ABSTRACT
The British music hall is conventionally regarded as one of the success stories of nineteenth-century popular culture, yet the most commonly received images of the halls seldom reach back to their Victorian prime, for today’s television and theatre reconstructions remain fixated on the whiskers and waistcoats of some effete Edwardian wonderland. Thus our historical perspective has been abruptly foreshortened for, though such representations provide evidence (twice over) of the incorporation of the music hall into the world of modern show business, they ignore its previous efflorescence as an autonomous formation of popular culture with a durable traditional inheritance that was often at odds with new modes of cultural production. The transformation of the Victorian halls was a process of negotiation and conflict within a complex of social relationships whose specific configuration anticipated but hardly guaranteed the emergence of a modern entertainment industry. This essay, which falls somewhere between a survey and an agenda for future research, examines the changing pattern of these relationships and the consequences for the content of music-hall culture.
