ABSTRACT
The London theatres of the mid-century were concentrated on the Strand and its immediate environs: the Strand Theatre, the Olympic, the Gaiety, the Lyceum, the Savoy, the Adelphi, with Drury Lane close by, as well as the Coal Hole and Gatti’s Music Hall at Charing Cross. Women who worked in Victorian theatre were exploited, not least by the young men who gazed at them. As late as 1893 the Palace Theatre of Varieties was advertising ‘nude and semi-nude females’ posing in imitation of great works of art. Such ‘living pictures’, exploiting poor, passive, vulnerable women, was a perfect symbol for some elements of Victorian masculinist culture. As impressive as any of these was Emma Stanley’s Seven Ages of Women, first performed at St Martin’s Hall in 1855 and then toured to America, Australia and India. In this context, it is not surprising that the Victorian theatre was implicitly, if perhaps unknowingly, voyeuristic.
