by T. S. Eliot
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with seating capacity of 2,300. Matcham designed more than 150 new
theaters and music halls and is best known as the architect of the Coliseum,
in St. Martin’s Lane, London, built in 1904 as the world’s largest music hall
(seating capacity 4,000), now home to the English National Opera.
Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was widely considered the greatest of all
music hall performers. When she died, nearly a hundred thousand people
mourned her funeral cortege, and Max Beerbohm thought it the biggest
funeral that London had witnessed since the death of Wellington. Though
she was noted for her risqué lyrics and double entendres, by the time that
she came to the Palladium in early 1921, she was performing “It’s a Bit of
a Ruin” (by Harry Beford and Terry Sullivan), for which she portrayed an old
woman who has been robbed outside a country pub. The audience at the
Palladium is reported to have taken up the chorus “with gusto.” Marie, who
pronounced her name to rhyme with “starry,” collapsed on stage while per-
forming at the Edmonton Empire on 7 October 1922. Eliot promptly wrote
an essay lamenting the death of “the greatest music-hall artist of her time.”
She had exercised a “moral superiority” as “the expressive figure of the lower
classes,” for there was “no such expressive figure for any other classes” and
the middle classes were just “morally corrupt.” (See T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,”
in Selected Essays [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950], 404–408.)
“Little Tich” was the stage name of Harry Relph (1867–1928), a minus-
cule man (barely four feet tall) who created an unforgettable stage character,
wearing slap shoes almost as long as himself and doing his Big Boot Dance.
He would dance on the tips of the shoe’s toes or lean so far forward on
the flats of his feet that his nose almost touched the floor; he also sat on the
ground, shoes straight up, imitating scissors and demented windshield or
windscreen wipers.
George Mozart was the stage name of David John Gillings (1864–1947),
a music hall comedian who did character sketches, perhaps best known for
“Idle Jack.” Between 1930 and 1938 he starred in more than fifteen films.
Ernie Lotinga (1876–1951) was a bawdy music hall comedian who
frequently played a fictional character named Private Jimmy Josser. With the
decline of music hall in the 1920s, he turned to the stage. Eliot went to see
him on tour in a play named Convicts, which ran for one week at the Isling-
ton Empire, beginning 20 June 1927. To Virginia Woolf, in a contemporary
but undated letter, he wrote that he had “just been to see Ernie Lotinga in
his new play at the Islington Empire. Magnificent. He is the greatest living
British histrionic Artist, in the purest tradition of British Obscenity.” In the
1930s Lotinga turned to film, appearing in Josser Joins the Navy (1932), Josser in the Army (1932), Josser on the Farm (1934), and Love Up the Pole (1936), among others.
27. Discussions about the possible extinction of the music hall as a cultural
form were common in contemporary journalism. The invasion of Hollywood
cinema was drawing away audiences. Many halls closed throughout the
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1920s and were converted into cinemas, while others limped on till the out-
break of World War II.
Ethel Levey (1881–1955) was a vaudeville singer and dancer who mar-
ried (1899) and then divorced (1907) the American songwriter George M.
Cohan. She continued with her own performing career, which, in a stage act
in the early 1920s, featured her rendition of the Grizzly Bear Dance. Begin-
ning 1 September 1920 she had the lead role in Oh! Julie, a musical comedy
in three acts; it ran at the Shaftesbury Theatre till 25 September, then was
transferred to the Prince’s Theatre, where it ran till 23 October.
28. The Phoenix Society was founded by Montague Summers (1880–1948) in
September 1919. It was dedicated to the revival of Jacobean and Restoration
plays, and to having them performed in their entirety. It gave performances
of Ben Jonson’s Volpone on Sunday, 30 January, and on Tuesday, 1 February
1921, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Allan Wade was the producer. The
cast was: Volpone, Balliol Holloway; Mosca, Ion Swinley; Voltore, D. Lewin
Mannering; Corbaccio, Stanley Lathbury; Corvino, George Zucco; Bonario,
Murray Kinnell; Peregrine, William Armstrong; Sir Politic, Eugene Leahy;
Lady Would-be, Margaret Yard; Celia, Isabel Jeans.
29. On Diaghilev’s ballet company and its performances in London, see London
Letter, July 1921, n. 14, 241.
30. The exhibition “Works by Pablo Picasso” was held at the Leicester Galleries
throughout January 1921. It contained twenty-four oils and forty-eight
drawings, and the catalogue preface, “Matisse and Picasso,” was written
by Clive Bell.
The Romantic Englishman
1. The essay was published in the first issue of the Tyro, a journal edited by Wyndham Lewis and produced with financial backing from Sydney Schi¤,
a writer and occasional patron. Eliot must have written it, or cast it into its
final form, over the weekend of 26–27 March, since he refers to a perfor-
mance of Congreve’s Love for Love which took place on Sunday, 20 March
1921, while the Tyro itself appeared only two weeks later, on 9 April 1921.
The Tyro was printed in an edition of one thousand copies.
2. Sir Tunbelly Clumsy is a character in The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger
(1697), a comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726). Sir Giles Overreach is
a character in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625 or 1626), a play by Philip
Massinger (1583–1604). Squire Western is a character in The Fathers; or, The
Good-Natur’d Man (1778), a comedy by Henry Fielding (1707–1754) which
was first performed at Drury Lane more than twenty years after his death.
Sir Sampson Legend is a character in Love for Love (1695), a comedy by
William Congreve (1670–1729). It was revived in a performance sponsored
by the Phoenix Society at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, on Sunday,
20 March, and again on Tuesday, 22 March, 1921. Eliot attended it with
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Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The part of Sir Sampson Legend was played
by the actor Roy Byford (1873–1939).
3. Midshipman Easy (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836) was a novel by Freder-
ick Marryat (1792–1848), the author of boys’ adventure stories that were
extraordinarily popular during the period 1850–1920.
Tom Jones is the title character of a 1749 novel by Henry Fielding.
Falsta¤ is Shakespeare’s creation, the legendary companion of Prince Hal
in Henry IV (Parts I and II) and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
4. “Broad-shouldered genial Englishman” is a phrase used by Tennyson to
describe Sir Walter Vivian, a fictional character in his long poem The Princess
(1847). In the Conclusion (lines 84–91), the narrator sees Sir Walter:
No little lily-handed Baronet he,
> A great broad-shouldered genial Englishman,
A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none;
Fair-haired and redder than a windy morn.
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific journalist and author, an
advocate of a principled, Christian conservatism. On the conservative critic
John Collings Squire, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 16, 206.
5. The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale was published by Lord Byron in 1813.
“Giaour,” which rhymes with “hour,” was the Turkish word for any infidel
(i.e., non-Muslim); the poem tells the story of a man who has banished him-
self to a monastery for causing the death of his lover, Leila, and for slaying
her murderer, the Pasha.
6. Le vrai honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien (“The true gentleman is one who allows nothing to ruºe him,” or “who is unpretentious”) is maxim
no. 203 in the famous collection of Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales
(1678) of Duke François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680). “René” refers
to René Descartes (1596–1650), the French philosopher.
“Mythopoeic nihilism” alludes to Dadaism, the anarchic cultural
movement which began life at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in early 1916.
Increasingly under the leadership of Tristan Tzara by 1917, the movement
e¤ectively moved with him in January 1920 to Paris, where he was wel-
comed and joined by Francis Picabia and the future Surrealists André Bre-
ton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard. A flurry of Dada
events, performances, and manifesto readings took place over the next few
months, but Eliot would not have known about these. His knowledge of
Dada would have come primarily from the Nouvelle Revue, a journal he sub-
scribed to and read regularly. In April 1920 André Gide, in the Nouvelle Re-
vue, assessed Dada’s place in the aftermath of the Great War: “It is important
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that the mind should not lag behind the material world (which has been
destroyed after four years of war): the mind, too, has a right to be in ruins.”
Four months later, in August, André Breton replied to Gide’s essay with
“Pour Dada” (For Dada), also published in the Nouvelle Revue (August 1920).
(“Pour Dada” is now in Breton’s Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 [Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1988], 236–241; in English translation, “For Dada” is found
in André Breton, The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 51–56.) Breton’s essay was accompanied by another
which immediately followed it in the same issue, “Reconnaissance à Dada,” a
sympathetic analysis of Dada by Jacques Rivière, editor of the Nouvelle Revue.
(The essay is reprinted in Jacques Rivière, Nouvelles Études [Paris: Gallimard, 1947], 294–310.) Eliot went to France twice in 1920: 14–28 August, though
he stayed in Paris for only a few days before pressing on to tour other places
with Wyndham Lewis; and 11–18 December. He may also have derived some
knowledge of Dada from Fritz Vanderpyl, a Belgian poet and novelist who
was art critic for the Petit Parisien. The only major Dada publication of early 1921 was the manifesto “Dada Soulève Tout” (Dada Overturns Everything),
issued on 12 January 1921; but it is diªcult to imagine how it might have
come into Eliot’s hands.
7. For Podsnap, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 16, 206. Horatio Bottomley
(1860–1933) became a court shorthand writer and then a journalist. With
the outbreak of World War I, the newspaper he edited, John Bull, became stri-dently patriotic, while Bottomley became a self-appointed recruiting agent
for the armed forces, giving speeches at rallies and meetings. He made a for-
tune through his “patriotic lectures” (more than three hundred during the
last three years of war). In December 1918, Bottomley was elected Member
of Parliament for South Hackney. John Bull had profits of £113,000 in 1918
and a circulation of 1,700,000 by 1920.
In July 1919, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the govern-
ment issued Victory Bonds to help o¤set the costs of paying for the war.
Priced at £5, they were out of the reach of most ordinary people at a time
when an unskilled worker might earn as little as £2.50 a week. Bottomley
instituted a scheme whereby poor people (especially unemployed soldiers)
might benefit by sending him £1 for a one-fifth share in a Victory Bond.
At first the scheme was a roaring success, and soon Bottomley was receiving
cash at the rate of £100,000 a day—this was before he had actually bought
any bonds, since he was waiting for their price to drop. But some of his
poorly supervised sta¤ members were helping themselves to the cash arriv-
ing through the post; others were simply unable to issue share statements
fast enough to keep up with the influx of subscriptions. Thousands of sub-
scribers soon started to demand the return of their capital, and by the end
of 1919 Bottomley had paid out £150,000. Meanwhile, although Bottomley
did finally buy around £500,000 worth of bonds at a bargain price, he used
the remaining money to buy two newspapers and pay o¤ other debts. It
was increasingly rumored that he was a fraud, and whenever he spoke to
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meetings, he found himself confronted by aggrieved subscribers demand-
ing their money back. But through 1921 conservative newspapers defended
him under the cloak of patriotism. In May 1922 he was charged with
“fraudulently converting to his own use sums of money entrusted to him
by members of the public.” He was sent to prison for seven years but was
discharged in 1927. He became a minor performer in music hall programs.
8. V.C.’s are Victoria Crosses, the highest award for valor in the British armed
forces. “The Spy” and “the Girl who Sank the Submarine” are parodic titles
and types invented by Eliot, the latter imitating such popular wartime songs
as “The Girl Who Wears a Red Cross on Her Sleeve” (1915), words and music
by William Mahoney, or “The Girl Who Helps the Man Behind the Gun”
(1918), words by Arthur Stanley, music by Charles Peter.
9. Chu Chin Chow was a musical, with book and lyrics by Oscar Asche (1871–
1936), and music by Gordon Frederic Norton (1869–1946). It opened at
His Majesty’s Theatre, London, on 1 August 1916 and ran for 2,238 perfor-
mances. It was still running at the time when Eliot was writing. It has a com-
plicated plot based on the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The setting
is the magnificent Eastern palace of Kasim Baba, who welcomes the Chinese
merchant Chu Chin Chow, in reality the rascally Abu Hassan, a robber.
10. For Little Tich, Marie Lloyd, and George Mozart see London Letter, March
1921, n. 26, 208–209. George Robey (1869–1954), born George Edward
Wade in London, was the son of an engineer. He was forced to leave Cam-
bridge University due to financial problems and f
ound his way onto the
stage. Known as the Prime Minister of Mirth, Robey made many recordings
of his comic songs and several films in his long career. His character was
a somewhat saucy country parson with big black eyebrows and a red nose.
Nellie Wallace (1870–1948) was born in Glasgow, Scotland. (Eliot was
mistaken, in his London Letter, May 1921, in thinking that she had “a Lanca-
shire accent.”) She first appeared on the stage in 1888 in Birmingham as a
clog dancer, then joined a singing group known as the Three Sisters Wallace.
Success arrived when she became a solo turn, famous for her characteriza-
tion of the frustrated spinster, comically dressed, who would bluntly declare:
My mother said always look under the bed,
Before you blow the candle out,
To see if there’s a man about.
I always do, but you can make a bet,
It’s never been my luck to find a man there yet.
In a strange, rapid account, she told of many romances that went wrong
or never really got started. She made much use of vulgar humor, and in her
later years became a pantomime dame, playing such classic roles as that
of Widow Twankey. She made only one film, in 1939, Boys Will Be Girls, in
which she starred alongside Leslie Fuller and Greta Gynt.
Lupino Lane (1892–1959) was an acrobatic music hall performer and
comedian. He starred in the Broadway show Afgar from 1920 to 1922, went
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on to make several films, and later became a stage and television comedian
in England.
George Graves (1876–1949) was a comic actor and music hall and
pantomime performer. He first appeared on stage in 1896 in Portsmouth,
and in 1903 he had his first London hit as General Marchmont in The School
Girl, which ran for two years at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre. In 1907 he
scored another success as Baron Popo¤ in the operetta The Merry Widow
( Die Lustige Witwe, by Franz Lehár) at Daly’s Theatre, e¤ectively transforming the light relief of opéra bou¤e into the terms of eccentric low comedy: he
adapted his voice to suggest the popping of champagne corks and wore an
exaggerated nose and peculiar wig. He became a regular at Daly’s and played
pantomime at Drury Lane at Christmas, with occasional forays into the
