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Audiences, stage
managers and scenes
that can only be
described as beastly:
Researching East
End theatre in the
nineteenth century
Jim Davis
University of Warwick
1
I don’t know whether there’s something special about East End theatre, but for
me it inevitably calls up a series of memories. I first became acquainted with
East End theatre per se in the early 1970s when I regularly travelled to Hoxton
to rehearse and act (very badly) in a couple of productions at Hoxton Hall, the
former MacDonald’s music hall, a few hundred yards up Hoxton High Street
from the site of the former Britannia Theatre. I still remember wandering up
dimly lit Hoxton Street on dark winter evenings and entering Hoxton Hall with
its then murky atmosphere and faint smell of gas.
Another memory, from around the same time, when I was living in East London
within easy access of the Theatre Royal Stratford East (on which my colleague
Nadine Holdsworth is currently undertaking some very exciting research), are
visits to Sweeney Todd (the version that inspired Sondheim), regular trips to
other new productions and large group visits to the Sunday evening variety
shows. Later, when the theatre was under Philip Hedley’s enlightened direction,
I took a group of students on a playwriting course I had just started at
Roehampton University, where I then worked, to Stratford East, where Philip
Hedley talked about the theatre’s writing policy, then generously provided us all
with free sandwiches and free tickets to that evening’s show. And any visit to
Stratford East at that period, of course, had to be rounded off by a visit to the
bar, for further live entertainment after the show.
My most significant memory, though, takes me right away from East London to
the blue skies and sunshine of Sydney, New South Wales, where I was working
in the late 1980s. I had decided to make the best of my distance from all my
major research resources by undertaking a study of English actors in Australia.
This meant visiting the Mitchell Library to see if they had any useful documents
that would assist in my research. The Library is situated quite centrally in
Sydney on the edge of a large open space called the Domain, just across from
2
the Art Gallery of New South Wales and adjacent to the Botanical Gardens,
only minutes away from stunning views of the Opera House and Sydney
Harbour Bridge.
Browsing though the catalogues I noticed a reference to the manuscript diaries
of the Britannia’s stage manager, Frederick C Wilton, with a rather parochial
description beneath – ‘some Australian interest’. I’d ordered up manuscript
diaries left by actors, stage managers and other theatre folk before at libraries in
the UK and the States. I knew that one was often lucky to get anything more
than a few pages of accounts and a couple of desultory entries in such volumes.
Nevertheless, I ordered the manuscripts, which took the form of a set of small
diaries contained inside a box file. I opened the first diary (for1863) not
expecting very much, only to find I was plunged into the world of East London,
the Britannia Theatre, Wilton’s domestic life, comments on the topics of the
day: a panorama, in fact of one man’s life and work in East London from 186375. From then on, whenever I had a few free hours, I returned to the library to
read more. I knew a bit about the Britannia from the late Clive Barker’s articles
on that theatre1 and it was soon clear to me that these diaries represented one of
the fullest accounts in existence of the day to day life of any London – let alone
East End - theatre in the nineteenth century. The future direction of my research
changed almost overnight and a long period of engagement with the history of
East End theatre began.
A few years later I was walking with my children and some friends through
Waverley Cemetery (in the eastern suburbs of Sydney). Waverley is truly a
cemetery to die for – it is beautifully situated on the coast, overlooking the
Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful Sydney winter day – blue skies, bright
1
Cliver Barker, ‘The Audiences of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton’, Theatre Quarterly 9:34 (1979), 27-41; ‘A
theatre for the People’, in Kenneth Richards & Peter Thomson, eds., Nineteenth Century British Theatre
(London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1971); ‘The Chartists, Theatre, Reform and Research’, Theatre Quarterly I:4
(1971), 3-10
3
sunshine – and I took a detour from the main path, glancing at the tombstones
and monuments as I passed. One large rectangular monument caught my eye –
the inscription was to F. C. Wilton, clearly described as stage manager of the
Britannia Theatre, London. Wilton had eventually departed for Australia –
where he was to spend the last twelve years of his life - not long after his
retirement from the Britannia. Four of his six children were resident in Australia
and they had seen to it that his life and his work at the Britannia were fittingly
memorialised on the slopes of this graveyard so many thousands of miles away
from East London.
One final memory – back in London and back in the East End - Not long after I
had completed an edition of Wilton’s diaries2, I began research for a jointlyauthored book on nineteenth-century London theatre audiences, Reflecting the
Audience3, focussing on representative theatres from different parts of London.
From the East End we selected the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel, and the
Britannia Theatre, although in the process we surveyed other east end theatres
as well. Inevitably, in the nineteenth century, theatregoers often walked to
neighbourhood theatres and even to theatres further a-field. Although not
empirical research, I decided to spend a Sunday with some friends walking from
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, via the site of every major nineteenth-century London
theatre in East London right the way through to the East London Theatre in
Mile End Road. From Sadler’s Wells we walked to the site of the Grecian in
City Road, then across to the site of the Britannia in Hoxton, thence moving
south towards Liverpool Street in an attempt to locate the sites of the Standard
and City of London Theatres. From there we sought out the site of the Garrick
Theatre in Leman Street – made a detour to Wilton’s (not on our original list),
2
Jim Davis, ed., The Britannia Diaries: Selections from the Diaries of Frederick C. Wilton 1863-75 (London:
Society for Theatre Research, 1992)
3
Jim Davis & Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880 (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2001)
4
then on to Whitechapel Road and the putative sites of the Pavilion and East
London theatres. Needless to say, London’s geography has changed so much
that little could be proved about travel between theatres in the nineteenthcentury, but the journey (which included frequent stops for refreshments in
various hostelries along the way), did indicate that a certain degree of mobility
between theatres among East End audiences might have been possible.
Before East End theatre turns into my own personalised version of Proust and
the madeleines, let me say that one of the delights of working on nineteenthcentury East End theatre has been the visceral memories that, retrospectively, it
conjures up. But the real work, of course, lies in the archives: in the Public
Record Office, the London Metropolitan Archives, local collections such as
those in Hackney and Whitechapel, not to mention the relevant materials held in
the British Library and the V & A’s Theatre Collection. The East End continues
to attract nineteenth century theatre scholarship, including Heidi Holder’s work
on the female playwrights of East London and Janice Norwood’s work on the
Britannia. For me there are a number of lessons to be learnt from researching
East End theatre, which I will now go on to discuss.
After the passing of the Theatre Regulation Act in 1843 public records relating
to east end theatres become more common and more accessible. This continues
throughout the nineteenth century, although from the 1880s onwards the
London County Council Records become perhaps the primary source of
manuscript material. That east end theatres and saloons were looked upon with
suspicion in the 1840s is abundantly clear in a number of police reports, and in
letters of complaint about audience behaviour in the vicinity of east end
theatres. I have documented elsewhere the difficulties faced by Samuel Lane at
the Britannia Saloon, by the Albert Saloon and by the City of London and
5
Garrick Theatres, when they fell prey to unsympathetic police reports.4 Many
of these reports were generated because of obstructions caused outside the
theatres and saloons by teenage boys and there is a possibility that rival theatre
and saloon managers encouraged such behaviour in order to discredit their
competitors. Inside the theatres, particularly in the galleries, younger members
of the audience were also singled out for censure. A police report on the City of
London Theatre for 1846 describes a performance of Jack Sheppard during
which the gallery was crammed ‘almost to suffocation’ and generating an
intense heat. Of the 466 members of the gallery audience we learn that most
were youths of both sexes aged from around 11 to 18 and from the lowest
classes, the males being divested of jackets and coats. The police officers
recognised several male who were the known associates of thieves. Additionally
There were also between 40 and 50 young prostitutes some apparently
not more than 14 or 15 years old and the language going forward among
them was bad in the extreme. Among those described above there were
(on rough calculation) from 70 to 100 children of both sexes apparently
of a superior class from their manners and dress. I saw more than 20 little
girls decently dressed intermixed with the Prostitutes, some of whom
from their gestures and manner towards the boys they were with, were
apparently making use of rude observations, but it was almost impossible
to get near them to ascertain.5
Yet subsequent reports on the gallery audience at the City of London Theatre,
even when Jack Sheppard was playing, were much more benign, suggesting
that the police saw what they chose to see, were expected to see or perhaps were
even bribed to see or not to see.
4
See Jim Davis, "Scandals to the Neighbourhood: Cleaning Up the East London Theatres", New Theatre
Quarterly, VI:23 (August 1990), 235-243
5
Lord Chamberlain’s Papers LC7/6, police report 22 July, 1846
6
The gradual assimilation of those saloons that survived, such as the Britannia,
the Grecian and the Effingham into theatres, as well as other neighbourhood
theatres throughout London, into acceptable patterns of conduct and
organisation seems to have largely been achieved by the early 1850s, but
complaints did not completely disappear. Thus in 1870 the East London Theatre
(formerly the Effingham), then under the management of Morris Abrahams,
came under attack on sanitary grounds, although the prime mover in the
complaints was a local bookseller, Gladding, who (as a vendor of theological
books) apparently had religious objections to the theatre in general, and who in
1866 had objected to the construction of a public urinal immediately adjacent to
the theatre. Gladding’s subsequent complaints had materialised in a memorial
submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, complaining about the egress of males three
or four times an evening from the theatre to relieve themselves against the
houses, walls and railings of Mary Street, just across the road. It was not
uncommon to see 20 or so males relieving themselves at any one time with
perhaps twice that number awaiting their turn. As a result, claimed the
memorialists:
Female inhabitants...are often obliged to wait for some time before they
can approach their habitations, whilst their exit is always made liable to
the foullest offence by the exposure of male persons...The whole ground
is saturated until the street has become offensive all day long...6
The Reverend James Cohen, Rector of Whitechapel, wrote to the Lord
Chamberlain in support of the memorialists, claiming that in less than five
minutes the previous Saturday sixty persons were actually counted committing
this nuisance:
6
Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, LCI/232, memorial, 5 March, 1870
7
Health is endangered by the horrible smell which hangs over the place,
especially in the summer time. One serous outbreak of fever had taken
place some time ago, in which four members of one family died.
Common decency is outraged; and the usefulness of large school rooms
seriously interfered with because females are prevented attending
meetings and classes in the evening for fear of encountering scenes which
can only be described as beastly.7
Morris Abrahams claimed he had done his utmost to deal with these complaints
and that the East London theatre itself now contained more urinals than any
other public building in London. Two years later the Reverend Cohen targeted
the Garrick Theatre in Leman Street in an unsuccessful attempt to have its
licence revoked.8
So, if theatre was alive and well in London’s East End, so was anti-theatrical
prejudice. In my co-authored book on nineteenth-century London theatre
audiences I attempted to demonstrate that what was written about popular
theatres (in particular those situated in the East End) and the ways in which they
were represented in the nineteenth century were coloured by contemporary
debates over leisure, popular entertainment, social order and public morality.
Despite letters of complaint and sometimes unfavourable police reports the Lord
Chamberlain’s Office was relatively benign in its treatment of East End
theatres, although a reformist agenda of sorts was certainly implicit in the
attitudes and decisions of Examiners of Plays such as W. B. Donne. Equally,
descriptions by Dickens and his contemporaries not only constructed an East
End audience (particularly in the galleries) that would benefit from the
discipline and moral instruction offered by theatre, and therefore confound the
complaints of the anti-theatrical lobby, but also provided templates for many
7
8
ibid., letter, 14 April, 1870
Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, LC1/263, letter, 5 June, 1872
8
subsequent accounts.9 Given their agenda such accounts are not entirely
reliable. Equally, the burlesque accounts of the theatrical scene painter, Thomas
Erle, provide an unreliable guide to East End theatre going.10 In effect it is
necessary to look again at audience composition and habits of theatre going in
the East End, especially in a context where many of our received accounts may
be flawed, prejudiced or agenda-driven.
Consideration of the communities that attended the theatre in nineteenth-century
East London leads us into quite a complicated knot of assumptions and possible
misapprehensions. I was surprised to find a blog on the East End section of the
audience book (a section of which I was the primary author) which, while
commending the crusading spirit of the arguments put forward, concluded:
I was unsettled by their implication that East End theatres are worthy of
theatrical scholarship because they attracted respectable or orderly
people, not just prostitutes and thieves. There is more than a whiff of a
Victorian social reform agenda about this. It’s as if they are saying ‘look,
these people are more like us than we realised, and thus deserving of our
notice’. Wouldn’t they be deserving of attention anyway?
I was equally unsettled by this statement, since I think it is a misreading in
which the opinions of nineteenth-century west end journalists become
compounded with and mistaken for my own authorial intentions, but we are
talking about two distinct perspectives here. At the end of the day, as historians,
we can only speculate on the composition and behaviour of east end audiences,
and on their reception of what they saw, based on close analysis of the available
evidence, and guarding against any tendency to stereotype these spectators.
9
See Reflecting the Audience, pp. 78-80
Letters from a Theatrical Scene Painter (London: 1880)
10
9
That the newly constructed Whitechapel Pavilion should appeal to a wide range
of its potential demographic in 1858 was a concern not so much for theatre
historians but for the East London Observer, a fascinating repository of
information about life in East London at this period. A year earlier it had argued
that
Places of rational entertainment – of light entertainment, such as appeals
to the hearts of the low and uneducated - should always be encouraged
when their tendency is beneficial, and we are not always disposed to
imagine that they must be the contrary because the entertainments
provided are discussed with the assistance of a pipe and a glass of grog. 11
[Shades of Brecht there – although smoking was actually forbidden in
most licensed theatres and the provision of alcohol carefully regulated.]
Such venues, argued the Observer, were infinitely preferable to the taprooms,
gin-palaces and brothels to which the itinerant sailors of East London would
otherwise resort. Now, in 1858, changing tack somewhat, it expressed its
disappointment in the Pavilion’s failure:
[t]o provide at least one theatre where respectable people might go, with a
reasonable expectation of enjoying what has been called the highest form
of intellectual amusement – a fine play, finely acted. We expected to see
a step in advance of the Royal Standard, where good plays are presented
with one or two of the characters efficiently and the remainder
wretchedly filled – a single star of the first or second magnitude being
expected to counterbalance a constellation of muffs.12
11
12
East London Observer, 28 October, 1857
Ibid., 6 November, 1858
10
The recent sprouting of elocution classes and dramatic clubs in the vicinity had
done much to counter an anti-theatrical prejudice amongst some local
inhabitants, while
The spread of education among the masses has removed much of that
mental darkness which is requisite to make a drama of the “blood and
thunder class” endurable. [Even] [p]utting...entirely out of consideration
the large class of residents at the east-end whose intelligence and
education require some resemblance to nature in the characters they see
upon the stage and are either play-goers or would be if good plays were
more accessible, and east-end theatres were not associated with every
thing vulgar and dreary – putting these out of consideration, we do not
think a manager would do wrong in speculating on a high class of
entertainment.13
Continuing this attack several days later the Observer asked:
Surely the tradesmen are as refined, and the working people as intelligent
in the Tower Hamlets, as they are in Southwark or Lambeth, where
flourishes the Surrey Theatre, or Bagnige [sic] Wells, where Mr Phelps so
deservedly proceeds.14
For a time the Whitechapel Pavilion did endeavour to provide the East End’s
answer to the Surrey and Sadler’s Wells, but in the end commercial pressures,
changing demographics and the Standard Theatre’s assumption of this role,
meant that the Pavilion did not quite fulfil the East London Observer’s
aspirations on its behalf. It did continue into the twentieth century, however,
13
14
Ibid.
Ibid., 13 November, 1858
11
providing in the early 1900s an interesting mixture of conventional melodrama
and Yiddish entertainment.15
The East End’s Jewish population is often referred to in accounts of East End
theatre, often enhancing a tendency to exoticise and orientalise East End
theatregoers. Such descriptions reach their apotheosis in this semi-caricatured
portrait of a Whitechapel Pavilion audience for Yiddish drama in the early
1900s contributed by Anthony Ells to the Pall Mall Magazine:
The day’s work in the tailor’s shop or the cap-making factory is over.
Presser, machinist and button-hole maker are free to enjoy their precious
leisure. Swart and bearded, the signs of excessive labour under
unwholesome conditions written in their pallid lips and hollow eyes,
these alien-born sons of Israel cast care behind them when the theatre is
entered...With them come the daughters of Israel, beautiful sometimes in
the flower of their youth, but too often gross and coarse of feature and of
figure when once the flower has faded...of all trade, all ages, and both
sexes, the audience pass in, soon filling the house to overflowing. What
an audience! Bubbling, effervescent, undisciplined, it is noisy and
excitable after the invariable manner of Orientals. When the play begins,
however, it follows with rapt attention, yielding to its emotions with the
frankness and simplicity of children...16
Almost a century of similar commentary lies behind descriptions such as this.
In discussing East End theatre in the nineteenth century it has always seemed
important to me to relate theatres and their repertoires to their neighbourhoods
15
See Jim Davis, "The East End" in Michael Booth & Joel Kaplan eds., The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Drama
and the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.201-219.
16
‘The East End Jew at his Playhouse’, The Pall Mall Gazette, ns, 41; 78 (9 February, 1908), pp. 174-9
12
and local communities. When Michael Booth undertook a survey of East End
melodramas he wrote:
When I began work on this paper I expected to find in many of the plays
an element of social protest, some reference to the problems of East End
life, and a strong sense of urban society and the daily life of the streets. In
this expectation (again I was only dealing with printed texts) I was largely
disappointed. Social protest, for instance, is mostly confined to a few
plays in the country in which the game laws are passionately
denounced.17
My own experience, from close reading of unpublished east end manuscripts in
the University of Kent’s Pettingell collection, is that social protest is an
omnipresent, if at times unfocussed, ingredient of many popular east end
melodramas.18 Without in any way devaluing Booth’s significant and important
contributions to nineteenth century British theatre scholarship, the printed texts
(which inevitably were of those plays which had a broader appeal beyond their
east end origins) do not provide the best guide to an understanding of repertoire
and its impact in east end theatres. Equally, when Booth argues that the
popularity of nautical melodrama at the Surrey Theatre in the early nineteenth
century was due to the large local population of sailors and those engaged in
maritime trades in South London – a view that has been erroneously repeated by
other theatre historians – he flies in the face of demographic evidence.19 Sailors
and those engaged in maritime trades largely resided in the east end, where, for
instance Jerrold’s hard-hitting Mutiny at the Nore, rather than the Surrey’s
sentimental Black-Ey’d Susan, was premiered at the Pavilion.
17
‘East End Melodrama’, Theatre Survey XVII:1 ((1976), 65
See Jim Davis, "The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia 1863-74", New Theatre Quarterly, VII:28
(1991), 369-89.
19
See Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880, p. 6
18
13
To return to audiences - It is clear that nineteenth-century London theatre
audiences were relatively mobile and that one should avoid generic notions of
both the audience per se or even of the audiences for specific theatres. The
Britannia Theatre in Hoxton has attracted much scholarly attention, not least
due to the pioneering work of the late Clive Barker. His seminal study of the
audiences of this theatre made it quite clear that any attempt at a generic
definition of the Britannia’s audience was flawed because there were so many
problems, contradictions and inconsistencies to overcome. But there are certain
assumptions that can be drawn about the Britannia’s role in its own community,
not least through the Britannia Festival, held each year for Sarah Lane’s benefit
just before the theatre closed to prepare for the annual pantomime. At the end of
the evening each performer dressed in their most popular role from the previous
season and spoke a few lines in rhyming couplets; afterwards the stage was
showered with hundreds of gifts, usually ear-marked for individual performers.
H. Chance Newton recalled how:
You saw hurtling down from the gallery or up from the stalls and pit, or
flying out of the private boxes, pipes, tobacco pouches, umbrellas,
walking sticks, a batch of neckties, pairs of boots, hats, comforters, pairs
of socks, , and even pairs of trousers...All these and other useful articles
were for the actors. For the ladies of the company...the present givers
pelted gifts of another kind. These included rounds of beef, a fine parcel
of sausages, a goose, pairs of ducks, legs of pork, and sundry articles of
wearing apparel...
Some of the audience – especially the sweeter sex – mostly humble shop
assistants, servant girls and artificial flower makers (very numerous in the
district) would hand over the footlights cheap (and often gaudy) clocks,
glass cases of wax fruit and flowers. Sometimes they would throw at the
14
feet of their favourite actresses sprays of artificial flowers – the work of
their own deft hands.20
One of the factors we should remember, and one which doubtless contributed to
the Festival’s success, was that many members of the company not only worked
but also lived in the local community. In the 1860s Wilton, the stage manager,
and Edward Elton, second low comedian, lived just south east of Hoxton in
Nichols Square. Many of Sarah Lane’s family lived in lodgings adjacent to the
theatre. A search of the 1861 and 1871 censuses led Tracy Davis and myself to
deduce, in a jointly written article on the social demography of the Britannia
Theatre, that many of its company lived with and as its audience, sharing
lodgings with or residing next door to a spectrum that included petty tradesmen,
skilled craftsmen and unskilled labourers.21
This also raises an interesting question about the nature of theatrical celebrity,
when your local stars are also your next door neighbours. Admittedly, east end
theatres attracted visiting stars - Ira Aldridge, J. B. Howe and James Anderson
at the Britannia, G. V. Brooke at the City of London Theatre, for example – but
perhaps the greatest celebrity of all was Sarah Lane , whose association with the
Britannia for well over fifty years had turned her into an iconic local figure. Her
funeral procession in 1899, prior to her burial in Kensal Green Cemetery, was
one of the East End’s great public spectacles and I hope that Janice Norwood,
who has researched this in great detail, will publish an account of it before long.
After the period of time I spent working on the Wilton Diaries I found that any
stereotypical assumptions I might have made about East End theatres and their
employees severely challenged. What are we to make of Frederick Wilton, who
20
Referee, 3 February, 1924
Jim Davis and Tracy Davis, "The People of the "People's Theatre": The Social Demography of the Britannia
Theatre (Hoxton)" (with Tracy C. Davis), Theatre Survey, 32:2 (November 1991) 137-65
21
15
had acted with Kean, Macready and Phelps in the provinces, read The Times
every day, went fishing every Sunday (often using passes secured from the
Superintendant of London’s North Division of Police, Inspector Mott, another
keen angler), renewed annually his pass to the British Museum Reading Room,
owned a personal library that included most major poets plus volumes of
periodicals that he had bound himself (book binding being one of his hobbies),
played chess (even teaching the captain of the boat on which he travelled to
Australia how to play it), was au fait with current affairs, could sit with the
Examiner of Plays and discuss problems with Britannia manuscripts over a
glass of wine, worked a gruelling six day week superintending and stage
managing Britannia productions all year round, also concurrently ran a grocery
shop in Houndsditch until 1862 – one census return enters his occupation as
comedian and grocer – and in any spare time remaining lovingly tended his
garden in Nichols Square (to which he moved in 1863)? His comments on the
Britannia theatre have been published, but there are equally publishable
accounts within the diaries of his weekly fishing trips in the vicinity of East
London (often far more detailed than his entries on the Britannia), everyday life
in East London, his voyage to Australia and, finally, his experiences of
Australia in the late 1870s and 1880s.22 Wilton may be an exception to the rule,
but may also be a warning that we ghettoise East London theatres, their
employees and their audiences at our peril.
That there were always pockets of poverty in the East End is undeniable – and
that areas like Hoxton sunk into extremes of poverty in the late nineteenth
century is equally incontrovertible – but the East End was also, for much of the
nineteenth century, a thriving, bustling hub of trade and industry. Neither the
area nor its theatres were the resort merely of thieves, prostitutes or the ‘great
22
See The Britannia Diaries, pp. 36-48
16
unwashed’. It is impossible, therefore, to arrive at a generic definition of East
End theatre and its audiences during the nineteenth century since changing
demographics and socio-economic conditions, developments and changes in
means of transportation, all contributed to circumstances in which theatres,
performers, repertoire and spectators were constantly responding to mobility,
mutability and forever varying financial pressures.
I would like therefore to argue that we approach nineteenth century East End
theatre devoid of the baggage and preconceptions that have so often bedevilled
past accounts of it, using the opportunity of this new project to re-evaluate and
extend our knowledge of this fascinating period of English theatre history. I
would also like to think that, in an Australian cemetery far, far away, Frederick
Wilton is turning in his grave, not out of trepidation about what we might
discover, but out of excitement at the possibilities for illuminating the lives of
others – those others often mythologized or misrepresented in previous
scholarship – and providing a more informed and carefully evaluated
perspective on nineteenth century East End theatre.
17