Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  This south- and eastward expansion of the theatres was a replication of the southern and eastern expansion of the city. The spreading dockyards along the Thames had created good job opportunities, and the population followed the work until, in 1901, the East End of London had the largest working-class population in the world - possibly as high as 2 million.22 With that expansion in population came an expansion in entertainment locally: from the 1828 opening of the East London Theatre (later the Royalty, and then the Brunswick; this was the theatre that collapsed on p. 177), a stream of theatres followed - the City Theatre in Cripplegate and the Garrick in Leman Street (both 1831), the Standard in Shoreditch (1835), the City of London in Norton Folgate (1837), and the Grecian and the Britannia in Hoxton and the Effingham in Whitechapel (1830s and 1840s, all saloon theatres, see pp. 372-4). By 1866 six East End theatres accounted for 34 per cent of the total theatre audience in London, while more than 63 per cent of the capital’s theatre capacity was found outside the West End.23

  The East End audience for the most part lived and worked near the theatres. But fewer and fewer of the audiences of the West End lived in that part of town. There was a general consensus by mid-century that most members of the audience travelled in to London, or at least in to central London, to attend the theatre. In 1855 John Hollingshead, later manager of the Gaiety Theatre, told a parliamentary select committee that ‘the old metropolitan playgoer lives out of town, and does not go so much to the theatre as he used to do; the provincial people come to town, and fresh audiences are created every night.’ Horace Wigan, the manager of the Olympic, agreed with him, saying that theatres were ‘in very great proportion’ supported by the non-London resident.24 This had been made possible by the railways and, from 1863, by the new Underground system, which was expanding to meet demand. Those living in the suburbs or even further away could travel in to see a play without having to have their own transport to get home. By the 1880s and 1890s, in addition, the new streets of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue with their stylish theatres had been bulldozed through the old slum areas, creating middle-class entertainment locations where previously had been Dickensian rookeries. To add further to a suburban audience’s sense of safety in foreign territory, these streets were now well lit with gas lights. Winsor’s gas-light demonstration of 1804 had led to the creation of the first company to supply gas lighting, in 1814; within eight years 200 miles of gas mains had been laid.25 G. A. Sala wrote for many in London when he said that ‘He who will bend himself to listen to, and avail himself, of the secrets of the gas, may walk through London streets proud in the consciousness of being an Inspector - in the great police force of philosophy - and of carrying a perpetual bull’s-eye [lantern] in his belt.’26 Gas meant light, and light meant safety.

  The railways brought in new audiences to London; they also transported London theatre to the provinces. Previously, as we have seen, touring companies consisted of local theatrical troupes on annual circuits performing a repertory of plays. Now two new forms of touring were made possible by the ease and economies of the railway. A West End hit, a single play, could be toured throughout the country by a company that was created by the play’s London management solely for that purpose, and that disbanded at the end of the tour. The second type of touring company was closer to the old provincial tour: this was a first-rate company which had a repertory of pieces ranging from melodrama to farce to Shakespeare, which toured continually, but, unlike the old provincial companies, was formed by top-class performers with West End-standard productions. These companies could be very successful: the Compton Comedy Company toured for thirty-five years. (Both kinds of tour eventually killed off the provincial theatre company, if very slowly - it survived in a ghostly form into the 1950s.) Audiences everywhere expected first-rate actors in first-rate productions, and the number of people prepared to attend a performance could now support several touring companies of a single successful play from London, all out on the road simultaneously. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas were particularly suited to this system; in 1879 there were a 1st and 2nd Pinafore company; by 1880, there were A, B and D companies touring the same, plus a C, or Children’s, company. In 1881 the D’Oyly Carte company had five touring companies; in 1884 there were seven, as well as the London company, the D’Oyly Carte company.27 While Gilbert and Sullivan had a number of hits to tour, there was enormous potential even for one-off successes: Charley’s Aunt, in 1893, had seven touring companies criss-crossing Britain.28

  The continued growth of the cities was changing access to theatre. It was also changing the way plays were produced. Previously, when populations were small, and the number of regular theatregoers smaller still, a run of a few weeks was considered perfectly successful for any show - Garrick’s Jubilee pageant had been a great success, running as it did for twenty nights in a row, and then another fifty-one performances after that. Until the catchment area for theatres had become large enough to be able to draw on audiences for months at a time, the repertory system, which relied on a small group of very regular customers, of necessity had to prevail. Once the population passed a certain level (it appeared to be about 3 million in London), then a long run could be sustained, with an audience that constantly renewed itself. Long runs were naturally more economical, as the investment in rehearsal time, in costumes and in scenery became a smaller proportion of the whole.

  In the 1840s only four plays ran for more than 100 nights, and they were not consecutive. In the 1850s sixteen managed that feat, and Charles Kean’s 1857 production of The Winter’s Tale ran for 102 consecutive nights, then the longest run ever. By the 1860s eleven plays had achieved 200 nights, while six had reached 300. Tom Taylor’s Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) ran for 407 performances.* In 1875 Henry James Byron’s Our Boys began its record-shattering run of 1,362 performances.† In the 1890s, 169 plays made it past their hundredth performance, another 73 reached 200, and 39 passed 300.30 Now, instead of small productions, economically staged, for a finite audience that returned time and again, the theatre world revolved around plays with large casts and even larger technical support teams to produce elaborate scenery and special effects for audiences that were constantly renewed.31

  The new long run contributed in part to a drop in the price of admission. In the eighteenth century the pit, which was the location for ‘honest citizens’, cost 3s.; the first gallery, for the upper working classes, cost 2s. This was a high sum, but the production costs were equally high - at Drury Lane 150 people worked in the theatre ( just over half of them actors), with annual running costs of approximately £40,000.32 By 1842, prices for seats in the pit ranged from 1s. (for the Queen’s and the Surrey), to 1s. 6d. (Sadler’s Wells), 2s. (the Adelphi, the Olympic and the Strand), and up to 3s. for theatres that considered the appeal to exclusivity worth the reduction in audience size - Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the English Opera, and the St James’s and Haymarket theatres.‡ The first gallery at the Queen’s or the Surrey, could be gained for a mere 6d., however, and most others settled at 1 or 2s.33 East End theatres charged even less: the Britannia had gallery seats at 3d. or 4d., and the pit was 1s. 6d.34 Yet it was not as if the number of people employed in the theatres had dropped commensurately with the prices (and neither had the wage bill: wages rose steadily through most of the nineteenth century). In 1832 Covent Garden had 1,000 employees, and spent over £60,000 annually.35

  Instead, money was being made in part from non-theatre revenue: from refreshments, either directly or from selling licences to serve food and drink to an outside contractor. There was also a small income from playbills, which were sold in the auditorium until the 1870s, when they were replaced with programmes. Librettos were sold too, and many theatres had annual sales of their props and costumes. But the main increase in revenue came from increasing audiences, and increasing professionalization of the box office.* Until the 1880s, tickets were written out by hand, which was a slow, laborious process and one that was open to fraud - a dishonest booking
agent could sell many more places than the theatre held, or claim to have sold far fewer and hang on to the cash. Possibly as a result of this, in the late 1860s a large number of patents were filed for various methods of checking admissions, or producing printed consecutive tickets, and by the 1880s the modern system of pre-printed tickets with counterfoils, which had a date, price and seat number on both halves, was in place.36 From the 1860s to the end of the century many bent their minds to finding ways to fit more and more people into the same-sized theatres: in 1860 a patent was filed ‘for the purpose of facilitating the passage of spectators between the rows of seats in the pits of theatres or in other places where long rows of benches are used’; another proposed a seat that is ‘raised, and the occupiers of the seats can then stand close to the projecting parts’; in 1873 there was yet another, this one for the first time proposing something similar to the modern tip-up seat that makes it possible to set rows of seats tightly together while still giving access to late-comers.37

  All these things made theatres more comfortable, as well as easier to get to, and theatres in the West End and the provinces were attended by the most respectably bourgeois in the land (apart from an evangelical minority). Queen Victoria adored the theatre: in 1838 alone she went to Covent Garden for Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons, James Kenny’s farce The Irish Ambassador, and another farce, The Omnibus, by Isaac Pocock, as well as his melodrama Rob Roy McGregor; she also attended a pantomime and the opera there (but didn’t trouble to write down the titles of the shows she saw). At Drury Lane that year she saw Harlequin and Jack Frost, plus a ‘lion drama’, The Lions of Mysore (see below).38 Apart from the lack of Shakespeare, it was a fairly standard - and wide - range: farce, pantomime, melodrama, drama and animal shows.

  Pantomime was a new genre, having developed only in the eighteenth century, and its novelty encompassed its spectacular form, the use of new technology to achieve it, and also the length of its run. By the middle of the nineteenth century, pantomime took up an ever larger proportion of many theatres’ calendars: the investment in the spectacle was huge, and the audience to witness it equally huge. In Leeds in 1885 the Grand Theatre made an annual profit of £2,067, of which £1,766, or 85 per cent, came from its ten-and-a-half-week run of Sinbad the Sailor, which was popular with the Leeds audiences, and further drew in nearly a quarter of a million visitors from the surrounding regions, who arrived in specially organized excursion trains. Many other theatres devoted similar periods of time to such lucrative business. As Charles Kean said pragmatically, ‘There is a certain sum to be got in a certain time…The case reduces itself to a matter of arithmetic. So many holiday visitors for a given number of weeks, give so much and no more.’39

  On its first appearance pantomime was not considered to be primarily for children. It was Joseph Grimaldi, almost single-handedly, who took the genre to the forefront of theatrical entertainment. It had already been popular; now it was fashionable. Grimaldi had been born into the trade: his grandfather (nicknamed ‘Iron Legs’ Grimaldi) had been a pantomime performer, as had his father; Grimaldi made his first appearance, aged three or four, as an ‘Evil’ that popped out of Pandora’s box in a 1781 pantomime of the same name. His great achievements were first at Sadler’s Wells and then at Covent Garden, where he transformed the role of the Clown from a rustic booby into a mischievous, vengeful sprite, gleefully spreading havoc as he lightly danced his way through the evening.

  At the beginning of the century, pantomime appeared at four set times in the year: from Christmas Day to mid-February, at Easter, in early July, and from the Lord Mayor’s Show in November for a few weeks. (Provincial theatres also used this November date, even without the street pageant.) Gradually, the dates began to spread, with the weeks after the Lord Mayor’s Show trickling on until they met the performances that started on Christmas Day. The original form developed too over the same period.

  At the beginning of the century the formula was fairly rigid: there were a couple of scenes where a standard fairy-tale story was set up, usually involving a wicked father refusing his daughter’s wish to marry. These straightforwardly dramatic scenes, told in verse, ended with a spirit of some sort descending and turning the lovers into Harlequin and Columbine, and the father and his approved suitor (or perhaps his servant) into Pantaloon and the Clown (always Grimaldi’s role). A harlequinade followed, taking up the rest of the performance, as Pantaloon and the Clown chased Harlequin and Columbine through a variety of settings, which ranged from the purely imaginative to scenes of contemporary life with satirical or political undertones. In the last scene the spirit descended once more and blessed the happy couple, and a rousing finale finished off the evening.

  By the 1830s the harlequinade began to atrophy, and the earlier scenes, inflated into major spectacles, took over, followed by a transformation scene that could last up to half an hour. These early scenes used stock fairy-tale characters - Cinderella, the Babes in the Wood, Dick Whittington - and set them in an imaginary fairy realm.* In 1827 Prince Pückler-Muskau went to see Mother Goose, and described it in some detail:

  At the rising of the curtain a thick mist covers the stage and gradually rolls off. This is remarkably well managed by means of fine gauze. In the dim light you distinguish a little cottage, the dwelling of a sorceress; in the background a lake surrounded by mountains, some of whose peaks are clothed with snow. All as yet is misty and indistinct; - the sun then rises triumphantly, chases the morning dews, and the hut, with the village in the distance, now appears in perfect outline. And now you behold upon the roof a large cock, who flaps his wings, plumes himself, stretches his neck, and greets the sun with several very natural Kikerikis. A magpie near him begins to chatter and to strut about, and to peck at a gigantic tom-cat…this tom-cat is acted with great ‘virtuosité’ by an actor who is afterwards transformed into harlequin…Meanwhile the door opens, and Mother Skipton [Shipton], a frightful old witch, enters with a son very like herself. The household animals, to whom is added an enormous duck, pay their morning court to the best of their ability. But the witch is in a bad humour, utters a curse upon them all, and changes them upon the spot into persons of the Italian commedia dell’arte, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine and the rest, who then persecute each other without rest, till at last the most cunning conquers.

  In the next scene we are transported to a village street, the centre of which is occupied by a tailor’s workshop. In the open front of this sit several apprentices stitching industriously. A gigantic pair of shears is fastened above the lintel as a shop sign. Harlequin races in and, with a gigantic spring and a somersault, crashes through the first-floor window. Pantaloon and his friends now rush in in pursuit, gesticulating to each other, and one of them points to the broken window. Pantaloon enters the shop but, as he is rushing up the stairs, Harlequin emerges from the chimney and escapes over the rooftops. Pantaloon then enters the upper room, puts his head out through the broken window and turns this way and that in search of Harlequin; unfortunately at that moment the great blades of the shears close and cut his head off. Not in the least discouraged, Pantaloon withdraws from the window, comes downstairs and begins to look about the street for his head. At this moment a poodle comes on, sees the head and runs off with it, with Pantaloon in hot pursuit. Before Pantaloon gets off the stage, he is met by Harlequin who is now disguised as a doctor. He explains his plight (by gestures), and Harlequin takes from his pocket a jar of ointment with which he rubs the stump of Pantaloon’s neck. This causes the head to reappear out of the neck. Pantaloon recognizes Harlequin and sets off after him. His followers cannon into each other and fall on top of one another on their way off the stage…

  The scene now changes to the path, which winds up a mountain-side towards a lofty castle in perfect perspective scale, so that everyone who is climbing up it diminishes in size proportionately. Gradually they all disappear, and finally [a] colossal pie, which is being carried by [an] assistant, goes down like the setting moon.
/>   We now find ourselves in the great hall of the castle, which belongs to a beneficent magician who banishes Mother Shipton and her son to the centre of the earth and restores all the characters to their proper human form. Harlequin is recognized as the rightful prince and marries Columbine.

  Clouds now cover the stage, and from the midst of them rises a balloon in which there is a pretty little boy. This ascends to the roof of the theatre and, as it is circling round the chandelier, the whole stage scene disappears through the floor and stars shine through the clouds - a very pretty illusion. The balloon now descends, the earthly scene rises again, and the whole spectacle ends with tightrope artists and acrobats.41

  The harlequinade still survived in Pückler-Muskau’s account, but within four years it would be banished almost entirely. By then many of the pantomimes had ceased to be pantomimes, even in name, and had become simply extravaganzas. The hero of the extravaganza was James Robinson Planché (1796-1880), a descendant of Huguenot refugees. His first play, ‘a Serio-Comick, Bombastick, Operatick Interlude’, had been staged at Drury Lane in 1818, but it was in 1831, with his Olympic Revels, or, Prometheus and Pandora, the opening production at Mme Vestris’s Olympic Theatre, that he created a new genre. Olympic Revels was the first of thirty-six pieces he was to write in the next seven years (his total output numbered at least 180, and included the libretto for Weber’s opera Oberon). Its tone can be judged from the opening scene. Jupiter, Neptune, Hercules and Plutus, the god of wealth, are playing whist, but Jupiter has lost his temper over their chattering and refuses to play any more: