladstone, William 80, 96, 100, 136–7, 141, 146–9, 220, 226, 230 Grundy, Sydney 121,123 Hamilton, Cicely 111, 112, 113, 114, 120, 122 Diana of Dobsons (1908) 120 How the Vote was Won (1909) 122 Marriage as a Trade (1909) 114 Hardie, Keir 51, 259–75 harlequinade 65, 68, 70, 72, 190, 191, 246 Harris, Augustus 135, 176–81, 255 hierarchy, social 12, 76, 79, 82, 91, 268 see also class Hilton, Boyd 2, 23, 57, 217, 220 historiography 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15n, 22, 59–60, 76–7, 79, 156 Holcroft, Thomas 37 Tale of Mystery, A (1802) 25 Hunt, G. W. 165 Hunt, Henry 30, 37, 225 Hunt, Leigh 64–5 Hyndman, Henry 51, 259–75 Ibsen, Henrik 99, 117, 118, 119, 262, Ibsenism 121, 124 imperialism 67, 98, 105, 133, 141, 152–70, 174–93, 255 see also nationalism Irish question 131–49, 219, 231 see also Fenianism Irving, Henry 76, 80, 82, 83, 88–9, 91, 97, 99, 104

Jones, Henry Arthur 97, 105, 119, 121, 240 Jubilee, Diamond (1897) 80, 156, 160–4 Jubilee, Golden (1887) 135, 191–2, 250, 253 Kean, Charles 103 Kift, Dagmar 77 Kruger, Loren 7, 96–7, 106 Lee, Nelson 67–8 Leeds theatres 6, 187, 204–5, legitimate and illegitimate theatre 6, 11, 26, 62, 66, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 136, 175, 201, 211 licensing laws 75, 83, 85, 244 Liverpool theatres 134, 138, 139–43, 145, 146, 149, 189, 205, 208 Lord Chamberlain and Examiner of Plays 11, 26, 33, 45, 61–2, 65, 69, 88, 90, 119, 145, 187, 201, 206, 208, 211, 240 see also censorship Lytton, Constance 115–17 Manchester theatres 28, 39, 90, 137, 144–5, 147, 148, 185, 189, 200 Martin, Theodore 102–3 Marx, Karl and Marxism 22, 60, 77, 80, 265 Marylebone theatre, London 48, 67, 191, 242 Mayer, David 2, 66, 70, 202 melodrama and the melodramatic 21, 23, 26, 38–9, 46, 55, 62, 117, 118, 119, 124, 132, 148, 176, 177, 180, 185, 227, 240, 242, 245 modernity 10, 12, 63, 69, 79, 92, 153, 210 monarchy 24, 78–81, 153, 160, 163, 169, 174, 199, 204, 209 Moody, Jane 2, 27, 62, 65, 75, 79, 240 music 26, 54, 138, 160, 169, 184, 189, 201

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Index music hall 57, 67, 75, 76, 85, 86, 90, 92, 97, 106, 136, 155, 156, 158, 162, 170, 175, 181, 239, 243–5, 246, 248, 249 musical comedy 82, 92 myth and ritual 2, 11, 39, 54, 66, 69–70, 72, 80, 82, 114, 120, 123, 201, 261, 267, 271 nationalism 23, 131–2, 134, 139, 145, 157, 178, 187 see also Fenianism, imperialism national theatre 6, 67, 80, 96–8, 103, 176 National Union of Women’s Suffrage 111, 113, 125 Northern Star 48–50 Olympic theatre, London 104, 181, 205 Ormiston Chant, Laura 85–7 Paine, Thomas 24, 29, 46, 54, 199, 209 Pankhurst, Christabel 115 Pankhurst, Emmeline 125 pantomime, 26, 64, 72, 90, 92, 131, 142, 146, 166, 177, 186, 190, 202, 205, 242, 245, 255 patriotism 23, 27, 137, 138, 143, 153, 158, 161, 167, 168, 174, 180, 184 see also imperialism, nationalism Peel, Robert 216–36 performative turn, performativity 2, 5, 8, 9, 138, 218, 260 Pinero, Arthur Wing 119, 121, 124 platform performance 4, 38, 45, 50, 51, 52, 57, 196, 225, 249, 260, 262, 271 political meetings 3, 29, 32, 36, 37, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55, 111, 113, 122, 199, 204, 225, 238, 254, 262, 264 politics and performance 2, 8, 24, 31, 33, 47, 51, 53, 61, 64–5, 67, 72, 111, 120, 146, 149, 157, 200,

202, 205, 207, 209, 217, 219, 260, 262–3, 271 Princess’s theatre, London 103, 180, 183–4 processions 53, 111, 113, 123, 125, 134–5, 142–3, 160, 163–4, 167, 188, 191–2, 201, 250–4, 255 protest 4, 23, 39, 50, 59, 61, 111–13, 132, 188, 237–55 public sphere 3, 8, 11–12, 53, 56, 113, 250 Punch 123, 132, 139, 176, 191, 220, 226, 227, 228–9, 253 Queen Caroline 23, 25, 45, 200, 202, 209, Queen Victoria 80, 135, 143, 153, 161, 163–4, 165, 184, 188, 192, 231 radicalism 9, 22–5, 27, 29, 31, 33, 36, 44–7, 49, 55, 57, 60, 64, 120, 199, 202, 205, 218, 225, 249, 253, 261, 265 Rancière, Jacques 45, 51, 57 reform 22, 27, 29, 31, 35, 62, 65, 87, 96, 147, 196, 205, 218, 221, 225 riots 23, 27, 36, 62, 178, 200–1, 238, 270 Ruskin, John 69 Sadler’s Wells theatre, London 26, 190, 193 satire 47, 62, 66–7, 71, 202, 205, 220 Schiller, Friedrich 97–8 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, (1832) 61, 200 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, (1892) 76, 82, 85, 87, 89, 249, 119, 244, 249 Select Committee on Theatrical Licensing, (1866) 75, 85, 106 self-help 55, 100 Shaw, George Bernard 6, 99, 118, 120–1, 123–4, 262 Southey, Robert, Wat Tyler (1794) 33–6

Index spectacle 3, 26–7, 53, 54–5, 62, 70, 99, 111, 112, 143, 152, 153–5, 157, 163, 165, 181, 184, 189, 193, 204, 260, 266 Stedman Jones, Gareth 22, 77, 81, 249 Stoll, Oswald 83, 84 strikes 30, 116, 147, 237–55 suffragettes 111–25, 159 male suffrage 28, 30, 209 Sullivan, Arthur 92, 160, 162, 184 Surrey theatre, London 26, 177, 187, 190, 192, 242 Tenniel, John 139, 142 Theatre Act (1843) 11, 27, 66, 75, 88, 146–7, 157 theatricality 5, 7, 11, 22, 47, 56, 62, 72, 111, 121, 123, 250–4, 271 see also anti-theatricality topical commentary 57, 59, 61–2, 66, 67, 68–9, 131, 140, 146, 155, 158–60 166, 167, 190, 202, 239, 242, 244

trades unions 196, 237, 248, 261 National Union of Dock Labourers 255 visual culture 3, 5, 23, 111, 132, 135, 143, 156, 162, 165, 168–70, 177, 253, 263, 267 war 129, 133, 164–8, 170, 176, 179, 180, 181, 189 Boer wars 129, 156, 161, 166, 167–8, 176, 183–4, 186 First World War 111, 125 Napoleonic wars 23, 27, 205 Weber, Max 76, 81, 82, 84 Westminster, Houses of Parliament 29, 30, 32, 50, 65, 123, 131, 136, 219, 266, 199, 202, 204, 217, 219–20, 225, 230, 237, 262 Wilhelm [Carl] 160, 172n Wollstonecraft, Mary 46, 48

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