Pots, Privies and Wcs; Crapping1 at the Opera in London Before 1830’2

Cambridge Opera Journal, 23, 1-2, 27–50 6 Cambridge University Press, 2012 doi:10.1017/S0954586712000018 ‘Pots, privies and WCs; crapping1 at the opera in London before 1830’2 MICHAEL BURDEN Abstract: What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour at London’s eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to docu- ment as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience’s general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a ‘listening’ audience, and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise. We can, without doubt, name the components of the routine today’s audience enacts when attending an opera performance in London. Patrons arrive at the venue, check coats, perhaps collect pre-paid tickets and order interval drinks. In- deed, our routines on attending musical performances of any sort have become so settled that Christopher Small has attempted to transform our understanding of them by promoting the process from ‘routine’ to ‘ritual’.3 However, while Small seems quite happy with the rituals of sipping coffee and alcoholic drinks, he does not mention the ritual of using the ‘facilities’ before purchasing a programme, having one’s ticket torn (or scanned) and entering the auditorium. In the case of women attending performances of opera at Covent Garden, for example, these facilities used – until recently – to be of such an inadequate provision, that the bulk of an interval was spent queuing, sometimes to no avail. Until recently, too, for men visiting the same theatre, it meant (at least in one case) finding the darkest possible staircase, descending to the lowest possible level of the building and finding the least ventilated room in the entire edifice. Such were the lavatories at the Royal Opera House in its previous incarnation. It may not at first be clear what relevance this subject has to our understanding of the history of opera in London before 1830, but among the questions it illumi- nates are: how much did (or could) the audience concentrate on the performance? How much movement was there in the auditorium? When we read written criticism of opera, what were the circumstances in which its contents were conceived? Can 1 ‘Crap’ or ‘to crap’ is defined as crude slang for ‘defecate’, according to the OED,recordedin Joseph Wright, English Dialect Dictionary (London, 1898). 2 This article was conceived while working at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California on an Andrew Mellon Fellowship; Alexandra Lumbers, Andrew Cambers, Catherine Molineux and Emma Christopher were present at the time. 3 See, for example, Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, 1998), 19–29. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 18 Jan 2020 at 01:04:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586712000018 28 Michael Burden the critics really have heard what they were writing about? What strategies might the composers, musical directors and performers have developed to hold an audience’s attention? The answers to some of these questions are known in the broadest sense, but when examined closely our ‘knowledge’ often proves to be illusory, based on assumptions of what ‘must’ have happened as opposed to what can be shown to have happened. And when this is coupled with, on one hand, the general failure to record organisational details which are so basic as to be assumed and, on the other, a natural reticence about plumbing, then what we can show happened amounts to a great deal less than one would like. In reading the following narrative, it is helpful to remember that there were three main theatres in London during the period 1660 to 1830: the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden; and the King’s Theatre (also the Queen’s), also known as the Opera House. All three theatres performed opera, but the first two staged mainly operas with spoken dialogue and all-sung after- pieces, while the King’s Theatre was limited to all-sung Italian opera. And it might be as well also to note some aspects of the terminology used at the outset. The ‘pot’ of this article’s title was a chamber pot, a term in use from about 15404 for a bowl used for urine and excreta. Particularly in use in the bedroom, its emptying – frequently through the window into the street – was one of the less welcome tasks of the servants in any household lucky enough to afford such help. ‘Privy’ is an ancient term used to describe a space to which one might repair, particularly one that was outside a building and without plumbing; the size, shape and fittings are not specified. Some privies clearly had chamber pots, others simply seats with the appropriate holes and a cess-pit below. The term was also put to a variety of uses, as suggested by the proverb ‘A true friend should be like a Privie, open in time of necessity’.5 The term ‘water-closet’ came into use about 1755, and was a privy with a mechanism to flush water through pan or chamber pot, and carry its contents out to a cess-pit.6 The actual principle was promoted as early as 1596 by Sir John Harrington (1561–1612), who advocated regular maintenance of these facilities: To keepe your homes sweet, cleanse privy vaults, To keepe your soules as sweet, mend privie faults.7 Harrington’s device was described in his volume A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax, and his name is immortalised in the still-used slang term for a toilet, ‘The John’, a term which may derive from its use by Elizabeth I to describe her version of Harrington’s device. The terms ‘pot’ and ‘privy’ would have been clearly understood by audience members in the London 4 The OED cites an Inventory in Lisle Papers (PRO: SP 1/161), f. 56v; it also locates mentions in 1570, (OED, III, 4), and in 1598, in Florio’s Worlde of Words,(OED, XII, 210). 5 J. Howell, Proverbs 18 in Lex. Tetraglootton (1660). 6 ‘it was always my office to hold his head during the operation of an emetic, to attend him to the water-closet when he took a cathartic, and sometimes to administer a clyster’; George Colman, TheConnoisseurbyMrTown, No. 100, 25 December 1755 (London, 1756), II, 602. 7 Misacmos [John Harrington], A New Discourse of a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (London, 1596), 120. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 18 Jan 2020 at 01:04:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586712000018 Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 29 theatres, and by the later part of the century all would been familiar with – if not had direct experience of – the ‘water-closet’. Before we turn to considering these theatres’ conveniences, it is worthwhile recalling behavioural norms for the rituals of opera-going in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, for they provide a framework in which to interpret our data and help us appreciate what audience expectations might have been for the theatrical experience in general and the quality of the toilet facilities in particular. In general, the documented behaviour of London audiences suggests that it had little or nothing in common with anything that might be experienced by opera-goers today. These audiences pushed, shoved, argued and, as the vomiting character in the centre of Figure 1 suggests, the crush could be tight. Recorded incidents in the nineteenth century include a terrific squeeze at the Opera House in 1830, where there were ‘torn clothes and a few fainting fits’;8 aMrJoneswho was knocked over and crushed, and emerged gushing blood from his ears, eyes and mouth;9 the positioning of fire engines at the stage doors in an effort to persuade the audience to remain under control;10 and a crowd ‘violent beyond precedent’ for Jenny Lind’s long-expected debut that gave currency to the expres- sion ‘a Jenny Lind crush’.11 Also evident in Figure 1 is a row a spikes, the standard device for London audience crowd control, which were so ubiquitous that they are even visible among the details included by Fanny Burney in her sketch of the Royal Box at Covent Garden in 1776.12 That these spikes – Covent Garden gilded theirs – were also dangerous, is indicated by the experience of a Mr Lorrimer in 1810, who was one of two young men forced back by the crowd ‘on to the spikes of the orchestra’, and who ‘received two severe wounds in the back part of his thighs’.13 Once in the auditorium, the eighteenth-century audience was considered bois- terous, but just what that means in today’s terms is far from obvious. Received wisdom has swung in two directions.

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