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

1: Mrs. Chant at the Empire

THE EVENING OF 30 JULY 1894 Laura Ormiston Chant was moved to visit the Empire Theatre of Varieties because of the unhappy experience there of two American male friends. As she would later explain to the members of the Theatres and Music Halls Committee, earlier in the year her friends had gone to the famous theatre of varieties in Leicester Square with the object, innocent enough, of hearing coster songs sung by Albert Chevalier, a famous exemplar of the genre. They appeared to have missed Chevalier, but what they found at the Empire was shocking in the extreme; they complained of “the character & the want of clothing in the ballet” and of being “continually accosted at night & solicited by women.”1 Having been alerted by her friends to what they considered indecent exposure on the stage and scandalous behavior, including solicitation, in the second-tier promenade, Mrs. Chant decided to investigate, but put off her visit until July, when the “living pictures,” the Empire’s more homely term for tableaux vivants, were causing a great stir. She may have suspected that the Empire’s living pictures would be as offensive as those she had heard of at the Palace Theatre of Varieties, a short walk to the north from Leicester Square, where simulated nudity was nightly on view; her colleague W. A. Coote, the secretary of the National Vigilance Association, had seen and complained about a whole series of what he thought flagrantly unacceptable presentations involving apparently scantily clothed or fully unclothed women presented in alluring poses. Mrs. Chant’s first experience at the Empire would con- firm her American friends’ opinions and would even move her to plan a return visit, and then another, as she and her colleagues in the NVA began to consider how they might respond to a situation they viewed as outrageous and intolerable. No record appears to have survived of their collective intentions, but the arrival in late September of a unison chorus of letters of intent from six members of the NVA at the hearing rooms of the Theatres and Music 1 : Mrs. Chant at the Empire
Halls Committee speaks well enough for itself. In fact, Mrs. Chant would end up visiting the Empire promenade no fewer than five times in the weeks leading up to the October meetings of the Theatres Committee. On each visit she was accompanied by a sister or one of her NVA colleagues. On the first three visits she wore plain dress but found that this attracted undue notice and singled her out as different. “You had better mind how you behave to-night,” she remembered overhearing an attendant cautioning an outspoken woman in the promenade, “as there are strangers round.” From then on she wore her favorite party dress — “such a pretty dress,” she later told a reporter for the Vigilance Record, “the same dress I spoke in at the Women’s Suffrage Festival at Boston — black lace over coloured silk, with an opera jacket and a pretty little bonnet to match.” The presence of the bonnet would still have proclaimed her a stranger — “after all,” Mrs. Chant admitted, “there was not much evening dress about it” — nor would her constant note taking have gone unnoticed.2 Still, there was a limit to Mrs. Chant’s ability, or inclination, to blend in with her surroundings, and she had more important things to accomplish than to try to remain invisible. Although she “did not wish to attract unnecessary notice,” she “was there to take notes & make my observations,” she later would explain to the members of the Theatres Committee. The very fact that she and her companion would actually have gone together to the infamous precincts of Leicester Square at night speaks of her unusual courage and determination. To have returned four additional times was the act of a woman on a crusade. At some time shortly before 8:00 P.M. on the evening of 30 July 1894, Mrs. Chant and her friend Lady Henry Somerset, one of the vicepresidents of the National Vigilance Association, up to London from her mansion in Reigate, set out alone from the Chant residence in Gower Street, a respectable middle-class and professional neighborhood, and headed toward Leicester Square, about a mile to the south. Their destination was that “elysium of the jeunesse dorée,” the Empire Theatre of Varieties .3 Mrs. Chant had serious business to conduct, of a nature particular enough to warrant bringing along her opera glasses. There was a...