The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1998 by Philemon Eva

By Dagmar Kift (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x plus 244pp. $54.95).

Once a matter of nostalgic cliche, music hall has prompted a proliferation of approaches and contextualisations that demonstrate both the rich historical potential of the halls, and the difficulties of synthesis - not least between approaches primarily concerned with the business of music hall as a cultural industry, and those interested in unpicking the meanings made possible by music hall performance. Dagmar Kift's book (updated and revised from the German edition of 1991) would not claim to be a definitive history of the music halls. It is however a vital contribution to the field, the result of pioneering research that sets the halls in a truly national perspective for the first time.

One of the central purposes of the book is to redress the dominance of the London halls in music hall history. Kift's investigation of the provincial halls, particularly in the industrial north, does not just fill the gap in the historical record; it argues convincingly for a substantial revision of that history, from which the London halls emerge not as the prototype but as a "special case." The London halls first claimed attention in the 1840s and 1850s within a crowded leisure sphere, in which the licencing role of the local authorities was long established. Their proprietors used the mythology and terminology of music hall to establish a distinct identity as against theatres, pleasure gardens, and pub entertainments. Similarly large, elaborately furnished and commercial venues already existed in regional towns and cities, but often faced little competition locally, and consequently did not have such a pressing need to establish a distinct identity as music halls. The programmes provided by these regional halls were diverse, varying according to the personal tastes of their proprietors and those of the local audience. Dialect poetry and songs were notable throughout the north, as were amateur performances and competitions. In this, the regional halls showed continuity with the informal traditions of amateur and semi-professional pub entertainment. The term 'music hall' itself was used in a more fluid way outside London, to denote relatively small pub backrooms alongside the larger capital-intensive ventures. It was only in the 1890s that this local diversity began to give way to syndicates organising standardised tours of 'variety' performance on a nation-wide basis.

Part One of the book presents this music hall culture from 'within,' with due emphasis on its provincial forms. Kift brings a wide range of sources to bear on questions about the nature of the music hall experience. The chapter on audiences is a tour de force in this respect, in which lists of casualties and other evidence from fire panics in halls in northern England and Scotland are used to reconstruct the age, gender and social background of their audiences. Supplemented by evidence of pricing policies and contemporary press impressions, these sources create an superbly nuanced account of the way music hall attendance was bound up with the rhythms of work and life in urban, industrial Britain. Kift traces the significance of pay-day in local industries, patterns of women's paid work, and age-differences in disposable income, in music hall attendance.

Similarly, evidence from printed programmes, advertisements and account books allows Kift to explore the full variety of the music hall programme, emphasising its debt to the eclectic traditions of street performance, fairs and pleasure gardens. Circus routines formed an important part of the programme, as did spectacular set-pieces representing contemporary events. Musically, while comic songs may have predominated, they took their place among ballads, madrigals, and operatic excerpts. Though Kift is not primarily concerned with questions of what all this might have meant for its audience, the material is nevertheless very suggestive of the contrasts between comic and sentimental, exotic/familiar, spectacular/intimate, or 'refined' and 'vulgar' performance in the halls.

Part Two shifts the focus from music hall culture 'in itself' to the relationship between music halls and the outside world; or "between working class culture and society," in a series of case studies of major controversies over music hall licencing. Again, Kift highlights the local peculiarities of these conflicts. Not only did the social and cultural configurations of the local political elites differ, but the system of licencing provisions itself developed in a piecemeal way until the 1880s. An extremely complex pattern of conflicts and alliances emerges from Kift's meticulous research; only rarely did the police, the local council and the magistrates form a united front against the music halls, and their proprietors often had powerful local allies.

Kift nevertheless proposes some key thematic developments. Before the 1860s, conflicts tended to take the form of rivalries between competing entertainment sectors (theatres v. music halls for example, in Sheffield), each with its own allies among councillors and magistrates. After 1860 the temperance movement increasingly brought pressure to bear on a number of municipal authorities, though Kift argues that the movement failed to exercise any comprehensive influence over licencing magistrates. It was only in the late 1870s that conflicts assumed the form of an attack by middle class reformers on the content of music hall entertainment. Again, London is a "special case" in all this; from the earliest days of the halls, their alleged toleration of prostitution (and 'provocative' dancing) was the key point of conflict in the capital.