Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City [Hardcover]

Lively, innovative, well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry.Lively, innovative, well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry which get inside the popular experience of the pub, music-hall, theatre and comic press. In this new leisure world, audiences learned how to be performers themselves, adopting roles and styles appropriate to the unsettling dynamics of the modern city. A major advance in understanding how popular culture actually works, this is a model of the successful integration of the theory and practice of social history and cultural studies.Lively, innovative, well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry which get inside the popular experience of the pub, music-hall, theatre and comic press. In this new leisure world, audiences learned how to be performers themselves, adopting roles and styles appropriate to the unsettling dynamics of the modern city. A major advance in understanding how popular culture actually works, this is a model of the successful integration of the theory and practice of social history and cultural studies.Lively and innovative, these well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry get inside the popular experience of the pub, music-hall, theater and comic press. In this new leisure world, audiences learned how to be performers themselves, adopting roles and styles appropriate to the unsettling dynamics of the modern city. A major advance in understanding how popular culture actually works, this is a model of the successful integration of the theory and practice of social history and cultural studies.Introduction: social history, cultural studies and the cad; 1. The Victorian middle class and the problem of leisure; 2. A role analysis of working-class respectability; 3. Ally Soper's half-holiday: comic art in the 1880s; 4. Business and good fellowship in the London music hall; 5. Champagne Charlie andlãM