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THE THEATRES AND MUSIC HALLS COMMITTEE On Wednesday morning, 10 October 1894, the Theatres and Music Halls Committee of the London County Council convened in its usual quarters in Spring Gardens, Charing Cross. It had a very full agenda, consisting of the many applications for new license or renewal of license from theatres, music halls, and theatres of variety submitted to it in the previous weeks. Aware of the great publicity that had surfaced concerning the challenge to the license of the Empire Theatre of Varieties by Laura Ormiston Chant and her colleagues in the National Vigilance Association, a large, eager crowd of journalists, partisans on either side, and curiosity seekers were present. Impatient though all these people were, they would have to bide their time until the application from the Empire, number 44, came up in its turn. Meanwhile, they could also anticipate the potentially sensational consideration of the application from the Palace Theatre of Varieties, where, it was well known, simulated nudity could be gazed upon nightly during the succession of tableaux vivants. For George Edwardes there would be no auditions, no rehearsals, no business, routine or urgent, to be conducted this day at one or another of his several enterprises in or near Leicester Square; nor would opportunity free him for even part of an afternoon at the races. Like all the others present in Spring Gardens, he and his solicitors would be forced to sit quietly, but perhaps sharing feelings of guarded confidence, while the lengthy hearings progressed. Also present and waiting patiently was a larger, perhaps even more confident group made up of Mrs. Chant and the several colleagues who accompanied her on this October morning, a group not limited to the five coauthors of the letters of complaint sent the previous month to the committee. All were members of the NVA, a zealous reformist organization and one of the most high-profile and active of various late-Victorian social purity organizations. The NVA had been founded in 1885 to help enforce the Criminal Law Amendment Act passed 2 : The Licensing Committee Meets  that same year.1 Involving itself in the censorship of alleged pornography and in other aspects of indecency in public life, the NVA had emerged in the wake of W. T. Stead’s scandalous, inflammatory revelations about the white slave trade in “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” an exposé published in Stead’s own Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885.2 It may have been the first time Mrs. Chant had attended a meeting of the licensing committee , but, as events would show, she and her NVA colleagues had taken care to make themselves knowledgeable about the legal aspects and rami- fications of the complaint they would lodge. The Theatres Committee, one of the hardest working of London County Council committees, had its work cut out for it. The number of music halls had increased steadily over the century to a peak of popularity around 1870, after which time, as populations shifted and more stringent restrictions came into force, they declined somewhat. Still, they numbered in the dozens in the 1890s, continuing to exhibit an even more remarkable mélange of audiences (heterogeneous or not so, depending on the locale), a reassuringly predictable yet varied range of offerings, and impressive powers of attraction. Meanwhile, the traditional theatre, the number of whose venues drew equal with the combined numbers of music halls, pleasure gardens, and other sites of popular entertainment around 1890, was maintaining and even increasing its perennial appeal and becoming more genteel in the process, winning back the more polite, affluent audience that had abandoned playgoing years before.3 Behind this phenomenon of extraordinary growth and vitality lay a regulatory body that usually remained well out of sight, but whose influence on the character of popular entertainment in London was becoming increasingly intrusive and formative. The Theatres and Music Halls Committee was slightly over five years old in the autumn of 1894, having been appointed in March 1889 and given responsibility for all matters, including safety precautions, affecting the licensing of theatres, music halls, and premises used for music and dancing.4 Licenses were required to be renewed annually. In order for a music hall to gain the committee’s recommendation for renewal of license, prior inspection and certification by the council architect ’s department had to occur, along with a structural inspection by the Department of the Chief Engineer.5 Supporting the...

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