Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City
Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City
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This lively and highly innovative book reconstructs the texture and meaning of popular pleasure in the Victorian entertainment industry. Integrating theories of language and social action with close reading of contemporary sources, Peter Bailey provides a richly detailed study of the pub, music-hall, theatre and comic newspaper. Analysis of the interplay between entrepreneurs, performers, social critics and audience reveals distinctive codes of humour, sociability and glamour that constituted a new populist ideology of consumerism and the good time. Bailey shows how the new leisure world offered a repertoire of roles that enabled its audience to negotiate the unsettling encounters of urban life. Bailey offers challenging interpretations of respectability, sexuality, and the cultural politics of class and gender in a distinctive, personal voice.
- Peter Bailey a well-known social historian
- Offers views of many popular Victorian entertainments: music, theatre, the pub, the comic newspaper, etc
- Contains illustrations from the period including comics from contemporary newspapers
Reviews & endorsements
"...it is often a pleasure to observe the dexterity with which Bailey handles his material." Times Literary Supplement
"...a captivating and eloquent contribution to the history of popular culture in Britain." Essays in Theatre
"For educated general readers as well as college and graduate collections at all levels." Choice
"In Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City Peter Bailey gives a bravura performance. The book is filled with challenging interpretations... Great fun to read as well as highly stimulating, the essays are characterised by impeccable research, elegant, lively prose, breathtaking vocabulary, and apt period illustrations. Further, the book illuminates wonderfully the evolution and maturation of the scholarly mind of one of the most imagnative Victorian social historians of the late-twentieth century." Kathleen E.McCrone, Canadian Journal of History
"[Bailey's] latest book is a collection of previously published essays exploring the expanding world of popular entertainment in the late Victorian city. Read together, they offer a fascinating overview of Bailey's achievement in shaping a field with its own set of evolving critical questions." Victorian Periodicals Review
"Bailey has cajoled conventional history into...relaxingits relentless emphasis on labor and attending to leisure. His latest book os a collection of previously published essays exploring the expanding world of popular entertainment in the late Victorian city. Read together, they offer a fascinating overview of Bailey's achievement in shaping a field with its own set of evolving critical questions." Victorian Periodicals Review 33:2 Summer 2000
Product details
- Published: October 2003
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780521543484
- Length: 272 pages
- Dimensions: 229 × 153 × 19 mm
- Weight: 0.423kg
- Contains: 13 b/w illus.
- Availability: Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: social history, cultural studies and the cad
- 1. The Victorian middle class and the problem of leisure
- 2. A role analysis of working-class respectability
- 3. Ally Soper's half-holiday: comic art in the 1880s
- 4. Business and good fellowship in the London music hall
- 5. Champagne Charlie and the music hall swell song:
- 6. Music-hall and the knowingness of popular culture
- 7. The Victorian barmaid as cultural prototype
- 8. Musical comedy and the rhetoric of the girl, 1892–1914
- 9. Breaking the sound barrier
- Notes
- Index.
- Show more
