ABSTRACT
Victorian and Edwardian music-halls provide vivid commentaries on working-class London’s marital and domestic lives. For every song of hopeful young romance, there were half a dozen evoking daily realities, their troubles and antagonisms. As uncovered in music-hall lyrics, in autobiographies, and in the observations of contemporary social explorers, cockney culture incorporated distinct attitudes and arrangements towards gender.2 In the London poor, middle-class observers found an ‘incomprehensible region’ where many women were neither ladylike nor deferential, where men struggled to keep their authority over them, where ‘sexual antagonism’ was openly acknowledged.3
