How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).