In January 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. Researching an essay on popular amusements for his new magazine, Household Words, his visit to the place commonly known as the Vic was more about business than pleasure.Footnote 1 With plenty of “minor” theaters available, including other transpontine venues such as Astley's and the Surrey, Dickens's choice was carefully considered. For one thing, he wanted to see a melodrama. Originating in revolutionary France, this rich hybrid of music and drama owed its development in Britain to long-standing restrictions on performing the spoken word. Described by Walter Scott in 1819 as “intellectual Jacobinism”—an early sign of its broadly populist appeal—it was now mainly associated with “threepenny” establishments such as the Vic.Footnote 2 This is why Dickens chose the Victoria over its pricier, and more socially mixed, neighbors, and why his observations were filtered through the invented working-class everyman, Joe Whelks: poorly educated and badly housed, but from his spot in the Vic's famously large gallery, determined to follow the dramas on show.
In describing Whelks's experience of May Morning; or, The Mystery of 1715, Dickens neglected to name the author as John Courtney. Like many of his contemporaries now largely forgotten, Courtney was then much in demand. Other work for the Vic included The Soldier's Progress; or, The Horrors of War (1849); an adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novel, Mary Barton (1851); and Markham and Greenwood; or, The Brother's Career, an 1846 version of G. W. M. Reynolds's sprawling bestseller, The Mysteries of London.Footnote 3 Although something of a bête noire for Dickens, the journalist, novelist, and second-wave Chartist leader was greatly admired by Lambeth's playgoing costermongers.Footnote 4 This is not to say that the Vic was a hotbed of politically advanced opinion, but it is to observe that some of its most favored authors could display the kind of socially critical edge that meant the theater often worked as a living “magazine” for the poor or, as a street-based Punch and Judy man told Henry Mayhew, a place to “learn knowledge.”Footnote 5 But as well as dispensing knowledge, the Vic also created a space in which to perform it. One practice noted by Mayhew involved people from the area ostentatiously “consulting of a play-bill” as status-making proof of their literacy.Footnote 6
Building on work by Jane Moody, David Worrall, and Marc Brodie, and following Gregory Vargo's illuminating account of Chartism's links to drama, this article considers how an officially regulated commercial cultural provider simultaneously functioned in the enabling ways described by Mayhew.Footnote 7 As well as being a study in urban social practice—by 1850, the Vic was serving one of the most populous parts of London—this is also a study in continuity. Although what follows is largely concerned with David Osbaldiston's management of the Vic in the 1840s, by covering the years from the accession of George IV to the apparent onset of mid-Victorian equipoise, I am assuming that in practical terms there was little separating late Georgian from early Victorian theater. The Theatre Regulation Act (1843) put the Vic on the same legal footing as other metropolitan theaters, but this did little to alter its social standing or day-to-day operation. Indeed, owing to certain anomalies in the legislation, and the organizational deficiencies of the overseeing Lord Chamberlain's office, it seems that formerly “illegitimate” establishments like the Vic continued to enjoy a significant amount of creative freedom. And with the act of live performance always difficult to regulate, the politically engaged space that was the late Regency Coburg continued to be that of the early Victorian Vic.Footnote 8
Opened in 1818 as the Royal Coburg, and renamed in 1833, the Vic was intimately bound to its location. Built to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, the aim was to attract a more upmarket clientele from north of the river. In this regard, however, the speculation failed and almost from the outset the audience came mostly from the poorer parts of Lambeth and Southwark.Footnote 9 If a number of theaters in the east of the city had a similarly neighborhood orientation, compared to its nearest south-side rivals, this self-styled “People's Theatre” had a notably plebeian feel.Footnote 10 While its mixed bill of dramas inevitably contained an ideological ragbag of messages, within the Manichean conflicts of the melodramatic mode, the poor and the marginal were invariably given a voice.Footnote 11 And whatever the authorial design on show, the vocal presence of the audience—or as Lynn Voskuil puts it, a “public sphere grounded in verbal exchange”—was integral to the production of meaning.Footnote 12 Moreover, in an age when auditoria were still fully lit, those gathered in some of the period's largest public spaces were part of a densely communal experience. In a point not lost on radicals looking for places in which to assemble, the police might well be present, but they had no automatic right of entry. While a licensed theater might well go bankrupt, especially in the economically turbulent 1840s, it was unlikely to be closed down by officialdom.Footnote 13
Drawing on press reports, official papers, playscripts, and especially playbills—the latter, as Mayhew noted, a key means of extra-theatrical communication—the following sections explore the Coburg/Victoria as an intermediate space between commercial arena and plebeian public sphere. Although comparisons with more overtly “counter” spaces should not be pushed too far, within what might be termed a “radical half-space,” monetary gain and radical expression were not mutually exclusive.Footnote 14 The “superior dramas” noted by Reynolds's Weekly News were always meant to pay, but this did not preclude the staging of numerous historical or contemporary works full of pointed social and political comment.Footnote 15 Here we find overlaps with recent work on Edward Lloyd, a populist-liberal publisher whose mass-market titles generated numerous links with the Vic, and with Rob Breton's study of the “scavenged” political content of penny literature.Footnote 16 Focusing on the 1830s and 1840s, Breton finds both a “genuine attempt to be on the right side of history” and, in the portrayal of such criminal celebrities as Jack Sheppard and Sweeney Todd, evidence that in making “social anger available to a working-class audience,” radical politics was a commercially viable proposition.Footnote 17 This in turn accords with Christina Parolin's work on the capital's radical taverns and meeting halls, alternative sites of social and political exchange that nevertheless operated within the marketplace.Footnote 18
What follows is organized into three interlinked sections. The first considers the Coburg/Victoria from its opening in 1818 to the arrival of David Osbaldiston in 1841. During this time, its position as a prominent neighborhood venue was firmly established, as too were its radical inclinations. With the public focused ever more on the need for political change, to actively demand reform was also to have a well-paying strategy of appeal. The second part of the article briefly covers Osbaldiston's professional life before 1841. Becoming in the words of Reynolds's Weekly News, one of the “ablest managers of the million,” the man who had once sold Henry Hunt's corn-based coffee (a blend of radical propaganda and commercial enterprise), successfully combined crowd-pleasing entertainment with socially critical comment.Footnote 19 Although in the absence of any personal papers, Osbaldiston's inner world is closed to us, in the self-authored role of actor-manager, his public persona was consistently on the side of reform.
Challenging the idea that in the regnal shift from Georgian to Victorian, theater's “glorious [radical] causes” were dispersed or defused, the most substantive section deals with the period 1841–50.Footnote 20 Under the shared management of Osbaldiston and Eliza Vincent, the Vic now enjoyed its most successful period prior to the twentieth century.Footnote 21 Offering a wide variety of theatrical entertainment, from Shakespeare to seasonal pantomime, the Vic specialized in domestic and historical melodramas, forms that gave ample scope for radically inclined writers such as George Dibdin Pitt. As well as supporting the reformist efforts of the Chartist movement, the Vic also developed a particular line on the Wat Tyler story. Playing on the “subaltern medievalisms” that informed popular perceptions of the English past, the Vic's interest in the fourteenth-century rebel leader was part of a wider engagement with the Norman Yoke.Footnote 22 This powerful narrative of lost rights exerted a significant hold on populist-radical politics, and would be strikingly re-enacted at the Vic in the shape of historical melodrama.
Crucial to bringing such dramas to life were the Vic's principal players. Osbaldiston took an increasingly backstage role; however, the Lambeth-born Vincent appeared most nights, and together with the likes of E. F. Saville and Newton “Bravo” Hicks, helped turn a money-making space into a meaning-making place. Here the concept of “ghosting” is useful—a process, suggests Marvin Carlson, “deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition,” which by “bringing together on repeated occasions and in the same spaces the same bodies” constructed and sustained close-knit interpretive communities.Footnote 23 However convincingly she played her parts, the “acknowledged heroine of domestic drama” was always the daughter of a Blackfriars news vendor.Footnote 24 Adding to these accumulated layers of meaning was the Vic's embeddedness in the physical community. Aside from its role as a major local employer, in a transient world lived largely on the street, the fondly named Vic was a reassuringly fixed and stable presence (Figure 1). The place visited by Dickens on a Tuesday night in 1850 was thus a more complex entity than either he realized or cared to acknowledge.
Though dating from ca. 1870, this illustration captures well the area surrounding the Vic at mid-century. © British Library Board.
The Victoria before Osbaldiston: 1818–41
When its latest novelty—a huge mirror-curtain set in a lavishly gilded frame—was unveiled at Christmas 1821, the Coburg had been open for two-and-a-half years. Although during this time it had mostly failed to attract the more affluent and fashionable, it had nevertheless made an impact. Much of this was due to its willingness to court controversy, an approach that ranged from illegal productions of Shakespeare to daring new pieces such as William Moncrieff's Giovanni in the Country! Or the Rake Husband (1820). Written as a follow-up to Giovanni in London (1817), its title made reference to the philandering George IV and the spiteful treatment of his wife during the so-called Queen Caroline affair.Footnote 25 In a real-life drama that gripped the country, the Coburg and its audience stood firmly on the side of their anti-establishment heroine—her lost rights to the throne morphing into the assumed lost rights of “the people.” This support was rewarded with the Queen's visit to the theater in June 1821. In a moment seen by Worrall as confirming the Coburg's growing political agency, once the cheers and huzzas had subsided, the disinheritance drama Marguerite! Or The Deserted Mother was dutifully played.Footnote 26 As reported the next day, the royal visitor watched with “great attention” while the “the audience caught at every sentence that bore upon her singular situation.” Not for the first time at the Coburg, the evening also included some lively singing of pro-Caroline songs.Footnote 27
While for much of the 1820s the Coburg relied on the kind of murderous melodramas that earned it the name of “Bloodtub,” come the summer of 1830 it was again a scene for more radical expression, as calls for reform mounted in the wake of George IV's unlamented death. In these stirring times, the demand for an end to the patent monopoly—a kind of theatrical rotten borough giving Drury Lane and Covent Garden unwarranted privileges—sat comfortably with demands for a wider franchise. Now under the actor-management of George Davidge, the Coburg energetically aligned itself with these twin causes.Footnote 28 First seen in August 1830, Douglas Jerrold's The Mutiny at the Nore! Or British Sailors in 1797 clearly signifies this re-engagement. While in keeping with the historical record, Jerrold has the mutiny end in failure and its ringleader, Richard Parker, hanged from the yardarm, this outcome was to provoke angry hissing from the audience. As one anonymous writer to the Home Secretary (Robert Peel) complained, in such “insubordinate times,” this “atrocious” work was doing more harm than any of “Mr Hunt or W. Cobbett's harangues.”Footnote 29 Testament to what the Examiner of Plays, George Colman, described as the “lawless” nature of “those people over the water,” the Mutiny was restaged in 1831 and 1832.Footnote 30
In somewhat lighter mode came Reform, or John Bull Triumphant, a one-act play from March 1831 in which Davidge himself took the lead.Footnote 31 As drawn by Moncrieff, the world of John Bull is filled with both his corrupt servants (Lickspit, Rottenstone, Rankweed, etc.) and put-upon tenants, such as the aptly named George Briton. Angry at not being properly represented at the “Great House,” the tenants consider withholding their rents. Finally made aware of the trouble brewing, John Bull resolves to engage only those who will “lighten your burthens, not add to them.”Footnote 32 Cementing the all-important bond between reform and patriotism, one crucial to the discourse of popular constitutionalism, the curtain falls with soldiers and sailors entering to the strains of “Rule Britannia.” Making clever use of its playbills, the drama's presentation at the Coburg was framed in terms of parliamentary procedure as this “very popular measure will continue to be debated through its different stages every evening till further notice.”Footnote 33 Prefacing a hurriedly printed sixpenny edition of the play, Moncrieff linked its calls for reform to the continued “odious” divide between legitimate and illegitimate theaters. As with the political stage, insisted Moncrieff, the nation's drama should henceforth be a “free and equal arena.”Footnote 34
Apparently sharing this view, and doubtless noting the financial worth in expressing it, Davidge took an active role in petitioning parliament and, in May 1832, a select committee was convened to review the matter. Chaired by the Radical member of parliament and novelist, Edward Bulwer, it numbered Davidge and Moncrieff among its witnesses. Emboldened by this development, Davidge chose to revive Henry Fielding's farcical tragedy Tom Thumb (1730). Coinciding with the tense final weeks of the Reform Bill crisis, the tale of a king who stood in fear of his wife (an easily recognized allusion to William IV and his anti-reform queen) was, at the very least, provocative. More controversial, however, were the accompanying playbills that set the people's cry of “Reform! Reform!” against the King's enfeebled retort: “Petition me no Petition … … Her Majesty the Queen is in a Passion.”Footnote 35 Threatened with legal action by conservative elements in the press, Davidge withdrew both the offending bills and the production they advertised. Thus, while it clearly paid Davidge to trade on current concerns and controversies, as with the rest of his profession, the ability to trade at all had always to be paramount.Footnote 36
By the time of Davidge's move to the Surrey in 1834, his renamed former theater had again returned to less obviously political fare. Yet in presenting popular legitimate dramas such as Richard Sheridan's Pizarro (1799) and Sheridan Knowles's William Tell (1825), the Vic was not only risking protests from the still protected patents, but was also handling works with strongly libertarian themes. Indeed, the life of the legendary Swiss freedom fighter would soon become a favorite with Chartists hungry for inspiration from the past. Continuing its association with historically themed dramas, and on this occasion one rooted in home-grown constitutionalism, early in 1840 the Vic presented John Faucit Saville's Magna Charta; or, The Birthright of Britons.Footnote 37 Making little of its subject beyond some period-style pageantry, it instead used the past to address the present, with the events of 1215 recast as the coming of “The People's Charta,” a reference to the rejected petition of 1839 that, in its constitutionalist list of demands, drew heavily on the precedent of Magna Carta itself.Footnote 38 Having also presented J. T. Haines's King Harold; or, The Battle of Hastings for the benefit of the Dorchester Laborers (otherwise known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs), heading into the new decade the Vic was again showing a more radical side, and one that its incoming management was profitably able to exploit.Footnote 39
Osbaldiston before the Victoria: 1817–41
Born in 1794 to a family of Manchester merchants, between his debut in 1817 and his arrival at the Vic in 1841, Osbaldiston's career had been a crowded one. From an early stint of management in Cornwall, to narrowly escaping the 1828 ceiling collapse at the Brunswick Theatre in Whitechapel, which killed at least a dozen people, Osbaldiston lived as dramatically offstage as he did on it. In the wake of his ill-fated move to the Brunswick, Osbaldiston immediately headed south to the Surrey. Engaged as principal lead, stage-manager, and occasional writer, he spent three years under the influential actor-manager, Robert Elliston.Footnote 40 Involved at the time in a bitter rivalry with Davidge's Coburg, the more established and respectable Surrey did not lag behind in confronting the issues of the day. Having quickly made his name playing manly heroes such as Rob Roy and William Tell, in August 1830 Osbaldiston produced an instant response to events across the Channel with Vive La Liberté; or, The French Revolution.Footnote 41
In celebrating the overthrow of Charles X, and his replacement by the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, Osbaldiston offered an upbeat alternative to the Coburg's Mutiny at the Nore, while putting himself on the right side of reform as the fictitious revolutionary, Henri de Florville. With Vive La Liberté playing until the end of the month, over at the Surrey's tricolor-flying neighbor, the Rotunda, William Cobbett was giving a series of packed-out lectures on France.Footnote 42 Now in the hands of the free-thinking publisher, Richard Carlile, and the arrestingly titled Archbishop of Pandemonium, Robert Taylor, the place formerly known as the Surrey Institution briefly combined all manner of radical discussion with highly politicized spectacle—most notably Taylor's politico-monological tragedy Swing: or, Who Are The Incendiaries? Inspired by the recent wave of agricultural disturbances in southern England, the piece concludes with the Kentish farmer, John Swing, successfully leading a “people's revolution” before returning Cincinnatus-like to the plough.Footnote 43
With calls for political change gathering pace, Osbaldiston took a headline role in a performance of Rochester; or King Charles the Second's Merry Days. Presented on the evening of 9 November, Moncrieff's 1818 comedy was greatly radicalized by Osbaldiston's on-stage behavior. Dressed as the eponymous merry monarch, he at one point announced that the Duke of Wellington was refusing to allow the new king to go to the City. Reportedly causing uproar in the house, this was a reference to the Guildhall dinner that William IV had been due to attend but from which, to the fury of reformers, the prime minister had barred him.Footnote 44 Earlier in the day, the bridges at Blackfriars and Waterloo had seen crowds of armed protestors making their way northwards, and around the time that Osbaldiston was speaking at the Surrey, Carlile and Taylor were doing the same at the Rotunda. Just as alarming to the “Friend of Order” who reported to Peel were the upcoming performances of The Venetian Plot (a version of Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved) and William Tell, both of which starred the “rank and designing radical” Osbaldiston.Footnote 45 Although within a day of Osbaldiston once again defying the Habsburgs, the formation of a pro-reform Whig administration had somewhat calmed things, the drama of political change—and the Surrey's role in performing it—was far from played out.
Significantly here, the Surrey was most active in 1832. In part, this reflects the climactic final months of the reform crisis, but it also relates to Osbaldiston becoming the Surrey's lessee and manager. In this new capacity, Osbaldiston attended a meeting in Covent Garden in January in support of Benjamin Rayner's unlicensed Strand Theatre. Established in defiance of the patent monopoly, it was a major factor in the establishment of Bulwer's select committee, to which Osbaldiston gave evidence on 22 June.Footnote 46 Along with topical new works such as Edward Elton's game-law-bashing Paul the Poacher, Osbaldiston further pushed his reformist credentials with thinly disguised productions of Shakespeare.Footnote 47 Not only was the people's right to the National Drama equatable with their right to the franchise, but the Bard's purportedly humble origins—even to the point of poaching deer—had made him one of radicalism's great literary heroes.Footnote 48 As part of this well-publicized move into cultural politics, Osbaldiston presented King John; or, The Days of Magna Charta, Macbeth, and The Venetian Moor. “Interspersed with melodramatic music”—a typical device for evading patent laws—this version of Othello had Osbaldiston in the lead with a seventeen-year-old Eliza Vincent as Desdemona.Footnote 49
During this time Osbaldiston continued to appear as William Tell, and in June 1832 he presented a more recent version of the story via Edward Fitzball's Hofer, The Tell of the Tyrol (Figure 2). Based on the life of Andreas Hofer (1767–1810), a Tyrolean innkeeper shot for leading resistance during the War of the Fifth Coalition, this was not the first staging of the subject. However, in contrast to James Planché's operatic offering for Drury Lane in 1830, Fitzball emphasized Hofer's refusal to accept the peace agreed by the Austrian emperor.Footnote 50 For Hofer, this would mean betraying the true liberty for which he and his supporters had fought. Refusing to yield, Hofer is put to death as a traitor.Footnote 51 With its focus on humble villagers fighting for their freedom, the drama's radical display of working democracy meant that Hofer (like William Tell) would later be of interest to theater-minded Chartists.Footnote 52 With performances sprinkled with various topical barbs, Hofer also marks the kind of politically engaged conversation that Osbaldiston periodically liked to conduct with his audience. And in following the Coburg by reducing the price of gallery seats to sixpence, it was also a conversation that could be had more cheaply.Footnote 53
Osbaldiston as Andreas Hofer. © Museum of London.
Three months after the passage of the Reform Act (Lambeth now had two members of parliament, but only a fraction of its inhabitants had gained the vote), in October 1832 the Surrey presented John Walker's The Factory Lad.Footnote 54 Punchier than Taylor's five-act Swing, and almost certainly better performed, Walker's angry two-act polemic on displaced workers resorting to incendiary violence was a strong response to the disappointed hopes of reform.Footnote 55 Culminating with the half-crazed Will Rushton shooting the ruthless factory owner, Squire Westwood, the action is frozen in tableau as soldiers commanded by Justice Bias surround the factory lads and their families. While some scholars have noted the play's atypicality and limited opening run, of more relevance here is that Osbaldiston consistently showed an interest in it.Footnote 56 Never acting in it himself, during his three years in the East End managing the City of London Theatre (1838–41), Osbaldiston nevertheless successfully revived The Factory Lad, and then did so again at the Vic when, as will be seen, it played in the context of a Chartist benefit.Footnote 57
In the summer of 1834, Osbaldiston's elopement with an obviously pregnant Vincent brought an unseemly end to his reign at the Surrey. Presenting his comeback in Hofer-like terms as personal liberty exercised, in the autumn of 1835 he reappeared as the manager of Covent Garden. His opposition to the patent monopoly seemingly forgotten, he stayed in the West End for two seasons. Accused of all kinds of “Surrey fooleries” by a condescending theatrical establishment, he nevertheless revived the career of the great tragedian, William Macready, and produced Edward Bulwer's controversial debut drama, The Duchess de la Vallière, the first in a trio of works exploring the shift in power from despotic to more democratic systems of government.Footnote 58 Osbaldiston also engaged Benjamin Rayner for a series of performances, including the title role in John Bull; or, The Englishman's Fireside. Much to the irritation of the Lord Chamberlain, Rayner used the occasion to passionately denounce the “official tyranny” that had ruined him.Footnote 59 Replaced by Macready in the summer of 1837, Osbaldiston briefly took the management of Sadler's Wells before moving to the recently opened City of London Theatre. Finally, at Easter 1841, he and Vincent moved back across the Thames to what became their professional home for the rest of the decade.
Osbaldiston and the Victoria: 1841–50
In August 1843, the middle-class writers of Punch imagined how the disturbances in rural Wales, commonly known as the Rebecca Riots, would play at the Vic. Titled Rebecca the Wronged One, the drama would climax with the heroine on trial for her life at Carmarthen assizes. The falsely accused Rebecca would be played by Eliza Vincent and her faithful lover by E. F. Saville.Footnote 60 A dart aimed at the supposed clichés of minor theater, Punch's spoof synopsis contained some obvious points of truth. The first related to the appearance together of Vincent and Saville, the stars of such hits as Simon Lee and Susan Hopley; or, The Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl. According to the weekly journal the Odd Fellow (owned by the veteran radical Henry Hetherington), a “more than common cordiality” existed between Vincent and her audience, while the well-connected Saville was a highly regarded “man of the people” (Figures 3 and 4).Footnote 61 Exemplified by Vincent's best-known role as the beleaguered Susan, one that when performed would inspire offers of help from the audience, there was also the Vic's inclination towards domestic drama. Often blurring into what Matthew Buckley calls the dramas of economic distress, these popular expressions of social and political concern were further shaped and amplified by the “ghosted” elements of space, performer, and audience.Footnote 62 In justifying his defiance of the game laws, Simon Lee's point that the laws of man are not those of nature was rooted in a plebeian moral economy, but the discursive force came in the nightly exchanges between actor/poacher and spectator/villager.Footnote 63
Saville as Union Jack. © Museum of London.
Vincent as Agnes Primrose. University of Bristol Theatre Collection/ArenaPAL.
Reflecting many of the concerns of the Hungry Forties, and the fact that many of the audience were rural–urban migrants, Simon Lee was frequently played at the Vic. Forced from his farm by a politically corrupt miser, Lee has turned to poaching to feed his starving family. The killing of a gamekeeper in self-defense leads to a sentence of death and the suicide of his despairing wife. Although reprieved at the last moment, Lee's once promising life is broken beyond repair. Famously denounced by the eighteenth-century jurist, William Blackstone, as the “bastard slip” of the Norman forest laws, the game laws produced countless bloody clashes between poachers and keepers, and dislike for them was rooted deep in both town and country. Uniting all shades of radical opinion, from the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League (who hired the Vic in 1843) to Chartism, this epitome of class legislation was regularly assailed in Simon Lee and other dramas laying bare the kind of structural inequalities that also produced the Poor Laws.Footnote 64 Later playing the role of The Factory Lad's Will Rushton, and invoking one of the key words in the lexicon of popular constitutionalism (“tyrant”), Saville would collusively address the audience thus: “the Game Laws, eh? As if a poor man hadn't as much right to the bird that flies and the hare that runs as the rich tyrants who want all … I care not for their laws.”Footnote 65
The author of Simon Lee, and the even more popular Susan Hopley, was George Dibdin Pitt. Having worked closely with Osbaldiston and Vincent at the City of London, and before that the Surrey, he was perhaps more attuned to the demands of the Vic's new management than any other writer.Footnote 66 No stranger to pawnbrokers and cheap lodgings, he was also close to his core audience. While much of his vast output is predictably unremarkable, at his best Dibdin Pitt was capable of skillfully crafted dramas that combined lively entertainment with forceful social comment.Footnote 67 In addition to attacks on the game laws in Simon Lee, and on the villainy of lawyers in Marianne, the Child of Charity (1844)—here, the evil plans of Grubwig are only thwarted by the intervention of an honest “British mob”—his radicalism is likewise evident in The Wreck of the Heart; or, The Story of Agnes Primrose, an adaptation of Elizabeth Inchbald's Jacobin novel Nature and Art (1796).Footnote 68 Strongly influenced by the ideas of William Godwin, Inchbald's fable on systemic inequality and official hypocrisy found a large and diverse readership. Running to numerous editions, by the late 1830s it was also available in serial form and the Chartist-supporting publisher, John Cleave, included it in his Circulating Library for the Millions.Footnote 69
Premiered by Osbaldiston at the City of London in 1840, The Wreck of the Heart made its first appearance south of the river in November the following year. Drawing largely on the novel's sub-plot, according to which the son of a wealthy churchman seduces, and then abandons, the daughter of a poor cottager, there was plenty of scope to set the rich and entitled against the poor and disenfranchised. In what the playbills promised to be “a correct delineation of a Court of Justice,” the drama climaxes with Agnes on a capital charge for her unwitting handling of forged banknotes.Footnote 70 The irony here is that the unforgiving judge is William Norwynne, the man who misused her as a young woman. In contrast to what transpires in the novel, Agnes is saved at the last minute as audiences would not accept Vincent dying too often. Yet the happiness of the ending did not obscure the earlier criticisms of cynically misused power, or what the Era deprecated as irresponsible “tirades against the possession of property,” and the promulgation of the “disgusting dogmas of the Chartist and Socialist.”Footnote 71
Greatly extending this drama's reach, a novelized version appeared early in 1842 in Lloyd's Companion to the Penny Sunday Times. Part of a stable of titles run by Edward Lloyd, it developed good relations with the Vic, in contrast to the more politically conservative Era. In addition to its publication of Agnes Primrose, Lloyd's Companion issued versions of Marianne, the Child of Charity and Poverty; or, Mary Graham, the latter a bitter portrayal of the “Want and the Horrors of Winter.”Footnote 72 Reversing the flow from stage to page, Susan Hopley was not so much an adaptation of Catherine Crowe's three-volume novel, but of a fifty-six part serialization by Lloyd.Footnote 73 When Osbaldiston initiated a series of sweeping price cuts in November 1846, an action that earned him a summons from the Lord Chamberlain, Lloyd's Weekly News congratulated him for “acting in accordance with the spirit of the times [and] boldly meeting the wishes of the public.”Footnote 74 Insisting that up to three hundred people relied upon the Vic for their “bread,” Osbaldiston was in fact following the Standard and City of London theaters. Revealing the limits of the Lord Chamberlain's authority, the lower prices were condemned as an inevitable undermining of quality, but they were not reversed. Tailored to the “industrious” but hard-pressed mechanic, exactly the kind of person on whose behalf that Lloyd and Reynolds claimed to speak, prices now equaled one shilling for a box, sixpence for the pit, and threepence for the gallery.Footnote 75
By the time of its switch to lower prices, a move stated in the bills as boldly advancing with “the March of Intellect,” the Vic was firmly on the radar of local Chartists.Footnote 76 Although the drafting of the People's Charter owed much to the efforts of metropolitan radicals such as Hetherington, Chartism made little headway in the capital prior to 1840. Between the turn of the decade, and the presentation of the second petition in May 1842, however, Chartism in London became a much more active force. This was clearly visible in the rising number of Chartist localities or branches: thirteen in 1838, rising to sixty-three in 1842; an overall increase that was mirrored in both Lambeth and Southwark, where the number of localities trebled.Footnote 77 In the east of the city, where several other Chartist-friendly theaters were based, the growth in localities was also marked. But localized Chartist activity and the resort to local theaters did not necessarily follow. While Lambeth and Southwark Chartists went to the trouble of establishing both a Chartist Hall of Science and a more informal coffee house, in contrast to the Vic, they had no direct contact with Osbaldiston's former theater, the Surrey, and only limited (and relatively late) contact with the area's other main venue, Astley's.Footnote 78
In part, this might be explained by the more socially mixed audiences and higher prices of these theaters, but it also relates to the more radical outlook of the Vic as cultivated by Osbaldiston. Faced with a fluctuating economy and the offer of cheaper amusements elsewhere, the Vic also pushed the offer of bookable benefit nights. To this end, the Vic promised not just a “numerous and most powerful company,” but “moderate expenses, liberal donations,” and an “unrestrained selection” of dramas.Footnote 79 Whatever the appeal of such claims, what is clear is that between 1842 and 1849, the Vic hosted at least four Chartist benefits, a number that put it second only to the Standard Theatre in Shoreditch with six.Footnote 80 By this count, the Vic was ahead of other East End theatres, such as the Pavilion and the City of London, and also more purely Chartist venues like the Marylebone Working Men's Hall. Revealing how open to radical politics some of London's theaters then were, Chartists in the capital made greater use of commercial spaces than they did of their own venues.Footnote 81 If Chartism itself was a theatricalized movement, including its own “leading man” in the shape of Feargus O'Connor, even a half-full benefit at the Vic might do more for the cause than restaging the trial of Robert Emmet at a working men's hall or institute.Footnote 82 The benefit held at the Vic in June 1842, for example, played to an audience of almost 2,000 and raised just over £75, though some of this would have gone to the hire charges agreed and the cost of printing and distributing tickets.Footnote 83
Although, in numerical terms, the Standard appears as London's key Chartist theater, a point reinforced by O'Connor speaking there in 1849, this impression is somewhat misleading.Footnote 84 For one thing, the Standard was then a smaller and much less prominent venue than the Vic. Also, the offerings at the Vic were generally more radical in tone. The fourth act of Venice Preserved aside (November 1843), there was nothing at the Standard to match William Tell, Andreas Hofer, The Wreck of the Heart, and Wallace the Hero of Scotland, all variously at the Vic in 1842, or The Factory Lad in 1846.Footnote 85 In a peak year for Chartist activity in Lambeth and Southwark, coincident with the presentation of the second petition, Osbaldiston played William Tell in April 1842, and two months later Hofer, another canonical figure for Chartists, was in the hands of Saville.Footnote 86 Shortly after this, though not in the context of an organized benefit, Saville was playing Richard Parker in The Mutiny at the Nore, and in August he was joined by Osbaldiston and Vincent in a much fuller production of Venice Preserved.Footnote 87 Comfortable playing men in conflict with authority, Saville's portrayal of the “Chartist” Jack Sheppard was much admired, and his impact in these roles should not be underestimated.Footnote 88 From a distance of forty years, the journalist and theatrical impresario, John Hollingshead, vividly recalled Saville as Oliver Twist's Bill Sikes nightly working the audience to a frenzy as he stagily daubed Nancy with red-ochre. Brutal murder thus played out, Saville/Sikes would calmly step forward and bow.Footnote 89
While the extent to which Chartists were able to influence the shape of a program is not clear, as the publicity above suggests, the chosen theater would be expected to provide suitable entertainment. Returning to the benefit of June 1842, with its generous offering of The Wreck of the Heart, Hofer, and William Barrymore's Wallace the Hero of Scotland, we find that in terms of the Vic's current programming, only Hofer was then playing.Footnote 90 When, on 8 April 1846, the principal Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, advertised some “excellent fare” and a “galaxy of talent” for a benefit at the Vic on 29 April, it was presumably unaware the event would include The Factory Lad.Footnote 91 Having successfully opened on 20 April, its inclusion at the benefit suggests that not only was it finding a regular audience, but also that Osbaldiston wished to oblige his Chartist clients. He also knew that Walker's drama could be safely revived, because under the 1843 legislation, anything pre-dating the new regulations did not have to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain—a loophole that also allowed such bleakly powerful dramas as Simon Lee to remain in the repertoire.
Just how seriously the Vic took these evenings can be seen in a pair of related benefits from the early 1840s, at which the poems of John Watkins featured. Though originally from Whitby in Yorkshire, in 1841 the Chartist journalist and writer had married the daughter of a London stonemason and was living on Upper Marsh Street in Lambeth.Footnote 92 Watkins's personal connection to the capital's stonemasons coincided with his political interest. Having formally aligned themselves to Chartism in June, by August the masons were in dispute with Grissel and Peto, the main contractors for the rebuilding of Parliament.Footnote 93 Shortly before Christmas 1841, the Vic hosted a benefit for those concerned, with Watkins supplying a poem. Read from the stage by one of the striking men, it compared the current situation to that of “bold” Tell's struggle to free his homeland.Footnote 94 Directly reinforcing the sentiments of the poem, Osbaldiston then played in William Tell. When the following Christmas a poem in aid of an orphan boy was presented at the Vic, Saville took the lead in reading it. Maximizing the evening's chances of success—the aim being to keep the child from the “tender mercies” of the nearby workhouse—Saville then appeared with Vincent in Susan Hopley.Footnote 95
Between the benefit in April 1846 when The Factory Lad was played and March 1849 when J. T. Haines's Ruth; or, The Lass that Loves a Sailor headed the bill, the Vic appears to have had no direct contact with Chartism. But as the following two cases suggest, during this critical time for the movement, the Vic was staging work that closely aligned with its interests. Starring Saville's successor, Newton Hicks, as the mixed-raced hero Fabian, Thomas Archer's The Black Doctor; or, The Siege of the Bastille, and the Revolution of 1793 first played at the Vic in late November 1846. Unusually progressive in its portrayal of the central character, and his doomed but reciprocated love for the aristocratic Pauline de la Reynerie (played, of course, by Vincent), it ran into February the following year. Beyond its racially challenging content and revolutionary setting, The Black Doctor is interesting for its links to Chartism. Having opened at the City of London two weeks ahead of the Vic, on 14 November it formed the centerpiece of a benefit. Serving as a boost to flagging morale—the number of localities in the area having declined significantly since 1842—the size and enthusiasm of the audience, claimed the Northern Star, was proof of Chartism's continuing strength and vitality in the capital.Footnote 96
This not untypical interest in foreign-set dramas was evident again in 1848 as revolution swept across the continent. Recalling the Surrey's response to events in France in 1830, within two weeks of the Second Republic being declared on 25 February, the Vic was presenting Vive La Liberté! or, The French Revolution, a series of tableaux depicting the “wonderful and rapid results of the “Grand Struggle of the People in the cause of Liberty.”Footnote 97 With developments in France enthusiastically followed by many in the capital—at Sadler's Wells The Marseillaise was sung and a mass meeting in Lambeth arranged for congratulations to be sent to Paris—this “spirited little pièce de circonstance” was indeed well timed.Footnote 98 There was also the fact that another Paris-based drama, Isabel Bertrand, was then in production. With a looming closure for refurbishments creating renewed financial pressures, almost certainly the sets from Isabel Bertrand would have been reused in the piece that followed: in a virtual journey across a wood-and-canvas Paris, the left-bank Rue D'Enfer becoming the right-bank Rue St Honoré (Figure 5).Footnote 99
Victoria playbill for Vive La Liberté. © British Library Board.
With Hicks as a revolutionary patriot, Vive La Liberté moves from resolutions against the government to the “dispersion of the soldiery” and then on to the victorious raising of the tricolor. Described in the bills as the “Ensign of Liberty,” the tricolor was more than just a symbol of radicalism in France; it became a universal sign of plebeian unity in action. In this instance, the sacred flag is defended unto death by Jacqueline, the Poissarde, her title a reference to the revolutionary fishwives of 1789. Directly engaging the audience, the action closed with the “Impressive Denouement” of the “Marseillaise Hymn.”Footnote 100 Opening on the day that Reynolds gave a fiercely republican speech in Trafalgar Square, a piece of political theater that launched his career as a Chartist leader, Vive La Liberté ran for a week at the Vic before transferring to the Queen's Theatre on Tottenham Street.Footnote 101 Demonstrating the speed and spread of mid-century cultural transmission, it also appeared at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham. With signs of nationwide disturbance growing, it now drew the attention of the Home Office—a copy of the playbill (closely following the Vic's original) is filled with various notices promoting radical activity in the provinces.Footnote 102 Given this official interest, and the fact that Dibdin Pitt's The Revolution of Paris; or, the Patriot Deputy had just fallen foul of the censor, how did the Vic escape interference?Footnote 103
To this, we can speculate that Vive La Liberté was not actually submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. While the absence of any record cannot be taken as conclusive (it was not until William Donne's arrival in 1849 that the relevant department was properly run), it appears that in this case Osbaldiston took a chance. Clearly a risky tactic, it was not an entirely uncommon one, and there was always the cover of the earlier piece for the Surrey. The fact that Hicks's character bears the same name as that played by Osbaldiston in 1830 certainly suggests an updated rehash. Osbaldiston could also argue that productions at the Vic were openly displayed in the playbills, copies of which were routinely sent to the Lord Chamberlain.Footnote 104 Staying with the revolutionary theme, on the eve of the Vic's closure for refurbishment at the end of March (just before the mass Chartist gathering on nearby Kennington Common), The Black Doctor was revived. With Hicks as the hero confined to the Bastille by his aristocratic enemies, the drama concluded with the fortress destroyed and the mob controlling the streets.Footnote 105
In attempting to rewrite the future, Chartists often looked to the past. This could mean recourse to events such as the Glorious Revolution or the signing of Magna Carta, or else the noble heroics of liberty-loving individuals. Like many radicals of his generation, John Watkins was drawn to the story of Wat Tyler. Best known for John Frost, an 1841 drama on the Chartist rising at Newport two years earlier, in 1839 he wrote Wat Tyler, or the Poll Tax Rebellion.Footnote 106 Performed only once, and apparently now lost, Watkins's failure with the subject ran against the cultural grain. Although certainly not to everyone's liking, thanks largely to Robert Southey's dramatic poem from 1794 (a work he subsequently disowned), the leader of the Peasant's Revolt had become a celebrated historical figure. Not only did “Wat Tyler of old” have a central place in Chartist hagiography—with activists from Greenwich proudly organizing themselves into the Wat Tyler Brigade—according to a recent study of counter-hegemonic or “subaltern” medievalism, his name was “everywhere in the working-class press of the period.”Footnote 107 Aside from giving Southey's youthful excursion into radicalism an unintendedly high profile, this rapidly expanding medium spawned fresh versions of the story, including Pierce Egan the Younger's Wat Tyler (1840–41), a work that culminates in a Chartist-like list of demands, including abolition of the forest/game laws.Footnote 108
But if the life and adventures (and violent death) of this medieval rebel with a cause were mostly recounted in print, in a way that remains relatively understudied, they were also depicted on stage. While Chartists might occasionally perform Southey's work as committed amateurs, when it came to commercial theaters, the most important manifestations were seen at the Vic: first in John Haines's Richard Plantagenet; or, The Rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw (1845) and second in the pantomime Harlequin Wat Tyler; or, Jack Straw's Rebellion and the Fairies of the Land of Flowers (1849).Footnote 109 And if we also include the Coburg's Wat Tyler and Jack Straw; or, The Life and Death of King Richard II (1825), it appears that the management and audiences of the Coburg/Victoria had a special interest in this gripping episode from the national past.Footnote 110
When first performed at the Vic in 1836, Haines's three-act historical drama had the plainer title of Richard Plantagenet. Fresh from his success with the nautically themed My Poll and My Partner Joe, and with the author himself playing Tyler, this production was sold more on Haines's name and the promise of equestrian spectacle than its subject matter. Through his retitling of the play a decade later, the endlessly speculative Osbaldiston was emphasizing the drama's more populist leanings. He performed a similar trick with Edward Fitzball's Walter Tyrrel (1837). Written for Osbaldiston at Covent Garden, the story of William II's presumed killer was revived at the Vic in 1847 as the more enticing (if completely ahistorical) Walter Tyrrel, The Saxon Avenger. As well as exploiting the period's booming market in popular history, Osbaldiston was clearly trading on the classic radical discourse of the Norman Yoke. Intrinsic to what David Matthews terms “resisting medievalism,” the idea that Saxon liberties had been stolen by tyrannical Normans spoke loudly to those still denied the vote.Footnote 111 As Reynolds's Political Instructor confidently informed its mid-century readers: “Property in the case of the Norman aristocracy [and thus all modern property relations] was acquired by rapine, murder and violation of all laws, both human and divine.”Footnote 112
While the earliest accounts of Wat Tyler have him either from Essex or Kent, by the time we get to Southey he is definitively a Kentish blacksmith. He also now has a daughter called Alice. Drawing on John Stow's Englysh Chronicles (1566), and the more recent Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791), Southey made the trigger for the revolt Tyler's braining of a tax-collector a response to the latter's inappropriate treatment of Alice.Footnote 113 Aside from a few additions, including a sub-plot on the sexual misdoings of Richard II, this is mostly the version that Haines adopts. A more significant intervention, however, and one that anticipates Egan's Chartist-inflected novel, was to frame the story as a Saxon–Norman conflict. This accords with what we know of Haines as a writer. Noted for his ability to infuse sharp social comment into fast-moving dramas, Haines had at least two of his works presented at Chartist benefits, including at the Vic in 1849 with Ruth; or, The Lass that Loves a Sailor—an evening that once again included the singing of The Marseillaise.Footnote 114
Richard Plantagenet; or, The Rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw began a fortnight's run in October 1845. Doubling the social anger on display, it was initially paired with Jack Sheppard, a piece now openly disapproved of by the Lord Chamberlain's office.Footnote 115 With Saville as Tyler (and Sheppard), Vincent took the fictional role of Effie, the abandoned object of the now adult king's lust. With the playbills having briefed the audience on the iniquities of the Poll Tax, the rising of 60,000 men against the king, and William Walworth's treacherous stabbing of the “daring rebel” at Smithfield, the action launches into “Saxon swine” being threatened by arrogant Norman tax-collectors.Footnote 116 Attempting to calm the situation is Tyler: “A poor smith … … a labourer for others’ hire, but still a man.” Reflecting ongoing debates around physical-versus-moral force, Tyler is unwilling to accept the “lordly scorn” of the authorities, but favors change through petition and persuasion.Footnote 117 The fragile peace is broken when an agent of the Crown, Hugh Heartless, and a tax-collector called Tireling, demand that Tyler's daughter be counted for payment. Converted to the need for physical force by their sexualized approaches to Alice, the smith turns his hammer on Tireling. Freezing the action, the “celebrated picture” of Wat Tyler braining the tax-collector (presumably William Blake's engraving of a painting by Henry Fuseli) is then realized (Figure 6).
Tyler's braining of the tax-collector as later imagined in Dicks's Standard Plays. Supplied by Special Collections and Archives, University of Kent.
Switching back into the action, Heartless aims an arrow at Tyler, only for Dame Tyler to leap to his defense. As Tyler's wife lies dying, the villagers drive the Normans from the scene. No longer “Wat the kind, but Wat the cruel,” the revolt begins as “waste; slaughter and fire” accompany Tyler and his men towards London.Footnote 118 Yet if the drama's ominous radicalism is partly contained by Tyler's personal tragedy—at the time of his death he is a grieving husband given to drink—his declaration to the king is nonetheless striking: “The people want redress, and so do I … … Freedom from tax, the banishment of favorites—death to the nobles, blood returned for blood.”Footnote 119 More striking still is the agency with which Tyler is now invested. Stabbed in the back by the Mayor of London, Tyler's final act is to command the sparing of the king, an action reciprocated by the pardoning of the rebels. The revolt is over, but so is Richard's reign, as the suicide of the cruelly exploited Effie delivers the final blow to his crumbling rule.
Having several times revived Haines's drama, and presented something like a continental alternative with Courtney's The Blacksmith of Ghent (1848), the Vic returned to the Wat Tyler story at Christmas 1849 with the “Original, Historical and Heroic” pantomime of Harlequin Wat Tyler; or, Jack Straw's Rebellion.Footnote 120 Combining topicality with fantasy and riotous slapstick to create an immersive “politics and poetics of affect,” pantomimes were a much anticipated seasonal treat.Footnote 121 Typically launched on Boxing Day, and designed to run into the new year, a successful production could earn around 20 percent of a theater's annual receipts.Footnote 122 For all the fun and fancy on display, therefore, pantomimes were a serious investment in time and resources, and an important badge of honor for managers. Further raising the stakes for Osbaldiston was the disaster at the Vic the previous year. Within minutes of the doors opening for Land of Light; or, Harlequin Gas, the third in a series of technology-based “Intellectual Pantomimes,” two boys died in a crush on the gallery stairs. Serving as a clear reminder of audience power and agency, Osbaldiston's initial response had been to try and clear the building, but given the size of the crowd, and its evident wish to be entertained, rather than risk a disturbance he opted to continue the show.Footnote 123
Billed as being personally overseen by Osbaldiston, Harlequin Wat Tyler put the radical past into the radical present by having the “patriot blacksmith” from Kent as the “great and original Chartist.”Footnote 124 Running into February 1850, it was thus playing on the night that Dickens saw May Morning, a fact not mentioned by the author. Suggesting deliberate intent rather than simple omission, the concluding piece on the bill (the 1825 drama of Red Riven the Bandit) was at least given brief notice. Fully exploiting the genre's satiric potential, one aided by the fact that pantomime scripts contained little in the way of detail, Wat Tyler delivered various “hits” at taxation and officialdom.Footnote 125 In addition to the Lord Mayor being “Defender of ye Filth,” a reference to the current outbreak of cholera, there was Pumpkin Puff the tax-collector and his door-knocking clerk Rat-tat, a man firmly opposed to Ragged Schools and the ballot.Footnote 126 Touching on modern dislike of the game laws, the king is first encountered hunting in Greenwich Park. It is here that he makes inquiry as to his new tax, only to be glibly assured that the people will complain “as usual” but still “they pay.”Footnote 127 Returning to the accepted record, we then have Tyler march with a force of 60,000 men to London, followed by the “Horrible, Hysterical and Historical Death of the Celebrated Chartist Leader of 1381.”Footnote 128
Asking who had not felt “an irresistible desire to establish their reputation as modern Wat Tylers,” Lloyds Weekly News was greatly taken with the show, and even if more conservative critics were unhappy with the tone of its politics, they could at least acknowledge the quality of the spectacle.Footnote 129 Linking Harlequin Wat Tyler to the support for Chartism observed by Mayhew, Marc Brodie suggests that, while somewhat lacking in detail, these radical inclinations were connected to time spent at the Vic. With the total audience for Harlequin Wat Tyler likely running to tens of thousands, from this quarter at least, support for “Trumps” such as Reynolds and O'Connor had survived the disappointments of 1848.Footnote 130 Progressing from page, to stage, to street, Tyler's revolt became mapped onto a radical London geography that moved from south of the river at Blackheath to the heart of the City at Smithfield.Footnote 131 But as with Vive La Liberté in 1848, as conceived at the Vic in 1849, Harlequin Wat Tyler also engaged with affairs in revolutionary Europe. Reflecting growing support for Hungarian nationalists at the hands of their Austrian oppressors—an important move in sustaining domestic radicalism at a threatening moment of post-Chartist decline—their granting of asylum by the Ottoman Empire (shown onstage as a “present from Turkey”), reportedly earned “thunders of applause.”Footnote 132
Having successfully appeared as John Felton, The Man of the People in the spring of 1850, in June of that year Osbaldiston submitted Courtney's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Chartist novel Mary Barton to the Lord Chamberlain.Footnote 133 He promptly received a reply requesting some changes concerning the role of Mary's Chartist-supporting father. With the offending lines obligingly removed, the play was successfully resubmitted in August. Performed the following February as Mary Barton; or, A Tale of Manchester Life, this archetypal Vic production actually marked something of a change.Footnote 134 First, there was the interference from William Donne. Given his objections to Courtney's script, one cannot imagine some of the earlier dramas discussed escaping the new Examiner of Plays. In the same year of his intervention over Mary Barton, Donne also began to request fuller versions of pantomime scripts. Second was the fact that Mary Barton was not played by Vincent, though together with Osbaldiston she would have commissioned the piece. This, in turn, relates to Osbaldiston's sudden death in December 1850. In mourning for her partner, and forced to contest her inheritance, Vincent was little seen at the Vic until her own demise six years later. Though definitively ending an era, the Vic's heroic days had already passed with Osbaldiston. Not until the following century, and the very different regime of Lilian Baylis, would the Vic matter so much to the cultural life of the capital.
Conclusion
Although the novelty of the mirror curtain proved to be short-lived, both as the Coburg and then the Victoria, this popular transpontine theater faithfully reflected its audience. In what Reynolds's Newspaper described as the most “successful establishment in London,” the serving of private interest usually coincided with that of the public's.Footnote 135 Osbaldiston's private coach and villa in Surrey came courtesy of his patrons’ hard-earned pennies, but it was they who effectively voted on what they saw. Dismissive though he was of May Morning, as Dickens noted from his encounter with the Vic, those living to please Joe Whelks had to please Joe Whelks to live.Footnote 136 In addition to the vocalized sovereignty of the hiss, cat-call, or cheer, in the very act of attendance, of scanning the playbill, taking a seat, and committing to follow the action, there was a measure of personal choice and agency often denied elsewhere. When Davidge presented the Coburg as an alternative version of Parliament, and when Chartists hired Osbaldiston's theater for their own purposes, the enabling role of this quintessentially working-class establishment was fully understood and realized.
In considering this self-styled “People's Theatre” as one that partly inhabited the capital's alternative public sphere, it needs to be emphasized that the Coburg/Victoria was an openly commercial venture. When attempts were made in the 1840s to reopen the Rotunda as a theater, Osbaldiston was quick to point out the already well-supplied nature of the market. He also reminded the Lord Chamberlain of the Rotunda's previous associations with extreme radicalism, albeit one confined to the early 1830s.Footnote 137 And while thanks to writers such as Dibdin Pitt, and Osbaldiston's understanding of the regulatory framework, the Vic presented an unusually high number of socially critical works, within this radical half-space much of the programming (as with melodrama itself) was not especially radical. When Mayhew observed the audience calling “Bray-vo Vincent! Got it, my tulip,” she was not playing Susan Hopley or Agnes Primrose, but the future wife of Peter the Great—a far cry from William Tell or Hofer, Osbaldiston played the tsar.Footnote 138
Yet if understood as a complex assemblage of time, place, management, performance, and audience, there is good reason to speak of the radical Vic. Reporting on the Vic in the wake of its 1848 refurbishment, the Tablet noted how theater and audience were bonded in a way of feeling against “judges and juries, privileges and powers” that always sympathized with “the accused as a class.”Footnote 139 Such institutions could not change the world, nor did they wish to. But taken on their own terms, they were both an attractive source of diversion and a major supplier of theatricalized cultural capital. It was surely not by chance that Mayhew found Lambeth's costermongers wanting to know more about Russian history following Vincent's performance in The Child of the Storm.Footnote 140 Although I have chosen here to focus on the Coburg/Victoria, other venues with Chartist connections such as the City of London and the Standard could likewise merit a closer look, especially from mid-century on. But in the years when Georgian became Victorian, years in which established monopolies were tested and challenged via new forms of political and cultural mobilization, no theater in the capital was more consistently radical, or more closely bound to is audience, than the only one bearing a royal name.
Stephen Ridgwell is a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His work on nineteenth-century popular theater has appeared in various publications, including New Theatre Quarterly, The London Journal, Theatre Survey, and The Dickensian. For their invaluable comments during the preparation of this article, the author thanks Edmund Knox, Rohan McWilliam, and the editors and anonymous reviews of this journal. Please address any correspondence to s.ridgwell1@btinternet.com
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