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2. The Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel he history of the Pavilion Theatre compels us to challenge the conventions through which East End audiences were usually depicted. Situated opposite the London Hospital and on the site of a former clothing factory1 in the busy Whitechapel Road, one of the major thoroughfares in and out of London, the Pavilion opened in 1828. The first of the major East End theatres to open in the nineteenth century, stimulated no doubt by the expansion in local population that the docks and increased trading had fostered, it was constructed by a local cat’s meat man, Wyatt,2 and Farrell, an actor. The new theatre’s luxurious accommodation was advertised, particularly its ‘‘elegant and commodious boxes [which] have been constructed and adapted for respectable Family Parties and which the Proprietors flatter themselves are fitted up in a manner to give satisfaction and ensure Patronage.’’3 The Pavilion evidently mirrored the patent theatres in its magnificence and aspirations . A. E. Wilson cites a court case in 1829, in which a prostitute appeared before the magistrates on a charge of disorderly conduct, after being refused admission. Farrell claimed that the management was resolved no female ‘‘of light character’’ should be permitted to enter the boxes. Yet this indication of aspirations towards respectability is offset by a newspaper report the same year, which referred contemptuously to ‘‘river pilots, its distinguished patrons.’’4 Further, although it is dangerous to overargue the relationship between repertoire and neighborhood, it is clear that its early emphasis on nautical melodrama may well have been aimed at a local population in part familiar with marine pursuits. T. J. Serle’s evidence to the Select Committee in 1832 also implies the Pavilion was drawing local audiences.5 Douglas Jerrold ’s powerful indictments of naval and domestic abuses, The Mutiny at the Nore (1830) and Martha Willis the Servant Girl (1831), both first performed at the Pavilion, may have marked the theatre not only as a home of melodrama, but of plays that were critical of aspects of British 55 { The Pavilion, Whitechapel } society in those turbulent years leading up to the first Reform Bill of 1832. The theatre was surrounded by ‘‘a typical low-income working class neighborhood, comprised of small businesses, coffee shops, pubs, greengrocers and assorted enterprises.’’6 Yet the commercial energy of the district, with its reliance on docks and trade, had been noted by C. A. B. Goede as early as 1807.7 The Reverend H. Hadden, writing of St. George’s-in-the-East Parish in 1880, suggests that in 1820 the East End was far less poverty-stricken than later in the century: Sixty years ago St. George’s was in the zenith of its prosperity. It was not then, as now it fairly may be called, an almost entirely poor parish. The London Docks had it all their own way . . . and a large proportion of the imports which came to the Thames were discharged within their boundaries. Many wealthy merchants and traders resided in the parish, and on Sunday morning one might have seen a line of carriages drawn up outside the church gates, waiting to take their owners home from service. Houses, each of which now give a dwelling to three or four separate families, were then the town residences of the parochial merchant princes, Wellclose Square being pre-eminently the most fashionable quarter, as containing the house of the Danish Ambassador. Ratcliffe Highway was a busy mercantile thoroughfare.8 Millicent Rose also provides a sense of the industrial vitality of the East End in the early and middle years of the century with its cabinet making and tailoring, docks and ship building, and breweries and sugar refineries , the latter being one of the chief sources of occupation in Whitechapel .9 It is for this vital community that the Pavilion was presumably catering, at least until the slump of the late 1860s. Throughout the 1830s the Pavilion continued to present melodrama yet also aspired to a respectable audience. Wilson quotes a panegyric by a manager of the theatre in 1840, announcing the Pavilion as ‘‘an eastern national theatre where the cause of moral improvement will be strenuously advocated and supported in the selection of dramas calculated to instruct and improve the youthful understanding,’’ adding that ‘‘parents and guardians may visit the theatre with their females without the fear of having the young mind contaminated by ribald and trashy productions which have too long been the order...

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