Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Jim Davis (review)

In John Ruskin’s view, the spiritually elevating character of pantomime made it comparable to a church service, as they were “two theatrical entertainments where the imaginative congregations still retain some true notions of the value of human and beautiful things” and likewise “retain some just notion of the truth, in moral things” (qtd. in Davis 36). Meanwhile, in the view of Francis Close, Dean of Carlisle, the press reports of the scandalous Boxing Day pantomimes of 1859 were “calculated to strike the heart of the Christian, and send us all on our knees to pray to God to avert the judgement we deserved” (qtd. in Davis 93). Janice Norwood, in discussing the many in-jokes aimed at the East End audiences of the Britannia, describes pantomime as “a supremely self-conscious form of theatre” (82), and her assertion is underlined by Jill A. Sullivan’s descriptions of the abundant localized humor featured at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, and by Ann Featherstone’s survey of commentary by reviewers for the Era on regional productions elsewhere. But Jim Davis quotes Anne Varty’s suggestion that the power of pantomime lay in the obliteration of self-consciousness—“children in the pantomime audience could enter a magical world of infinite possibility, while the adults were invited to escape into a world of anarchy and subversion” (7)—and her assertion is seconded by many extracts from Victorian observers, including the reviewer for the Era who praised one of William Beverly’s scenic depictions of Fairyland as “so exquisitely glowing in its execution” as to transport the viewer “into regions so conceived, and so peopled, only in his dreams” (qtd. in Davis 92).

Davis’s clear and concise introduction to this collection of essays serves to account for some of these apparent contradictions, as he surveys the radical changes wrought in the content and character of pantomime over the course of the nineteenth century. Pantomime began the 1800s as an entertainment unequally divided between an Opening derived from literature or legend and a much longer Harlequinade, in which the characters were transformed into the stock types of commedia dell’arte and spent most of the rest of the play riding roughshod over social and legal restrictions. Toward mid-century, the Harlequinade began to shrink in length and importance while the now-foregrounded Opening became more family-friendly, as refined adaptations of fairy tales were embellished by show-stealing scenic spectacles. But another shift marked later decades, as performers and jokes were imported from the risqué music halls, though less open-minded patrons may have been placated by added doses of jingoism and conservative social comment.

This able examination of the form’s evolution through time provides a very useful grounding, but neither summary nor chronology is at the heart of this volume’s method. Its essence, rather, is snapshots—pictures of pantomime taken through an unexpectedly wide variety of lenses, providing a kaleidoscopic but highly vibrant image of the genre as a whole. Seen from diverse perspectives, the contradictions in judgment cited above seem not just explicable but inevitable, and the reader exits the book with a less unitary but far richer concept of what Victorian pantomime was than that with which he or she entered.

Geography provides one of the lenses through which a number of essays take their views—and one of the major merits of this collection is that its geographical focus extends beyond the West End of London to other parts of the capital and beyond. Thus, Davis’s own essay discusses pantomime as it was in the 1880s and 1890s at the middle-class mecca of Drury Lane, where “the poor, the unemployed, the socialist, . . . progressive drama, racial difference and female emancipation” were “all pilloried” by the scripts (115); Norwood, conversely, looks some miles east, to the working-class district of Hoxton, where the action of the Britannia’s productions reflected “a preference of rewarding the...