Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894

Prologue

A VISIT TO THE CAFE DU GLOBE One evening in the summer of 1859, a seasoned journalist headed toward Leicester Square to cover the tableaux vivants currently on view at the notorious Cafe du Globe. On assignment from a new weekly journal of town life bearing the ingenuous title Peeping Tom, the reporter was planning a piece that would escort a select group of would-be “swells” on a vicarious expedition into the great, mirrored expanse of the cafe. Once there, he would describe the special entertainment available under the Nordic-romantic sobriquet of “Walhalla,” revealing its risqué character for the delectation of present and future men-about-town (fig. 1). Evidently familiar with the varied amenities of the square, the journalist brought to his task an intimate knowledge of this licentious, Frenchified territory and its checkered history, together with an eagerness, qualified by no little cynicism, for navigating its disreputable byways. What he did not yet quite know about himself was his readiness to invoke moral judgments on the transgressive character of whatever might meet his eye. If his experience had stretched back as little as ten or fifteen years from 1859, the Peeping Tom journalist would have been well aware of the surge of popularity in tableaux and poses in the London of the late 1840s — “tableau mania,” the Athenaeum called it, in 18491 — and their widespread emergence in the less respectable houses of entertainment and libation in the vicinity of Leicester Square and the Strand, and perhaps most notoriously in “Lord Chief Baron” Renton Nicholson’s Coal Hole. Nicholson claimed he had himself introduced the poses plastiques entertainments at the Garrick Head tavern in 1846, where some singers billed as “Female American Serenaders” posed while Nicholson gave an “illustrated lecture” on poetry and song.2 A bill for Nicholson’s “Judge and Jury Society” at the Coal Hole Tavern, Fountain Court, in the Strand, offering “Poses Plastiques Every Evening, at Half-Past Seven, and After the Theatres,”3 indicated that Nicholson was adding poses to his usual “Mimic Court of Law” Prologue
1. “Walhalla. Late Miss Linwoods, Gallery, Leicester Square.” Undated playbill, ca. 1847. Author’s collection. entertainments — mock trials whose subjects were often related to seduction or “crim. con.” (that is, “criminal connection,” or adultery) — proceedings in which men dressed as women were cross-examined, producing much “double entente” and immoral language.4 A French critic scoffed at the pretentiousness of a Coal Hole tableau representing the judgment of Paris, whose personages, three large women and a black-bearded fourth, “who it was difficult to say was male or female,” turned slowly on a revolving stage, “mute and fixed in the fitful glimmer of bluish-purple light.”5 A contemporary woodcut, datable as 1854 (fig. 2), captures the seedy ambiance of Nicholson’s establishment and anticipates the comparable amenities and aura of the more elegant Cafe du Globe. In a mirrored room men in tall hats, some standing, some seated at tables with drinks and cigars, pretend indifference to a couple posed on a raised stage beyond an archway. The two figures are an ostensibly mostly nude woman, with a skirt wrapped loosely around her hips below the waist, exposing her navel, who half embraces another, winged woman whose only clothing is a sash wrapped around one leg and hip, terminating between the legs; perhaps they reprePrologue : : : 3 2. “The Coal Hole, Strand.” Photograph of woodcut, ca. 1854. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. sent Cupid and Psyche. The same tawdry atmosphere is captured in a bill for Nicholson’s Cider Cellars, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, to which Nicholson had repaired in January 1858, featuring “Poses Plastiques” and “Tableaux Vivans,” along with a new “Judge and Jury Society” case, “The Great Social Evil” — the by now universal euphemism for the chronic problem of prostitution in modern society. The top of the bill is embellished with a drawing of a woman posing with hands clasped behind her head, unclothed except for a V-shaped loincloth.6 The Peeping Tom reporter would almost surely have known of such attractions, alluded to in all their midcentury shabbiness in plate 3 of George Cruikshank’s The Drunkard’s Children, a pictorial moral narrative in the Hogarthian genre depicting the sad downfall of the son and daughter of a drunkard whose demise had been immortalized in Cruikshank’s earlier series The Bottle. The plate depicts a...