ABSTRACT
In the second half of the nineteenth century, ordinary lower and middle class people were able to take advantage of cheap railway tickets to travel to the seaside. Such developments suggested that seaside towns retained respectability, but there was also licence, something beyond the everyday, a sort of transgressive liminality which tempted without destroying. Most obvious on the beaches of the 1870s and 1880s were the blackface minstrels. Though minstrel shows continued in cities, at St James’s Hall and the Elephant and Castle Theatre, for instance, they now became especially associated with the seaside. Early troupes consisted originally of six or eight men, but soon women were seen, too, and the floppy white costume with pompoms and ruffles was an appropriately androgynous appearance for the seaside. One or two entrepreneurs were responsible for the rapid spread of pierrot shows through Britain’s seaside resorts.
