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1.Music Hall
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
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The success of the penny gaff, the precursor to variety entertainment, stirred a moral panic in otherwise seasoned mid-Victorian social explorer Henry Mayhew. The prodigal creativity of working-class audiences elicited his alarm and apprehension. Less than a century later, cultured observers appeared certain that music hall acculturated its audiences. Moreover, they found that the form offered a reliable index of national vitality and values, and the most authentic expressive form of native Englishness. Star performers received acclaim by critics as the true curators of their culture,as representatives of English character. Whereas Mayhew proclaims that music hall endangers the moral fiber of the English laborer, T. S. Eliot argues that the death of Music Hall 1 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Marie Lloyd, “the greatest music hall artist of her time in England,” constitutes a decisive crisis for both the working classes and England itself.1 Eliot’s pronouncement proved durable. In , George Orwell praised comedians like Little Tich and Max Miller as caretakers for English culture, observing that they expressed “something which is valuable in our civilisation which might drop out of it in certain circumstances.”2 Similarly, when John Osborne needs a metaphor for the nation in his play The Entertainer, he finds it in the music hall, and embodies his sense of national decline in the failing career of an artiste gone to seed. What exactly caused this sea change in attitudes? How did a decidedly lowbrow practice come to be invested with “deeper” meanings, let alone come to gain the status of national treasure? To produce this shift in critical reception, I argue, professional intellectuals reworked potent metaphors of cultural vitality and decay. The earliest generation of middle-class observers of music hall treated the art form as an alien, threatening “other.” Professional culture criticism of the s and s, on the other hand, provided a structure for the integration of the music hall into the canons of middle-class culture. In fact, the new discourse of professional criticism reflects a novel bourgeois imperative to integrate the popular within its symbolic repertoire. In contrast, literary professionals ranging from Max Beerbohm to Elizabeth Robins Pennell to T. S. Eliot formulated a well-nigh Manichean opposition between music-hall entertainment and what they cast as middle-class conformist culture. In the process they produced a new genre, the musichall lament, in which what was most vital and most endangered about the English people could be found in the music hall. Thanks to this genre, the music hall retained its centrality as trope for England long after it ceased to be a privileged entertainment form. The “lament” served as a perennial rhetorical resource from the s, through the generation of Eliot and Orwell , and extending to subculture observers such as Colin MacInnes in the s, as well as s British pop bands such as the Beatles and the Kinks.3 Even those who looked for Englishness in other forms appear to have been compelled to offer an interpretation of the music hall in order to speak credibly for the English public. The roster of culture producers who endeavored to speak positively on behalf of music hall includes a host of major and minor figures in the arts: Arthur Symons, George Moore, Joseph Pennell, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and Herbert Horne, in addition to Max Beerbohm, Selwyn Image, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Wratislaw, and painter Walter Sickert.4 These figures were Music Hall You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. hardly univocal in their shared music-hall lament. In the case of Symons, for instance, the music-hall account could spiral into complex, reflexive commentaries that suggested a new, self-conscious spectatorship. Max Beerbohm, on the other hand, felt free to send up Symons’s claims to have discovered the deep meaning of the music hall.5 Even so,Beerbohm himself insists that music hall needed perceptive critics to appreciate the aesthetic achievements of its star performers. What these observers shared was a commitment to a stylized experience of patronizing the halls, and an intimation that the form struck at the foundations of middle-class taste...
