Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  But there was a very limited number of animal-tamers. In 1823 Covent Garden staged its next big hippodrama. Astley pe`re et fils were now both dead, but their Amphitheatre had been taken over by a worthy successor, Andrew Ducrow. Ducrow (1793-1842) was the child of circus performers,* who trained him as an equestrian from his earliest days. (‘Trained’ is a euphemism: he was once beaten by his father for breaking his leg during a performance.) After travelling through Europe with his equestrian act in the post-Waterloo period, he returned to London and appeared in an extravaganza mounted by Planché at Covent Garden in 1823, Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico. This was full of dramatic incident, including Cortez quelling a mutiny in which his ships were set on fire, and his entry into Mexico at the head of an army, with both horses and men in full armour appearing at full gallop. But the big scene was in Act II, when Cortez and his men were attacked by the ‘natives’. The Times was admiring:

  A steep ascent runs from the floor of the house up the side of a cataract; over which a bridge is thrown at a considerable height from right to left; and again, at a very sharp angle, from right to left. Up this steep the horses pass - rising from below the level of the stage, as though they sprang from some defile by the bed of the waterfall - they cross the line of bridges, thus making two turns within the view of the audience - and return…descending dexterously by the same pass which they ascended.

  Then a ‘native’ manages to unseat one of the Spaniards, wrestles his horse away from him, and mounts. But he has never ridden before, and ‘the steed darts up the precipice by the cascade in pursuit of his companions; crossing the first bridge over the waterfall, [the rider] is laid hold of by some tree or projections; he falls from the saddle, over the bridge, and sinks in the gulf below.’65 This astonishing stunt was performed by Ducrow himself.

  But Ducrow was not content simply to perform. In the following year he moved on to the next great stage in his career, when his production of J. H. Amherst’s The Battle of Waterloo opened at Astley’s. This was the second-most successful hippodrama ever staged (for the most successful, see below); it received the traditional approval of the Duke of Wellington, and ran for 144 nights, before being revived endlessly over the next fifty years.* It was in three acts, each act ending with a battle: Act I had the battle at Marchienne; Act II the battle of Quatre Bras, and Act III Waterloo itself, with scenic extras including a baggage wagon set on fire, frightened horses bolting, the Black Brunswickers forming squares to repel the cuirassiers, and, the popular finale, the flight of Napoleon. Napoleon was played by Edward Gomersal, who spent most of his career as the French emperor, also appearing in Bonaparte’s Passage of the Great St Bernard, Bonaparte’s Invasion of Russia; or, The conflagration of Moscow and The Life and Death of Napoleon.66 In 1831 the Surrey staged Napoleon; or, The Victim of Ambition, with moving dioramas, and in the same week Covent Garden staged a ‘Grand Historical and Military Spectacle’, Napoleon Buonaparte, Captain of Artillery, General and First Consul, Emperor and Exile.67

  But Covent Garden was competing that year with a hippodrama that was more successful than even The Battle of Waterloo. This was Ducrow’s Mazeppa. In 1819 Byron had published his poem Mazeppa, in which an officer in the army of Charles XII of Sweden recounts how, in his youth, he had been caught in a scandalous liaison, and as punishment was tied naked to the back of a wild stallion that was whipped into madness and released to gallop off with him. The stallion stopped only when, at the point of death, it reached the Ukraine. There Mazeppa was found and rescued by Cossacks. Henry Milner produced a version of this piece of exoticism for the Coburg Theatre in 1823, and when he became the house playwright for Astley’s in 1831 he reworked it as a hippodrama.* John Cartlitch, who played the hero, became as closely linked with Mazeppa as Gomersal had been with Napoleon: he played it over 1,500 times (and when he was demoted in old age to playing the Tatar khan, he wept).

  The play had everything: troops in procession, troops in cavalry charge, troops in hand-to-hand combat. While the production throughout was up to Ducrow’s high standard, it was the wild ride of the stallion carrying Mazeppa across the steppes of Russia that created the frenzy. The stage directions for the end of Act I and the opening of Act II read:

  The horse is brought forward by three or four grooms, who with difficulty restrain him. He is led to the centre…Music. Cassimir [another name for Mazeppa] is now bound to the horse’s back…Music. The horse is released, and immediately rushes off with Cassimir. He presently re-appears on the first range of hills from L. to R., all the spectators rushing to the L., and as he crosses

  again from R. to L., they take the opposite side. When he has reached the third range of hills, they commence pursuing him up the hills, and as he progresses, they follow. When he has disappeared in the extensive distance, the whole range of hills is covered by the servants, females, guards, and attendants, shouting, waving their arms and torches, forming an animated tableau. Olinska [the woman with whom Mazeppa had the affair], who has fainted, is supported…in the front, while the Castellan [her father] expresses exultation, completing the picture, lighted by the glare of torches and red beacon-flares, on which the drop falls. [End of Act I]

  [Act II] Moving panorama of the course of the Dnieper River, running from L. to R. On the flat is seen its bank, with a tract of wild country. A tremendous storm of thunder and lightning, hail and rain…Music. Mazeppa discovered on the wild horse, stopping a few moments, apparently from exhaustion…The wild horse gallops off with Mazeppa, R. Music. The storm abates, the sun rises, and the panorama begins to move. The horse, still bearing Mazeppa fastened to his back, is seen wading up the stream from R. to L.…Music. A group of wolves is seen on the opposite bank, as if watching and pursuing the horse and Mazeppa…Music. An enormous vulture is seen hovering above him.68

  In fact the horse galloped across the stage three times, in zigzags, with Cartlitch tied to its back; then another horse, with a dummy on it, continued the ascent up the bridges at the back.69 The horse was then placed on a treadmill in front of a moving panorama of the banks of the Dnieper, to continue its wild ride to the accompaniment of music, thunder and lightning.70

  Mazeppa continued its unabated popularity for more than half a century: in the 1830s in America alone there were two productions running simultaneously in New York, two in Philadelphia and one in St Louis. Sanger’s Circus toured with another version throughout Britain. The money it brought Ducrow was phenomenal. In 1841 Astley’s burned down yet again, and Ducrow suffered a stroke, dying the following year. Even when the depreciation in value from the fire was taken into account, Ducrow left £60,000 in his will - the same sum that Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex and a son of George III, left when he died the following year.

  In 1861 Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress, debuted in the role of Mazeppa in Albany, New York (her ride made even more exotic by the fact that she wore nothing but skin-coloured ‘fleshings’ - quite a different thing from when Cartlitch had done so). This quickly became her most famous role, and she was soon playing Mazeppa on Broadway, in San Francisco, in Baltimore and in other cities in America, as well as in London and Paris.* With this, Mazeppa had become nothing more than an opportunity to look at women’s legs: its glory days were over. But it was not that Menken finished off hippodrama; instead, it was the fact that hippodrama was dying which made it possible for Menken to appear at all. What was killing off the genre was an alternative type of reality that was appearing onstage - a reality that made horses seem un-modern, and a relic of the old century.

  Now real animals onstage were no longer exciting in and of themselves. Instead it was a separate strand of stage effects, which had been developing since de Loutherbourg’s sets had been so well received in the 1770s, that was coming to the fore. By the 1820s, many reviewers saw it as part of their brief to review the scenery - sometimes to the detriment of the play. Arnold’s Library of Fine Arts warned theatregoers that ‘The only thing at present worth entering a t
heatre for is the scenery’, while Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his diary that the pantomime at Covent Garden in 1825 was dull, ‘but the scenery beautiful; and this is one of the attractions of the theatre for me’. Spectacle was expected in the provinces no less than the metropolis. The North Shields Dramatic Censor told its readers that for one play the designer had created ‘several exquisitely painted scenes’; the Norwich Theatrical Observer reported that in the production of Macbeth under review, ‘The Banquet scene was finely displayed; the Gothic screen behind the throne, executed by that ingenious artist, Mr Thorne…was truly magnificent.’72

  Some designers began to take umbrage at their traditional lowly place in the hierarchy of theatre. In 1834 Clarkson Stanfield, known as the heir of de Loutherbourg, was aggrieved when his sumptuous backdrop for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table at Drury Lane was constantly hidden from the audience by a milling retinue of actors and supers, not to mention horses. He demanded that the curtain should go up first on a stage empty but for his set, ‘for the audience to gaze on and admire, and the multitude sent on afterwards’. When he was refused, he quit.73 Stanfield was right; the Drury Lane management was wrong. Percy Fitzgerald, a journalist and protégé of Dickens, made the situation explicit: ‘We go to the theatre not so much to hear as to look. It is like one gigantic peep-show and we pay the showman, and put our eyes to the glass and stare.’74

  There were two paths that were followed, both developing from this urge for scenic effects, one ‘high’, one ‘low’. The high was interesting, and - as is often not the case - also successful. The low was not only interesting, it radically altered the direction of drama for half a century. For those who believed theatre to be an art form, not mere entertainment, it was simple, perhaps even natural, to see a link between theatre and painting. This connection had been made before. As early as 1733 Drury Lane had mounted The Harlot’s Progress; or, the Ridotto al’Fresco, written by Theophilus Cibber and dedicated ‘to the ingenious Mr Hogarth, (On Whose Celebrated Designs it is Plann’d)’. Cibber had attempted to produce an animated version of the first four engravings in Hogarth’s series, creating stories for the dramas they depicted, using both traditional narrative and tableaux vivants, in which the actors struck poses when they reached the point that Hogarth had shown. Hogarth’s episodic narratives made an easy transition to drama: seventy years later the Coburg advertised ‘a New Interesting, Local and Moral Drama, replete with Splendid Pageantry, founded partly on Hogarth’s celebrated series of Engravings, and partly on a Drama which has recently acquired great popularity in Paris, called, THE LONDON APPRENTICES; OR, INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS’.75

  By 1800, tableaux were common enough that the theatrical versions were integrated into other art forms. In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), the novel’s happy ending parodied the form. Lady Delacour was in charge: ‘Let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect…Captain Sunderland - kneeling with Virginia, if you please, sir, at her father’s feet - You in the act of giving them your blessing, Mr Hartley - Mrs Ormond clasps her hands with joy…Clarence, you have a right to Belinda’s hand, and may kiss it too - Nay, miss Portman, it is the rule of the stage…There! quite pretty and natural!’76 This took for granted that the novel’s audience would understand precisely the theatrical references. It was also an early precursor of the ‘picture plays’ which became increasingly popular from about 1830 for the following halfcentury. In Planché’s The Brigand in 1829, the stage directions read, ‘The distance is shrouded in mist at the rising of the curtain and becomes clear during the execution of the following Round[,] the Symphony to which must be sufficiently long to allow the contemplation of the picture formed from the 1st of the popular series of Mezzotinto Engravings after Eastlake - “an Italian brigand chief reposing &c.”.’ Later in the stage directions the brigand’s wife is instructed to leap up on a rock so that she can be seen ‘looking anxiously down the mountain. - Forming the second picture from Eastlake’s Series, “The Wife of a Brigand Chief watching the result of a Battle”.’ The scene ends with the characters grouped to resemble the last picture in the series, ‘The Dying Brigand’.77 Eastlake’s engravings had just been published, and could be seen in print-shop windows, enabling all in the audience to make direct comparisons.

  The most famous realization of a painting was probably in Douglas Jerrold’s play The Rent Day (1832), which was written specifically to produce a scene that mirrored Sir David Wilkie’s painting of 1815, Distraining for Rent, as Jerrold’s stage directions made clear: ‘The Interior of Heywood’s Farm. The Scene, Furniture, &c., as in Wilkie’s Picture of “Distraining for Rent”.’ At the end of the play, Heywood cries, ‘God Help us! God help us!’ and ‘buries his face in his hands. The other Characters so arrange themselves as to represent WILKIE’S Picture of “DISTRAINING FOR RENT”.’ A reviewer reported that ‘The arrangement of the various persons, as the drop fell, was so striking that the audience testified their approbation by three rounds of applause.’ But Jerrold did not have a monopoly on a popular image, and within a couple of months another two plays based on the same painting had opened. In addition the Examiner praised the ‘Domestic Burletta’ at the Adelphi, which had not one but two realizations, reproducing Wilkie’s Village Politicians as well as his Reading of the Will: ‘Both were very good…the characters exactly filled the scene in most perfect grouping…The artist has reason to be satisfied with the arrangement of the manager, he has done ample justice to his original.’78 Other popular images that were reproduced in this way included Cruikshank’s The Bottle, Abraham Solomon’s Waiting for the Verdict and Frith’s Railway Station and Derby Day. A slight variant on this sort of representation was to be found in the reproduction of the Laocoön already noted in Hyder Ali. Ducrow was admired for his imitations of classical statues, as well as for hippodramas: his Raphael’s Dream, or, The Mummy and Study of Living Pictures (1830) was an entire series of references to classical statuary, produced while standing on the back of his horse as it galloped around the arena.

  This idea that theatre and paintings were in some way interchangeable was perhaps reinforced in the 1880s when the managers of the Haymarket Theatre produced a new design for the proscenium arch, ‘set all around in an immense gilded frame, like that of some magnificent picture’, wrote Henry James, understanding immediately its function.79 From the early part of the century, stage designers had used painterly elements specifically to be recognized as restatements of themes and images found in old-master paintings. Equally, contemporary artists incorporated elements from stage design into their own work. John Martin’s wild imaginings of chaos could perhaps not have been painted without his having seen many scenes of stage destruction, and his paintings in turn fed back into stage design. In 1834 Sardanapalus, based on Byron’s poem of a dramatic revolt against the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, was presented at Drury Lane, and the Athenaeum commended it highly - especially the last scene, when the vanquished king and his favourite slave immolated themselves on a blazing funeral pyre: ‘The burning itself, and the disappearance of Sardanapalus and Myrrha were capitally managed, and drew shouts of applause…We believe we need not inform our readers, that the last scene is a copy by Mr Stanfield, from Mr Martin’s picture, “The Fall of Nineveh”.’80

  In 1853 Charles Kean also produced a version of Sardanapalus, and now the threads of influences were so tightly interwoven that it is difficult to see where each began and ended. A. H. Layard had encouraged the British government to purchase the ‘winged bulls’ from his Assyrian excavations, and in 1847 they arrived to be displayed at the British Museum to great fanfare, the Illustrated London News having recorded their journey as they made their way to Britain. There was also Layard’s own book, Nineveh and its Remains, with the winged bulls as a frontispiece, which appeared the following year; by 1851 it had been abridged as a popular railway-library book. The possibilities for paying entertainment did not end there: there was a panorama of Nimrud and a diorama of Ni
neveh, complete with a simultaneous lecture by the artist, who had been at the excavations with Layard. So by the time Kean began work on his production the public was familiar with the accepted view of what Assyrian art looked like. Kean thought that Sardanapalus could not have been produced successfully earlier, because ‘until now we have known nothing of Assyrian architecture and costume’.81 For him, and for many of his audience, the ‘reality’ of pictorial imagery was a mark of the success or failure of serious drama. Not everyone agreed. The essayist G. H. Lewes heavily criticized Kean’s production, and by extension the growing reliance on stage effects more generally: ‘Is the Drama nothing more than a Magic Lantern on a large scale? Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama? It is a strange state of Art when the mere accessories become the aim and purpose of representation - when truth of archaeology supplants truth of human passion - when “winged bulls” dwarf heroic natures!’82