In Household Words Charles Dickens wrote: “Last night I was in an immense
theatre, capable of holding nearly 5,000 people. What theatre? Her
Majesty’s? Far better. Royal Italian Opera? Far better. Infinitely superior
to the latter for hearing in; infinitely superior to both, for seeing in.”
Dickens was speaking glowingly of the Britannia in Hoxton, East London, one of
the new generation of “saloon theatres” that was taking music hall to ever
bigger audiences in the 1850s. Dickens’s polemical defence of these halls –
which he sees as temples of a new, popular folk-art form that was morally
educative, self-regulating and uplifting – suggests that the music hall
provided a secular form of the Mass in which the audience were themselves
identified and uplifted as members of a general community.
One wonders which of the acts treading the boards in 1857 might have led him
to these conclusions. Maybe it was the the banjo-playing blackface minstrel
E. W. Mackney, the “bearded lady of Geneva” Josephine Clofullia, the
tightrope walker Caicedo (“the King of the Wire”), or maybe Napoleon the
Wizard Dog.
He may have seen a troupe of acrobats called the Chinese Brothers (“the
original wonders of Pekin!” exclaimed one playbill), or Stolberg &
Lawrence (the “Albanian minstrels”, who actually came from Hull), or J. H.
Stead, whose USP was to wear a close-fitting striped suit and a dunce’s cap
and execute a lengthy series of bizarre, stiff-legged jumps before leaving
the stage.
While music hall was to enjoy its greatest success in the “golden age” between
1885 and 1914, the mid1850s was the critical point at which the phenomenon
spilt out of the taverns into ever larger premises. The 1843 Theatres Act
had, inadvertently, assisted this process. The main thrust of the act was to
allow theatres around the country to present “legitimate dramas” such as
Shakespeare that had previously been permissible only at the two “royal
theatres” at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. But it also allowed unlicensed
venues to operate as pubs while presenting music and variety turns.
Unlike legitimate theatres, music halls could supplement their entry price by
selling food and drink. “Every publican,” wrote the music-hall historian
Willson Disher of the 1850s, “would now try to lay violent hands on the
building next door. No opera house was too grand for the purpose, no shanty
too mean.”
By 1857 these ad-hoc extensions had become recognisable theatres, numbering
about 50 in London alone. The Canterbury in Lambeth – the capital’s first
proper music hall, originally built over a skittle alley next to a pub in
1852 – was upgrading its premises to hold 2,000 people, while Gatti’s Music
Hall had just opened on the other side of Westminster Bridge Road. Other pub
theatres were expanding: the Mahogany Rooms in Aldgate was being converted
into a 1,000-capacity venue called Wilton’s Music Hall (it’s still there
today), while the Britannia in Hoxton would reopen in 1858 capable of
holding more than 4,500 people. The Shoreditch Theatre, holding 2,300
patrons, opened in 1857, as did the Surrey Music Hall in Kennington, with a
Great Hall that held 10,000.
That was also the year that the music halls started to move out of the East
End and southeast London slums and into the West End, with grand venues such
as Weston’s Music Hall in Holborn.
Outside London, 1857 was also the opening year for the Britannia Music Hall on
Trongate, Glasgow (later renamed the Panoptican and still standing today),
showing that music hall had become a nationwide phenomenon.
Few of these venues were on the scale of the giant “variety halls” such as the
Palace Theatre in Manchester and the Shepherds Bush Empire that were built
around the turn of the century. Instead, these early music halls retained
the ambience of the taverns that gave birth to them. “The audience would
usually behave as if they were in a pub,” says John Evans, a music-hall
historian, “talking, drinking, eating, smoking and wandering throughout the
acts, often heckling, joining in the songs, retaining the drunken feel of
the saloon-bar song clubs.”
These 1850s halls tended to have a similar layout. A chairman would sit in
front of the orchestra pit, looking out at the audience but viewing the
events on stage through a strategically placed mirror, drumming up
enthusiasm as he announced each act and occasionally calling order by
banging a gavel. The area in front of the stage would seat punters around
half a dozen tables, with waiters serving pies, ham sandwiches, pigs’
trotters and pease pudding. The back half of the hall would have rows of
benches, with shelves on the back of each to hold drinks and food. Flanking
these seats would be the promenade areas, while the upstairs balcony and
stairs would typically be filled with prostitutes, even though, by 1857,
many men would have been visiting the music hall with their wives.
The shows would be leavened with “speciality acts” – strongmen,
contortionists, acrobats, ventriloquists, bird acts, fire-eaters, conjurors
and Derren Brown-style mind-readers, described at the time, rather
delightfully, as “mentalists” – but the entertainment would have been
largely musical. The playbills of the time proudly advertised sentimental
ballads and popular operatic selections (“so badly sung and vulgarly
accompanied,” said one contemporary critic, “that it would be better for the
cause of art that they should be omitted”).
However, it was the innuendo-laden comic song that provided music hall with
its signature style. By the 1850s this peculiarly British fusion of light
opera, folk ballads, theatrical airs, drawing-room lyrics, bawdy topical
humour and Stephen Foster-style negro songs from across the Atlantic had
coalesced into a recognisable genre.
“The performances are all similar,” says one rather sceptical observer in a
contemporary newspaper called The Tomahawk. “A man appears on the
platform, dressed in outlandish clothes and ornamented with whiskers of
ferocious length and hideous hue, and proceeds to sing verse after verse of
pointless twaddle, interspersed with a blatant ‘chorus’, in which the
audience is requested to join.”
“The great popularity of the songs,” says the historian Peter Bailey, “with
their principal motifs of booze, romantic adventure, marriage and
mothers-in-law, dear old pals and seaside holidays and so on, comes from the
audience’s identification with the routine yet piquant exploits of a comic
realism that validates the shared experience of a typically urbanised,
class-bound world seen from below.”
In this elevation of the mundane, you can see the music hall’s resonance in
much popular culture of today, from soap operas to reality TV. Its obvious
influence is in stand-up comedy (a byproduct of the comic singer’s
between-song banter) as well as the ever-popular behemoth that is the
variety act.
Less obvious, perhaps, has been the spectral presence of the music hall
throughout British pop music. After more than half a century of British
singers trying to sound American, a host of contemporary vocalists – from
Mike Skinner to Pete Doherty, from Arctic Monkeys to Dizzee Rascal, from
Jamie T to Lily Allen – are developing an authentically British pop song,
told in a defiantly urban vernacular. It might come as something of a shock
to discover that East London’s music-hall stars were already doing this 150
years ago.
— Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, off Ensign Street, London E1 (020-7702
9555)
