Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  This ran for sixty-six nights consecutively, and within a year there were seven adaptations onstage in London alone. G. H. Lewes thought it ‘the most daring, ingenious and exciting melodrama I remember having seen’.102 Partly its success was due to the clever mix of melodrama with chivalric morality that gave sober audiences who did not normally attend melodrama permission to be stirred. But what was really exciting was not the rather moth-eaten story, but the technology that produced the ghostly double.

  Stage machinery had undergone a transformation during the century. Earlier, scenery was painted on to flats that were set in grooves on the floor; each successive scene slid into place in front of or behind the current scene. Now some scenery was flown down from newly developed fly-towers high above the stage, while other sets were built as freestanding boxes, creating a sense of three-dimensional reality. These threesided sets, which we take for granted, were completely revolutionary, a newly created reality appearing in front of the audience. To change them from one scene to the next, a front cloth was dropped down before all but a thin strip at the front of the stage, music was played to drown out the noise, and playwrights were asked to provide ‘carpenters’ scenes’ that could be staged on the narrow front stage while the set was wheeled into place behind. To produce special effects within the box, planks were removed from the floor, and scenery was raised from underneath. The most advanced stages had four bridges built under the stage, set between the grooves for the scenery; these wooden platforms were then raised by ropes to the level of the stage, while the orchestra once more produced extra-loud music to cover the noise. Specialized ‘grave’, ‘star’ and ‘vampire’ traps were set, each opening at a different place on the stage, with different types of hidden door, to permit ghosts, demons, vampires - or simply the star of the show - to appear suddenly, and ostensibly out of thin air. The Corsican trap, devised for Boucicault’s show, was different: the performer stood on a wheeled platform that moved slowly and silently up an incline built into the understage bridge: the ghost of Louis dei Franchi floated ominously across the stage, rising ever upward behind his oblivious brother.*

  This was a sensation, and created the now almost obligatory parodies. The Strand Theatre produced a burlesque of both The Corsican Brothers and Kean’s recent production of Hamlet: both, after all, were in essence plays about taking revenge for the murder of a family member. So the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared through a Corsican trap, and the playbill also mocked Boucicault’s novel dramatic structure, promising that ‘The Action of the Second Scene is supposed to take place immediately after the First, and not before, as many, perhaps, will be inclined to suppose. Scene the Second will be followed in regular succession by Scene the Third; the Action of which is supposed to Occur after Scene the Fourth, before Scene the First, and simultaneously with the Second, Fifth, and Seventh Scenes.’ Another parody, Planché’s The Discreet Princess of 1855, had one brother who was Hamlet and one who was Louis dei Franchi. Masaniello; or, the Fish o’Man of Naples took this idea even further: at one point the audience was watching the comedian Frederick Robson play Masaniello, who was impersonating Prince Richecraft from The Discreet Princess, who was in turn playing Louis dei Franchi. This may have been an audience who loved stage gimmicks, but it was hardly an unsophisticated one.103

  With The Poor of New York, staged in that city in 1857, Boucicault harnessed the power of the sensation scene; now the grand spectacle was intended from the first to be more important than the story. The stage directions stress the importance of this scene, by their minutely detailed instructions:

  The house is gradually enveloped in fire; a cry outside is heard. ‘Fi-er!’ ‘Fi-er!’ It is taken up by other voices more distant. The tocsin sounds - other churches take up the alarm - bells of engines are heard. Enter a crowd of persons. Enter BADGER, without coat or hat - he tries the door - finds it fast; seizes a bar of iron and dashes in the ground-floor window; the interior is seen in flames. [he climbs in through the window, followed by Dan]…Another shout. DAN leaps out again, black and burned, staggers forward and seems overcome by the heat and smoke. The shutters of the garret fall and discover BADGER in the upper floor. Another cry from the crowd, a loud crash is heard, BADGER disappears as if falling with the inside of the building. The shutters of the windows fall away, and the inside of the house is seen…

  And at this point, on to the stage rolled a real fire engine.104

  The formula was set: Boucicault’s Pauvrette (1858) had an avalanche; his 1859 play, The Octoroon, had the firing of a Mississippi riverboat;* in London by Night (1868) a life-sized express train roared across the stage; this was the progenitor of so many later train melodramas, with the hero tied to the railway track while the express rushed onwards.

  Boucicault was not alone in his love of sensation. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Britain in 1852, and by early 1853 there were eleven versions competing onstage, many with a sensation scene of Eliza escaping over the ice, pursued by the evil slaver and his dogs. (Astley’s version had a runaway horse, which ‘loved freedom’ too.)106 The Standard Theatre, in the East End, in the 1880s specialized in sensation scenes: The Ruling Passion (1882) had a real balloon in which the heroine, an escaped lunatic and his keeper all rose from the Crystal Palace and landed in the Channel in a storm, to be rescued by a lifeboat. Glad Tidings (1883) was set in Rotten Row, with a full complement of riders on horseback. Daybreak (1884) staged the Derby with real horses (this was two years before the same thing appeared at Drury Lane, but, to make up for coming second, from 1886 Drury Lane set plays at Goodwood, the Derby, Newmarket, the Grand National and Longchamp). The Standard did not have Drury Lane’s facilities, but nevertheless managed to create the necessary racetrack drama by taking over some of the street outside. The scene docks with their ramps leading down to the street were opened on both sides of the stage. The horses gathered at the bottom of one ramp, cantered out into the street, then raced around the building to the other side, up the opposite ramp, and at full gallop tore across the stage, out the other side and down the first ramp, to be pulled up in the street. This arrangement also provided essential working space to gather the crowds used in pageant and processional scenes: Our Silver Wedding (1886) had 250 children on a Sunday-school excursion to Epping, in 12 horse-drawn wagons.

  For some, one sensation scene per play was no longer enough. At Drury Lane in 1882, in Pluck, there was a burning house, a blizzard in Piccadilly Circus, an angry mob breaking the windows of a bank, and an express train ploughing into the wreckage of another, already derailed, train. There were plays with scenes of an underwater fight with the heroes in diving suits, or an avalanche, or the Royal Academy summer exhibition, or the entire stage and auditorium of a music hall.107 The Lyceum even had a version of The Bride of Lammermoor with ‘accommodating quicksand that allowed Edgar to stand on it with Lucy in his arms till he had quite finished his theatrical business, and then let him go suddenly down, together with the curtain’.108

  These spectacles were astonishingly transportable. Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, a huge success in 1860, had a sensation scene where the villain’s servant Danny went rowing with the heroine, Eily, on a lake in Killarney. When she refused to give up the marriage certificate that proved she was the legal wife of the villain, and not a fallen woman, Danny pushed her overboard, but Myles (played by Boucicault himself in the first London performance) appeared in the nick of time, shot Danny, dived into the lake, and saved Eily from drowning.* The journalist Henry Morley, in The Journal of a London Playgoer, commended the ‘incidents of plunging, swimming, drowning and fishing up, of which the illusion provokes rounds of applause’.110 Boucicault initially granted licences to provincial theatres to produce versions, but he quickly realized that if he ran his own touring companies he would do better financially. In 1861 the Theatre Royal, Sunderland, became the first to receive The Colleen Bawn, with Brighton following later that same week; soon Boucicault was earning £500 a week from touring pro
ductions alone - the first West End productions on tour.111 And his The Poor of New York, which he had written for the New York stage in 1857, was equally innovatory: in 1863 Boucicault rewrote the play as The Poor of Liverpool, and opened it in the port city, clearing £1,000 in the first nine weeks. Over the succeeding years he created individual productions of The Poor of——for Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin, and even The Poor of Islington for Sadler’s Wells. Finally The Streets of London opened in the West End, with a set that replicated Charing Cross station and Trafalgar Square, just outside.112

  This was another trend that was popular: theatrical re-creations of domestic or local settings, which succeeded or failed by virtue of their similarity to the originals. Boucicault’s Janet Pride in 1855 had called for an exact replica of the Old Bailey; Tom Taylor’s The Overland Route was set on a replica of a P&O steamer, and the manager of the theatre boasted, ‘We were also fortunate in securing some real…lascars, and ayahs, who lent great reality to the picture.’113 Other plays set in hotels hired waiters from the actual hotels. Human Nature, about the fall of Khartoum, advertised that it had ‘real police officers’ to control the stage crowds which gave the returning troops a hero’s welcome, while in the Grand Saloon of the theatre were displayed ‘interesting articles illustrative of African life and warfare’, together with maps and ‘a recreation of Ahmad Urabi’s Cairo cell, designed from on-the-spot sketches and featuring the actual carpet and furniture used by the Egyptian nationalist leader during his confinement’.114 Theatre was a sort of newsreel, but it was also a magazine, and by the 1880s the links between theatre and display, display and fashion, fashion and shopping were being thoroughly exploited. Theatres had long carried advertisements: in 1855 Henry Morley had commented on the ‘bad taste of the curtain [at Covent Garden] which…is a mass of advertisements collected from Moses and Son and other well-known advertisers’.115 But this simple appeal to those waiting for the play to begin soon became a more complex interaction. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia (Limited) in 1893 had a drawing-room scene that was advertised to be an exact replica of one of Queen Victoria’s receptions. George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘I cannot vouch for its verisimilitude, as I have never, strange as it may appear, been present at a Drawing-Room; but that is exactly why I enjoyed it, and why the majority of the [audience] will share my appreciation of it.’116 It was the aspirational nature of voyeurism that was being played on, posing and answering the question: how do the rich live?

  The magazines that reviewed plays carried long, detailed descriptions of the sets and, especially, the costumes. Retailers and dressmakers now supplied props and dresses to the theatres, seeing them as an advertisement for their wares. Youth, at Drury Lane in 1881, had its set dressed with furniture from Gillows. B. J. Simmons and Co. advised the public that it had created the ‘costumes for the Blue Moon Scene, the Irish Girls, and the Moonbeam Dance in “Our Miss Gibbs” ‘.117 In 1892 the Lady began a column called ‘Dress on the London Stage’, written by ‘Thespis’, who was confident that no play could be considered a failure if from it the audience could ‘get a new idea for a bonnet, hat, or other feminine trifle’.118 Dozens of magazines listed details of all the best stage costumes throughout the decade, and often reproduced fashion plates as well, while for the first time theatre programmes began to give the names of the dressmakers who had made the costumes. Black and White magazine sold paper patterns for the costumes described in its pages, while the Lady described the eponymous fan in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) in great detail - it had, the fascinated reader was informed, sixteen ostrich feathers fixed to a handle of yellow tortoiseshell, with the name ‘Margaret’ picked out in diamonds, and there was also an illustration, for those who wanted more. Queen’s simply advised its readers to visit Duvelleroy’s in Regent Street, where they would be able to buy a similar item.119

  Many department stores sold theatre tickets from special booths, and ‘going to the West End’ was no longer a geographical description, but meant spending the day either shopping or at the theatre, or both. From the 1860s the Gaiety Theatre had been a place for the man about town, but in the mid-1880s it was taken over by a new manager, who produced a series of musical comedies, many set in fashionable commercial locations - at the milliner’s or the dressmaker’s, or, best of all, in a department store. H. J. W. Dam, the author of The Shop Girl (which ran for two years from 1894) said, ‘As many thousands of people do business at the large shops and stores in London…[it was clear to me that] the stores formed an excellent sphere to make the basis of a musical piece.’ The first act was a conflation of the interiors of Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores, and singing shoppers compared ‘the loyal, royal stores’ to ‘a daily dress rehearsal’. The even more successful Our Miss Gibbs (1909) was set in ‘Garrod’s’ department store, and its song lyrics linked, completely naturally, clothes, shopping and desirability:

  Some people say success is won by dresses, Fancy that!

  But what are dresses without a Hat?

  If you would set men talking when you’re walking out to shop, You’ll be all right if you’re all right on top!

  That’s the last Parisian hat,

  So buy it,

  And try it!

  Keep your head up steady and straight, Though you’re fainting under the weight!

  We’ll declare that you are sweet, Men will wait outside on the street, If you have that hat!120

  In the 1870s a number of department stores had added their restaurants at more or less exactly the time that theatres had stopped using afternoon performances as try-outs for new playwrights, and instead established regular matinee performances of whatever was running in the evening.* The stores, the restaurants and the theatres were now all

  working in concert. The idea was to get women to spend an entire day between these various places of commodified leisure: to come in from the suburbs by train or Underground, shop, have lunch in a departmentstore restaurant, attend a matinee, and take tea - from 1913, possibly at the Queen’s Theatre, which advertised that women could there ‘meet one’s friends, write letters, read all the papers and magazines, use the telephones, send messages…take tea and generally make themselves at home, as at Selfridges’ (my italics).121 They could do all this and still be home to greet their husbands as they returned from their offices.

  *This 1737 Act was passed after details of a particularly scabrous play about the private life of the King and Queen, The Festival of the Golden Rump, were made known by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who read the dialogue concerning George II’s haemorrhoids out loud in parliament.1

  *The Orchard Street Theatre secured a patent in 1768 - becoming the only patent theatre outside London - by the intervention of its proprietor, John Palmer, of postal-reform fame (pp. 128-9).

  *Napoleon refused him permission to travel, saying ‘Foreigners must come to Paris to see Vestris dance.’ (After Napoleon’s abdication, he travelled to great acclaim.) He was also renowned as a teacher, listing Fanny Elssler, August Bournonville and Marie Taglioni among his pupils.

  †Until the end of the eighteenth century the green room at Covent Garden was known as the ‘Flesh Market’; throughout the nineteenth century the Empires promenade was a haunt of prostitutes, while its gallery was a gay cruising spot. As late as 1902 ‘this exchange, this traffic, this Flesh Fair’ continued to take place nightly.16

  *The boxes in the first balcony began to be removed over the course of the century, and the new open seating area became known as the dress circle. The boxes that survived were those nearest the stage - that is, the worst place in the theatre from which to see the performance, but the one where the audience can most easily see the box’s inhabitants. The royal box at Covent Garden to this day is virtually on top of the stage, and requires a mirror on one wall to give some of the box’s rear inhabitants any idea of what is taking place onstage.

  †As there is no Act I, scene v listed, it must be assumed that scenes iv and
v were run together, and thus the two scenes with Hamlet’s father’s ghost are the two that have the house lights down.

  *With this appearing soon after the Ring cycle, Gilbert had the Queen of the Fairies topically costumed with breastplate, winged helmet and spear.

  *Tom Taylor (1817-80) was another of those exhaustingly busy Victorians. He was, in turn, a professor of English at the University of London, a barrister, a journalist and the editor of Punch. He was also secretary to the Board of Health and an art critic for The Times and the Graphic (although one very much of his time and place: he appeared as an expert witness for Ruskin in the notorious Whistler libel trial, testifying that Whistler’s paintings were really no more than wallpaper - although very nicely coloured wallpaper). In between times he managed to write nearly forty plays. Our American Cousin, his most famous play, is however known today simply as the play at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

  †Byron’s reputation has not lasted, and the two most interesting facts about him may well be that he was Lord Byron’s second cousin, and that he named his daughter Crede, after the Byron family motto, ‘Crede Byron’.29

  ‡The Italian Opera at the Haymarket outdid even Covent Garden - it charged 10s. 6d. for a pit seat, while boxes, which were privately owned, could be rented for a mere 2 or 3 guineas, compared to other theatres’ 2 to 5s.

  *In the eighteenth century, only boxes could be bought in advance; all other seats were sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The boxes were sold from an office near the stage door: hence ‘box office’.

  *The nineteenth-century obsession with fairies really needs a chapter to itself, but this brief footnote summarizing some of the places where they turned up will at least highlight their extraordinary omnipresence. In 1840 A Midsummer Night’s Dream had its first grand nineteenth-century staging, at Covent Garden, which included an Act V that was more or less a pantomime transformation scene. The 1853 Sadler’s Wells production carried this even further, with green and blue gauze drops in the earlier acts, and gas jets covered with gauze inside the columns of Theseus’s palace in the last act. When the lights dimmed, the columns glittered brilliantly in the darkness. But fairies were not only a pantomime theme: ballet treated fairies in Henry’s La Silfide (1828) and Taglioni’s and Bournonville’s La Sylphide in 1832 and 1836; in Coralli and Perrot’s Giselle (1841), which had a libretto by Théophile Gautier, based on a legend described by Heine. Opera found the subject as rewarding, with Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon (1826), a fairy ballet (also choreographed by Taglioni) in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), Wagner’s Die Feen (1834), Lortzing’s Undine (1845) and Puccini’s famous debut opera, Le Villi (1884); even W. S. Gilbert planned for ‘Self-lighting fairies, with electricity stored somewhere about the small of their backs in Iolanthe (1882). Offstage, fairies were everywhere: Richard Dadd’s fairy paintings were painted throughout the 1850s and 1860s; and fairy-tale books poured off the presses: the collections made by the brothers Grimm were first translated into English in the 1820s, T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland was published between 1825 and 1828, followed by Andersen’s fairy tales in English from 1846, in dozens of editions, Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1851), Cruikshank’s Fairy Library (1853-4), Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855), Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), Andrew Lang’s thirteen ‘coloured’ fairy books (1889-1910) and, finally, on to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the new century.40