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"Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.) England London History 19th century."
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Music Hall and Modernity
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture.Music Hall and Modernitydemonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \"the people.\"In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.Music Hall and Modernityoffers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.
eBook
Chaplin’s Music Hall
“Charlie Chaplin grew up in and around the music hall. His parents, aunt and their friends all earned their precarious livings on the stage and Chaplin himself started out his career touring music halls with a dance troupe. His experiences of the culture of the music hall were a major influence, shaping his style of acting and the films he made, most famously Limelight, which tells the story of a failing variety performer and which evoked painful memories of his own past. Chaplin was horrified to see how performers’ lives were ruined when their audience turned against them and he was relieved to exchange the stresses of live performance for screen comedy. Barry Anthony here tells the story of the lives and careers of Chaplin’s family and their music–hall circle–from ‘dashing’ Eva Lester to the great Fred Karno and from Chaplin’s parents Hannah Hill and Charles Chaplin to ‘The Great Calvero’ himself. He reveals the difficult and often–tragic lives of London’s variety community in the late–Victorian and Edwardian years, a time of great change in the music hall and entertainment scene, and in doing so sheds important new light on the inspiration behind Chaplin’s genius, providing a fascinatingly fresh perspective on this popular cultural icon of the twentieth century.”
eBook
Fantasies of Empire
In the London summer of 1894, members of the National Vigilance Society, led by the well-known social reformer Laura Ormiston Chant, confronted the Empire Theatre of Varieties, Leicester Square, and its brilliant manager George Edwardes as he applied for a routine license renewal. On grounds that the Empire's promenade was the nightly resort of prostitutes, that the costumes in the theatre's ballets were grossly indecent, and that the moral health of the nation was imperiled, Chant demanded that the London County Council either deny the theatre its license or require radical changes in the Empire's entertainment and clientele before granting renewal. The resulting license restriction and the tremendous public controversy that ensued raised important issues--social, cultural, intellectual, and moral--still pertinent today.Fantasies of Empire is the first book to recount in full the story of the Empire licensing controversy in all its captivating detail. Contemporaneous accounts are interwoven with Donohue's identification and analysis of the larger issues raised: What the controversy reveals about contemporary sexual and social relations, what light it sheds on opposing views regarding the place of art and entertainment in modern society, and what it says about the pervasive effect of British imperialism on society's behavior in the later years of Queen Victoria's reign. Donohue connects the controversy to one of the most interesting developments in the history of modern theatre, the simultaneous emergence of a more sophisticated, varied, and moneyed audience and a municipal government insistent on its right to control and regulate that audience's social and cultural character and even its moral behavior.Rich in illustrations and entertainingly written, Fantasies of Empire will appeal to theatre, dance, and social historians and to students of popular entertainment, the Victorian period, urban studies, gender studies, leisure studies, and the social history of architecture.
eBook