University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/59427 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. THESIS INTRODUCTION The picture of themselves which the Victorians have handed down to us is of a people who valued morality and respectability, and, perhaps, valued the appearance of it as much as the reality. Perhaps the pursuit of the latter furthered the achievement of the former. They also valued the technological achievements and the revolution in mobility that they witnessed and substantially brought about. Not least did they value the imperial power, formal and informal, that they came to wield over vast tracts of the globe. The intention of the following study is to take these three broad themes which, in the national consciousness, are synonymous with the Victorian age, and examine their applicability to the contemporary theatre, its practitioners, and its audiences. Any capacity to undertake such an investigation rests on the reading for a Bachelor’s degree in History at Warwick, obtained when the University was still abuilding, and an innate if undisciplined attachment to things theatrical, fostered by an elder brother and sister. Such an attachment, to those who share it, will require no elaboration. My special interest will lie in observing how a given theme operated at a particular or local level. To do so is to bring it under the microscope and note its workaday effects. Assessing the extent of those effects may lead me to either question or endorse an assumed potency. The point that the Victorian theatre enjoyed a rich and varied theatrical life outside London is one that bears repeating. My own particular proofs of this will be drawn 2 chiefly from my home city (until 1889 a mere borough) of Birmingham, which, between 1774 and 1956, boasted one of the most handsome and well-appointed playhouses in the land, albeit one that more than once enjoyed the mixed blessing of rising from its own ashes. If provincial towns shared the common characteristic of not being London, it did not follow that any one of them could be described as wholly ‘typical’. I suggest that the random selection and scrutiny of any would be revealing of factors special or perhaps unique to that community. Certainly one does not have to look far below the surface of Victorian Birmingham to identify a society that was nonconformist not only in the religious sense, and I shall weigh the significance of such considerations in the conditioning of the local response to the opening and continuing presence of the town’s first permanent theatre, and, later, to the arrival of the music halls. To place this in a slightly broader context, a brief look will be taken at the state of popular morality as evidenced in the correspondence columns of the local press of Birmingham’s smaller but older sister city of Coventry, much more securely under the sway of the Established Church, and enjoying the status of a sometime bishopric. When investigating the second chosen Victorian theme of technological advancement and the revolution in mobility, and the capacity of the contemporary theatre to respond to and even stimulate such innovations, the participation of ‘the town of a thousand trades’ will be subject to special scrutiny, and it is my hope that such investigation might be productive of evidence sufficient to mount a challenge to the longstanding paradox of William Murdock’s discovery of gas lighting occurring less than 3 two miles from New Street, and the apparent absence of the town’s theatre from any authoritative list of the earliest playhouses to benefit from the new illumination. The exercise of imperialism for most of the Victorian period was a surprisingly subtle one. Power could be exerted over lands far and near, usually without the need of formal annexation. If the American colonies had secured their political independence from Britain, their citizens continued to accept the cultural sway of the Mother Country, who was graciously pleased to continue exercising it. Even when the young nation began to produce theatrical formulae of its own, they were quickly brought across the ocean for approval, and if Britain re-exported them -- as in the case of minstrelsy -- refined and polished, that was an added source of pride and satisfaction for the ex-colonials. Imperialism, in all its forms, was both a stimulus to and a beneficiary of the advent of the ocean-going steamer. I propose to ascertain whether inter-continental sea travel was becoming sufficiently safe, fast and cheap to activate a significant increase in the transatlantic exchange of theatrical talent, and if so, whether it remained confined to a professional elite, shuttling between the established metropolitan centre of culture of London and the burgeoning new one of New York, or encompassed humbler practitioners, and whether all operated on a vastly enlarged transatlantic circuit that encompassed the still-industrializing English North and Midlands and the scattered towns of the American Middle- and Far-West whose isolation was ending in the wake of the transcontinental railroad. In this context Birmingham stands for provincial Britain, and the degree of its participation in the Anglo-American theatrical intercourse is taken as a rough measure of the involvement of other substantial towns. Notwithstanding, it should be recognized that Birmingham’s approximately equidistant location from London and 4 the great transatlantic port and theatrical venue of Liverpool, where many American performers would have disembarked, without doubt gave it an ‘edge’ in competing for the expanding theatrical ‘trade’. The town’s own inherent importance as a magnet for these performers must have been very greatly enhanced by its convenience as a stopping- place en-route to the metropolis. Two of the ‘Victorian values’ I discuss are based on premises underpinned by quantifiable proofs. There can be no dispute that the period witnessed dramatic developments in many fields of technology, and in the speed, convenience and accessibility of inland and transoceanic travel. That such innovations were ‘valued’ can be determined by the extent to which Victorians, on both sides of the Atlantic, utilized them. My task is to investigate the degree of effect and influence they bore on the theatre and its contemporary practitioners. But I use ‘value’ as a noun as well as an active verb, and I note the warning of James Walvin, who insists that the very concept of Victorian values ‘represents a particular, partial and debatable interpretation of nineteenth-century history’. [1] Even -- perhaps especially -- an unqualified use of the term ‘Victorians’ harbours inherent perils. The task of analysis and categorization has been undertaken by others. Matthew Sweet challenges the concept of the prevalence of male-dominated families, argues that libertarian ideas about gender equality, homosexuality, and ‘recreational’ drug-use circulated more freely than the present generation might suspect, and suggests that the seeds of ‘21st-century’ phenomena such as high-powered advertising and the promotion of celebrity cults were firmly planted by the Victorians. [2] Jeremy 5 Paxman utilizes paintings to illuminate many aspects of the Victorian experience, including living and working conditions, gender and class roles, religious and moral attitudes, and tastes in the arts. [3] A.N. Wilson believes that people constitute the essential ingredient of history, and illustrates the diversity of Victorian society by presenting them in a remarkably wide-ranging series of situations. [4] All of these studies challenge the concept of Victorian ‘values’ as revived and promoted by a number of Thatcherite politicians in the 1980s. My use of the term relates largely to the Victorian minority who set or caught a public mood that is, one suspects, at least as recognizable to posterity as it was to participating contemporaries, and my remit is to consider to what extent contemporary theatre managements were challenged, influenced and inhibited by that mood. The Victorians I discuss are, by definition, to a greater or lesser degree participants in the world they inhabit, even when, like those self-appointed iconoclasts, the raucous galleryites of Birmingham’s Theatre Royal, they are actively rejecting that public mood. Apart from contemporary local press reports, the chief sources for my research were the theatre playbill collections in the Archives Department of Birmingham Central Library, and the Victorian theatre’s ‘trade’ newspaper, the Era, which constitutes an incredibly rich and still underused resource, my frequent and longstanding browsings through which provided the germ of this study. 6 I MORALITY, RESPECTABILITY AND DECORUM INTRODUCTION To the disinterested observer it might have appeared that Victorian Birmingham was too preoccupied with being the ‘Workshop of the World’ and making money to be overmuch concerned with intellectual controversy or abstruse questions of morality. But this was far from being the case. Temperance, the teaching of religion in schools, and the theatre’s right to exist were just three matters exercising the minds and emotions of local protagonists. Though it is the last that will chiefly concern us, a common denominator applies to all three, viz., the role of Nonconformism, and Nonconformists were strongly represented and influential in the town (Birmingham did not achieve city status until 1889), for reasons that will be reviewed later in this chapter. By definition, not all the beliefs of Nonconformists coincided, but in some matters there existed a sufficient consensus to suggest that their opinions had been spawned from a common intellectual seed-bed.