ABSTRACT
Colonial expansion had brought wealth to the capital and between 1840 and 1880, opulent new playhouses sprung up throughout the developing suburbs. Pantomime was a regular part of the fare at all of them and continued to attract a social mix. Amongst the well-to-do audience at the Royal Victoria, according to one observer, were ‘the vilest and lowest in London, the scum of Lambeth’.1 A bid to attract smarter audiences to London’s oldest theatre, Sadlers Wells in Islington (formerly a rural spa patronised by Londoners as a summer holiday resort), made capital of encroaching urban development with an Aladdin reference:
The fields and dreary roads, which of yore isolated the spot, have now, as by pantomime magic, given place to a new and populous town, entirely surrounding the Wells, and presenting avenues in every direction abounding in lamps, watchmen and hackney vehicles of all descriptions.2
