Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, and: Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996 (review)

Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, by Peter Bailey; pp. x + 258. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £42.50, $59.95.

Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996, by John Springhall; pp. ix + 218. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, $55.00.

Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City is an engaging compilation of previously published essays by a scholar whose work has long been as noteworthy for its wit and rhetorical energy as for its erudition and command of period cultural arcana. In these times of straitened library budgets and overflowing stacks, there are few essay collections that can justify, either economically or spatially, such reconstitution within hard covers. But here is one which adds up to considerably more than the sum of its component parts. Individual essays take on a new resonance in conjunction with each other, forming themselves into a collection whose inter-generic ambitiousness does full justice to the twinned key terms--popular culture and performance--of its title.

There are nine essays, ranging in original publication date from 1977 to 1996, and in subject matter from the "problem" of Victorian leisure, through an analysis of the notion of working-class respectability, a generously illustrated exploration of the comic art of the penny weekly Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, three pieces on music-hall business and performance, two on questions of gender typing as embodied in barmaids and chorus girls, to a final whimsical but suggestive rumination on the phenomenon of noise. The collection is introduced by a limber exercise in proleptic summation and historical self-recovery entitled "Social History, Cultural Studies and the Cad." Peter Bailey's own subject-position-- working-class Oxford scholarship boy, emigration to Canada and academic success, the intellectual dislocations occasioned by transatlantic repositioning and the need to come to terms with the disciplinary inroads made by questions of gender and sexuality as "earnest blokes like myself worried away at class" (9)--informs this apologia-cum-contents digest. While the self-reflexiveness is mediated through much too speculatively sophisticated a mind to manifest the caddish persona he archly assumes, the sense of a close relationship between Bailey's own formative experiences and his subject matter informs without overdetermining the whole book.

Despite his more recent engagement with questions of gender (which bears fruit here in the essays on "The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype" and "Musical Comedy and the Rhetoric of the Girl, 1892-1914"), dissection of the complexities of class performativity, both on stage and off, remains perhaps Bailey's greatest strength. Thus in "A Role Analysis of Working-Class Respectability," he convincingly argues a case for individual assumption and doffing of the clothing of respectability as opportunity dictated, rather than accepting, as the Victorian middle classes tended to do in their assessment of the moral proclivities of social inferiors, the limiting taxonomy of fixed terms. Recognition of such subversive possibilities is dependent on the ability to decode ironic inflection from superficially compliant working-class response. Is the addressing of a frocked bishop as "Madam" manifestéation of childlike confusion about correct forms of address, and therefore appropriately treated with good-humoured condescension, or conscious mockery masquerading as naiveté, inspired by the transgendered innuendos of music hall? This kind of working-class "knowingness" is the central subject matter of Chapter Five, "Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture," but in various ways it provides the basis for all of Bailey's engagements with popular culture. The empowerment that such culture--whether of the penny press, the music hall, or the pub--gave to those who by virtue of class or gender were notionally unempowered has rarely been demonstrated with such cumulative conviction and subtlety.

Certainly not by John...