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East End Melodrama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Michael R. Booth
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Extract

Both historically and critically, in one important area our view of Victorian drama and theatre closely parallels that of the Victorian theatre historian and critic. We tend to regard that history as fully expressed by the cumulative record of the middle-class West End theatre and the middle-class West End drama. Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the St. James's, the Haymarket, the Princess's, the Strand, the Lyceum—these are the theatres that always appear in our books and articles; and Taylor, Buckstone, Boucicault, Robertson, Maddison Morton, and Pinero the dramatists we always write about. The representative Victorian commentator upon the theatre, drama critic or historian, did the same. In 1866 Henry Morley stated categorically: “In our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the eight or nine theatres in or near the West end of London, of which I hold the performances to be worth serious attention.” And in Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, a selection of his dramatic criticism from 1851 to 1866, there is no evidence that Morley paid serious attention, or any attention at all, to theatres outside this magic circle.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , May 1976 , pp. 57 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1976

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References

1 The Journal of a London Playgoer, 2nd edn., (London, 1891), p. 14Google Scholar.

2 Report from the Select Committee on Theatrical Licences and Regulations (London, 1866), p. 295Google Scholar. The list does not include the Garrick, which was temporarily closed in 1865; its capacity was then about 500. Nor does it include music halls.

3 “Occupations of the People, London,” Census of Great Britain (1851)Google Scholar. The “Working Class” 79.1% is made up of 39.7% skilled labor; 17.9% domestic service; 10.6% unskilled labor; 6.6% semi-skilled labor; 2.3% unclassified; 2% clerks. A small proportion of this group attended West End theatres with varying degrees of frequency; clerks, in particular, did so extensively.

4 The Brunswick, which collapsed three days after it opened, had been built on the site of the Royalty (1787), renamed the East London in 1816 and destroyed by fire in 1826.

5 It closed in 1836.

6 In category G, or lower middle class. Booth included “shopkeepers and small employers, clerks, &c. and subordinate professional men”: Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series: Poverty (London, 1902–1904), I, 60Google Scholar. This class, too, was well represented in East End audiences. Booth estimated it at only 3.3% of the working population of East London exclusive of Hackney. Class H, upper middle, was another 1.6%. Thus 95% of the East End population, according to Booth's definitions and his statistics, was working-class. This compares with 80% for Central London.

7 I cannot account for the fact that plays performed at the Standard do not seem to have been printed; it was, after all, one of the important East End theatres.

8 The tableau technique is also common in nineteenth-century comedy, although the degree of emotional and physical anguish involved might be considerably reduced.

9 Each of the seven deadly sins is personified by one of the principal dramatis personae, listed in the text with the appropriate sin after his name; he behaves accordingly in the play.

10 Actually called Sir Jasper.

11 A similiar dramatic advantage is taken by George Dibdin Pitt in two melodramas for the City of London: Simon Lee, or The Murder of the Five Fields Copse (1839)Google Scholar and The Beggar's Petition, or A Father's Love and a Mother's Care (1841)Google Scholar. Both plays depict unnatural parent-child relationships. In the first a rich miser turns his daughter out for marrying a farmer, and scorns her as she lives in wretched poverty. In the latter a daughter runs off with a wealthy young man and becomes contemptuously indifferent to the plight of her suffering and, finally, starving parents.

12 They are, however, usually working-class, such as the carpenter and needle-seller, milkmaid, and hawker of dying confessions in Hazlewood's, Mary Edmonstone (Britannia, 1862)Google Scholar: the artificial flower-makers in the same author's Lizzie Lyle, or The Flower Makers of Finsbury (Grecian, 1869)Google Scholar; and the crossing-sweeper, chairmender and rushmaker, and stonemasons in The Negro of Wapping.