Music Hall and Modernity; The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (review)

Perhaps no single national development in Victorian England reveals so much of cultural change as the ascendancy of the middle class and its emerging tastes. While scientific thought and attendant skepticism at midcentury assaulted previously held values, by the last decade of the century, industrialization and women working outside the traditional home effected profound value change. The seams between the middle and lower, and the middle and upper classes abutted abrasively in the growth of a vulgar and often raucous entertainment industry. The English music hall, vilified and lauded by those who saw its activities as both nationalistic aesthetic and moral degradation, emerged in changing taste and social order. Barry J. Faulk researches the progression of the music hall as its journalistic supporters and its detractors saw it. He details the rise of professionalism in the critic and the performer, and the growth of commercialism in entertainment.

Faulk looks at those who deprecate music hall and those who praise it from the 1850s through the turn of the century. Early critics such as Henry Mayhew determined that music hall entertainment was coarse and detrimental to the working class. By the 1890s, however, music hall transcended the lower class and was defended by writers such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell as reflective of traditional English taste, and by theatre wit Max Beerbohm as vital in its variety. Faulk examines work by William Archer and G. H. Mair, and by T. S. Eliot, all defending and criticizing music hall in popular culture. Most important, Arthur Symons, poet and essayist, who identified himself as an aficionado, extolled and supported music hall shows as popular entertainment encompassing Victorian "camp." All of this work emerged as professional discourse defining and justifying middle-class taste in a changing culture.

In addition to journalistic critics and essayists, the discourse of reformers weighed into the cultural development of the music hall. Laura Ormiston Chant, liberal thinker and lecturer on women's suffrage and temperance, spoke out against rampant sexual displays by prostitutes within the celebrated promenade of the Empire Theatre. On more than one occasion, she, with Lady Henry Somerset, dressed herself as a woman of the street in order to interview women and support a position against such exploitation of women before the London County Council. Professional critics, most often men, saw objections of this type as prudish, supporting their pro-Empire positions on aesthetic grounds.

In literary work, writers created fiction around music halls, the performers, especially women, and the men who supported them. Walter Besant's Dorothy Wallis (1892) and Hall Crane's The Christian (1897), among others, deal with moral and social issues attendant upon women taking roles in music hall entertainments. Society dominated by men gave way to a changing order where women could work, and this was often followed by a masculine backlash against societal standards that in any way limited promiscuity.

Visual pictures called tableaux vivants, usually re-creations of famous gallery paintings, became important variety acts during the 1890s and were questioned on moral grounds. Women were often dressed in fleshcolored body stockings and posed in the still pictures as nudes. Directors like Edward Kilyani formed troupes and utilized new technology in staging and lighting. Faulk examines Lady Henry Somerset's objections to the form as well as Bernard Shaw's defense of the tableaux. At issue was the employment of women in a perceived risqué enterprise and the morality of an audience who gazed at it.

The music hall changed from the 1850s to the 1890s in its variety, its audiences, its production techniques, and the professionalism of those employed. In his conclusion, Faulk returns to the validity of the critic who aesthetically understands both the performer and the audience.

The book is organized into five chapters, with an additional introduction and conclusion. It also has extensive notes and bibliography. The notes section is especially well designed, with headings in bold that reference entries to...