Art or indecency? Tableaux Vivants on the London stage and the failure of late Victorian moral reform

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 744-758

  Assael, Brenda ^a  

^a SWANSEA UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44949145286     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/505956     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. See Susan Pennybacker, "'It was not what she said but the way in which she said it': The London County Council and the Music Halls," in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes, 1986)
2. Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914 (Stanford, CA, 1990), 150
3. Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London, 1987)
4. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1989), 86-93
5. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 81-120
6. Pennybacker, "It was not what she said," 136
7. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London, 1991)
8. Among the numerous works in this field, see Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester, 1987)
9. See, e.g., Erika D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, NJ, 2000)
10. Judith R. Walkowitz, "Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Street-walking in Late Victorian London," Representations 62 (Spring 1988): 1-30
11. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
12. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987)
13. see also Kathleen E. McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914 (London, 1988)
14. see also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY, 1986)
15. Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Sydney, 2000), 67
16. Hugh Tours, The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton (London, 1963), 90
17. Tours, Life and Letters, 156-57, 13-16
18. Kirsten Gram Holmstrom, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770-1815 (Stockholm, 1967), 115, 126
19. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 343
20. J. R. Planché, The Court Beauties (1835), Dicks' Standard Plays no. 898 (London, 1887), 12
21. for other earlier examples, see Abigail Solomon Godeau, "The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Display," in The Sex of Things, ed. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, CA, 1996), esp. reference to lithographs, 117
22. Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville, VA, 2005), 4-5, chap. 2
23. Altick, The Shows, 342-45
24. Bill, Palace of Varieties, 26 February 1894, Theatre Museum, Covent Garden
25. G. J. Goodrich, Tableaux Vivants and Living Waxworks with Directions for Stage Management (London, 1895), 42
26. "The Tivoli Tableaux," Daily Graphic, 2 August 1894, 10
27. Parliamentary Papers (PP), Select Committee on Theatres and Places of Entertainment, 1892, vol. 18:461 (app. 15), 571
28. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, 1992), 2
29. Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 100-102
30. see also the influential study by Stephen Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1966)
31. Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 120-21, 133
32. Peter Bailey, "Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology in the Music-Hail Swell Song," in Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. J. S. Bratton (Milton Keynes, 1986); in testimony given before the LCC licensing sessions, manager Charles Morton pointed to the socially diverse audiences at his hall, the Palace Theatre
33. See "Living Pictures: The Licensing Committee of the London County Council," Woman's Signal, 18 October 1894, 244
34. Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester, 1996), 25, 62
35. T. W. Connor, "That's as Far as I Want to Go!" sung by Dan Crawley (London, 1911)
36. James Thornton, "Living Pictures" (London, 1894)
37. "Walter," My Secret Life (New York, 1966), 3:549-50
38. on ""Walter" and the "libidinous excesses" of the Victorians, see Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), esp. 46-47
39. see also Marcus, The Other Victorians
40. "Walter," My Secret, 4:655
41. Annie Holdsworth, "Footlights: The Story of a Living Picture," Woman's Signal, 20 December 1894, 391-92
42. "Living Pictures," New Review 11 (November 1894): 463-64
43. Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 122
44. Pennybacker, "It was not what she said," 122
45. and Lucy Bland, "'Purifying' the Public World: Feminist Vigilantes in Late Victorian England," Women's History Review 1, no. 3 (1992): 397-412
46. Ibid
47. Quoted from Pennybacker, "It was not what she said," 130. Inspector's report, LCC, 1893, although the date in her notes has been misquoted
48. Alison Smith, "'The British Matron' and the Body Beautiful: The Nude Debate of 1885," in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester, 1999), 217-19
49. See Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, chap. 8
50. see also Judith Walkowitz, "The 'Vision of Salome': Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918," American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337-76
51. and Roland Barthes, "Striptease," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1972), 84-87
52. see also Bland, "Purifying," 405
53. Bristow, Vice, 209-10
54. For a general discussion of the female gaze, see E. Anne Kaplan, "Is the Gaze Male?" in Power of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Anne Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983)
55. Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature ofModernity," in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London, 1989)
56. and, more recently, Viv Gardner, "The Invisible Spectatrice: Gender, Geography and Theatrical Space," in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester, 2000)
57. see also Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London, 1985), 15-16
58. Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London, 1976), 14
59. "County Council and Licensing," Era, 13 October 1894, 16
60. Bland, "Purifying," 406
61. "Ecclesiastical Intelligence," The Times, 8 June 1907, 7, col. C
62. "Living Statuary," Vigilance Record, July 1907, 49-50
63. See the following from the Vigilance Record: "British National Committee," April 1907, 27
64. "Living Statuary as Entertainment," April 1907, 31
65. "Living Statuary," May 1907, 36-37
66. "Meeting in Hull," July 1907, 53
67. "Meeting in York," July 1907, 54
68. and "Meeting at Blaenavon," July 1907, 56
69. For various aspects of the national efficiency question, see G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, 1899-1914 (Oxford, 1987)
70. Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton, NJ, 1988)
71. and E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880-1914 (London, 1995)
72. "The LCC and Amusements," Era, 29 June 1907, 16
73. Jeffreys, The Spinster, 25-26
74. see Leslie A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 (London, 1991) 3, 70-71, for discussions about masturbation
75. see John Springhall, ed., Sure and Steadfast: A History of the Boys' Brigade, 1883-1993 (London, 1983), 26-27
76. see also Hall, Hidden Anxieties, 29-32
77. For instance, the Newcastle Town Council refused to get involved; see, from the Vigilance Record: "Living Statuary in Newcastle," August 1907, 63
78. "Protest against the Living Statuary in Newcastle," September 1907, 70
79. "Living Statuary Exhibition at Newcastle," November 1907, 87
80. On Headlam's ideas about LCC cultural policy, see Waters, British Socialists, 149-52
81. See the following from Music Hall and Theatre Review: "Music Hall Morality," 25 January 1912, 57
82. "The County Council as Censor," 8 February 1912, 89
83. "Music Hall and Morals," 15 February 1912, 105
84. On power disputes between the LC and LCC, see "The Censorship," 30 September 1909, 635
85. see also John Johnston, The Lord Chamberlain's Blue Pencil (London, 1990), 127
86. On Maud Allan, see Walkowitz, "The 'Vision of Salome'"
87. On cinema, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925 (London, 1988)
88. on "khaki fever," see Angela Woollacott, "'Khaki Fever' and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age, and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War," Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 325-27
89. Shiela Van Damme, We Never Closed: The Windmill Story (London, 1967), chaps. 5, 8
90. On the complex relationship between individualism and collectivism in this period, see Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870-1914 (London, 1993), 11-13
91. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978)
92. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (New York, 2003), 40-82