Sex, Drugs and Music Hall

Page 1 of 6

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Sensation seekers
• 3. Sport
• 4. Celebrity
• 5. Misconceptions
• 6. Find out more
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Introduction

You've seen it in a hundred costume dramas. A group of Victorians sitting around the piano. Men in dinner suits, women twitching fans, the daughter of the household bashing out a Mendelsohn standard, polite applause muffled by white kid gloves, and another round of constipated dialogue.

'...it's hard to think of a public pleasure with which they did not engage with intense, breathless enthusiasm.'

If only somebody had thought to check the entertainment listings on the front page of The Times. Instead of suffering this well-mannered torture, they could have telegraphed the Cremorne Gardens and booked a table near the bandstand, scored a few strikes at the American bowling alley, taken in one of the shows or concerts, guzzled down a curry, danced until four in the morning, smoked a few opium-laced cigarettes, then returned home on the tube to negotiate their inevitable hangovers.

The processes of industrialisation partially account for the scope of these activities. During the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain was transformed from a largely agrarian society to one in which the majority of the population lived in cities. Those who relocated to these growing urban environments could no longer, as their parents and grandparents had done, pursue activities based around the rhythms of village life. Moreover, industrial jobs offered a precise delineation of work and leisure time that had never existed in the past. The Victorians were the first people to have statutory holidays and proscribed days off. The burgeoning entertainment industry was only too eager to help them fill that leisure time with recreational pleasures, enticing them into theme parks, shopping malls, amusement arcades and theatres.

There's a huge disjunction between the received image of nineteenth-century recreation, and the dizzying extent of the pleasures that were available to ordinary Victorians. 'Outside amusements were few,' insists one standard history textbook, 'hence the frequency with which the piano figured in the home.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The lives of Victorians were anything but staid and dull. Indeed, it's hard to think of a public pleasure with which they did not engage with intense, breathless enthusiasm.

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Published: 2001-08-01