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notes introduction 1. Earlier studies of theatre audiences like those of Allardyce Nicoll and George Rowell have tended to privilege the theatres of the West End and to have identified their values as universal ones and the preserve of a particular class. See A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, Vol. 4, Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800–1850, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) and A History of Late Nineteenth Century Drama 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946); and G. Rowell, The Victorian Theatre 1790–1914, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). To be sure, since Nicoll and Rowell first analyzed nineteenth-century audiences, a number of critics have questioned the orthodoxies that they had established or have opened up alternative modes of exploration . Of particular relevance are Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), and the three studies by Michael Booth, in Michael R. Booth, Richard Southern, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, and Robertson Davies, The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. 6, 1750–1880 (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1975); in ‘‘East End and West End: Class and Audience in Victorian London,’’ Theatre Research International 2, 2 (February 1977), 98–103; and in Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), which have usefully mapped out some of the additional territory that any investigation of nineteenth-century audiences must necessarily explore. 2. In many ways the patent theatres were national theatres; they brought to one place a cross section of the community and provided one of the few public forums, as Marc Baer has shown, in which dissent could be expressed, M. Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 3. See the Select Committee on Public Houses, 1852–3 in British Sessional Papers : House of Commons (London, 1853), xxxvii, Minutes of Evidence, 445, which suggests that these strategies were less than successful in a climate of free trade. 4. 22 November 1865, LC1/153, Lord Chamberlain’s Papers (LCP), Public Records Office (PRO). 5. A Journeyman Engineer [T. Wright], Some Habits and Customs of theWorking Classes. By a Journeyman Engineer (London 1867; repr. New York 1967), 198–9. 6. The Victorian Music Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62–3. 7. Patterns of leisure are discussed by J. Mekeel, ‘‘Social Influences on Changing Audience Behavior in the London Theatre, 1830–1880,’’ Ph.D. thesis (Boston University , 1983); concepts of middle-class respectability by G. Best, Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Fontana, 1979); the changing definition of the middle-class in J. Rule, Albion’s People: English Society 1714–1815 (London: Longman, 1992), F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1991); the emergence of the lower middle class in G. Crossick ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). Changes in the structure of theatre buildings to accommodate the increasing sense of class division can most clearly be seen in Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (London: Methuen, 1973) with his references to the contemporary nineteenth-century concerns that appeared in The Builder. 8. In preparing this book we have consulted a number of studies of other historical periods, in particular, Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), J. J. Lynch, Box, Pit and Gallery: Stage and Society in Johnson’s London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), H. W. Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), and Leo Hughes’s The Drama’s Patrons (Austin, University of Texas, 1971). As well, we have consulted recent theoretical models relating to audience behavior and composition as proposed in Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2d ed. (London : Routledge, 1997); Marvin Carlson, ‘‘Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance,’’ in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie, eds., Interpreting the Theatrical Past (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1989); Susan R. Suleiman and I. Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Interesting material that allows a useful comparison to be made between nineteenth-century audience receptionand that of contemporary television is to be found in John Fiske, ‘‘Moments of Television : Neither the Text nor the Audience,’’ in...

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