ABSTRACT
Victorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals, they were recruited from all classes of society.1 While performers repeatedly demonstrated that class origins could be defied by hard work, talent, or strategic marital alliances to secure some a place in the most select company, others lived with and like the most impoverished classes. Unlike other occupational groups, performers’ incomes spanned the highest upper middle-class salary and the lowest working class wage, and were earned in work places that ranged in status from patent theatres to penny saloons. The heterogeneity of performers’ experience, competence, salaries, and social classes made them anomalous among middle-class professionals, while the differences between their art and others’ trades set them apart socially and existentially from the people of the factory, mill, and workshop. In a sense, they were everywhere and nowhere in Victorian culture, only nominally classifiable as a group, and as diverse as possible in their rank in the social pecking order.
