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Introduction . For more on the development of music hall, as well as on issues of audience and class, see Penelope Summerfield, “The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music-Hall in London,” in Popular Culture and Class Conflict, –, edited by Eileen and Stephen Yeo (Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, ), –; and Peter Bailey, “Custom, Capital and Culture in the Victorian Music Hall,” in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England , edited by Robert Storch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ). The scholarly essays collected in Peter Bailey, ed., Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, ); and J. S. Bratton, ed., Music Hall: Performance and Style (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, ), are essential reading. For specific studies of music-hall song and lyrics, see Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, ); Peter Davison, Songs of the British Music Hall (New York: Oak, ); J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, ); and Lawrence Senelick,“Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs,” Victorian Studies (–): –. Peter Bailey’s Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) is a sustained effort to bring cultural studies perspectives to the phenomena of music hall. Dagmar Kift’s The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) provides a thorough account of the marketing and commercial history of the music hall throughout the century; it details shifts in the composition of the music-hall audience . Kift also gives necessary attention to provincial music halls. For a comprehensive bibliography of the music hall, see Lawrence Senelick, David Cheshire, and Ulrich Schneider, editors, British Music-Hall, – (London: Hamden Press, ). . Eric Lott observes that the multiple entertainments combined in the minstrel show are still familiar to anyone “who has seen American television’s ‘Hee Haw’” in his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Notes You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Class (NewYork: Oxford University Press,),.The capsule summary of the form that Lott provides here also describes British music-hall entertainment. Readers who recall American TV’s long-running Ed Sullivan show also have a ready analogue to variety theater. . There is another justification for my focus on the London halls. The nation’s major metropolis was and remains a synecdoche for the nation. Interpreters of the London music hall often overlook the local nature of the entertainment in order to highlight its universal —i.e., national—meaning. See my reading of Percy Fitzgerald’s Music-Hall Land below and of Henry Nevinson’s short tale “Little Scotty” in chapter . . Like Lawrence Grossberg, I understand cultural studies as constituting a body of work that originated in debates within British Marxism; cultural studies insists, in Grossberg ’s words, that “much of what one requires to study culture is not cultural”; see Grossberg ’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place (New York: Routledge, ), . Cultural studies work attempts to provide a social context for artistic practice, without indulging in the illusion that context makes for absolute knowledge. The practice of cultural studies accepts the impure, uneven working conditions that impact the production of art and scholarship. Grossberg again: “[Cultural studies] does [not] attempt to smooth over the complexities and tensions; it chooses instead to live with, to see any historical struggle as neither pure resistance nor pure domination but, rather, as caught between containment and possibility ” (–). My understanding of cultural studies also draws on the rich, contextual work of Raymond Williams, including The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, ), The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, ). I owe a considerable debt to the work of Stuart Hall as well, especially his generous and insightful accounts of debates within cultural studies. Such work includes “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, –, edited by Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, ), –, and “Cultural Studies and Its Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Nelson Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, ). In a manner suggestive of the syncretism of cultural studies, Hall includes debates within cultural studies as constitutive of the...
