Music Hall & Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (review)

This study of the late-Victorian music hall is a puzzling mixture of suggestive insights, assiduous scholarship, special pleading, and theoretical turgidity. Its argument proceeds from a number of loosely intermeshed premises that provide the informing principles for the whole book. Most would have benefited from more rigorous analysis, which would have prevented their becoming collectively something of a conceptual straitjacket, restricting rather than facilitating the convincing deployment of core ideas.

The main article of Barry J. Faulk's faith is that by the 1880s music hall was seen by many middle-class critics as having become "cleansed and capitalized" (4) as it moved up the social scale; he suggests that this "narrative of vernacular decline" encouraged the emergence of "a new kind of professional critic" (4). Thus Faulk sees professional music hall criticism that "privileged the trained and credentialed specialist" (4) as both creating and being created by this myth of the commercialization and emasculation of a rich, and richly historicized, vernacular culture. The critics themselves—confidently designated "intelligentsia" (1) or "literary intellectuals" (3) by Faulk with virtually no analysis of who precisely they were or whether they can meaningfully be defined as a coherent group— are deemed examples of, in Harold Perkin's phrase, "the rise of professional society" and the hardening of distinctions between amateur and professional. That professionalism, in Faulk's view, constitutes "a hallmark of British modernity" (4). For Faulk's immediate purposes, modernity "designates a crucial transformation in the development and middle-class reception of London music hall in the late-Victorian era, and nothing less than a structural change in discourse on the halls" (5). From this emerges a construction of "the popular" so powerful that it fosters "a notion of culture that bolstered another powerful fabrication, the nation, which in turn created a climate of opinion congenial to the growth of the centralized state" (5).

This is a heavy burden for a relatively ephemeral medium like music-hall criticism—even as practised by such "literary intellectuals" as Arthur Symons, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Max Beerbohm, and ultimately T. S. Eliot—to shoulder. It is not surprising, therefore, that the argument falters somewhat, most conspicuously in the second chapter, "Camp Expertise: Arthur Symons, Music Hall, and the Defense of Theory." On the strength of analysis of a handful of brief articles—one of them, "A Spanish Music-Hall," devoted to Symons's discussion of his experience of a Barcelonan hall (which has somewhat questionable application to an argument about the popular culture of late-Victorian London)—Faulk argues that Symons "theorized his relation to music hall entertainment" (51) and generated "a passionate defense of criticism and theory" (55). As articulated here, this seems to boil down to little more than a complicating of the relationship between amateur and expert (or "aficionado," in the Spanish context), performer and observer, insider and outsider. Symons's easily-bestowed status as an "aficionado" of the Spanish music hall is granted here on the flimsiest of qualifications, not least because he freely acknowledges that he does not understand the lyrics of the songs to which he is listening.

Faulk is on less precarious ground in his discussion in Chapter 3 of Laura Ormiston Chant and her 1894 campaign to close the notorious promenade at the Empire Theatre. He has interesting things to say about the paradoxical ways in which battle lines were drawn, and he explicates well the gendered vested interests that successfully, and unfairly, reduced Chant in the public mind to the caricatured figure of Mrs. Prowlina Pry. A similar subtlety informs Chapter 5's analysis of the controversies surrounding the tableaux vivants at the Palace Theatre—controversies in which paternalistic expressions of social concern about the vulnerability of the women who posed masked much more fundamental resistance to their appropriation of a right, as working professionals, to self- determination. Also useful is the intervening chapter entitled "Tales of the Culture Industry: Professional Women, Mimic Men...