Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City

by Peter Bailey

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521574174
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/08/1998
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Michael Morpurgo, the Children’s Laureate of Britain from 2003 to 2005, has written more than one hundred books and received numerous prestigious awards. He and his wife, Clare, founded the organization Farms for City Children. They live in Devon, England.

Peter Bailey has been illustrating books for more than thirty-five years and has worked with such authors as Philip Pullman, Dick King-Smith, and Allan Ahlberg. He lives in Liverpool, England.

Table of Contents

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 and the music hall swell song: 6. Music-hall and the knowingness of popular culture; 7. The Victorian barmaid as cultural prototype; 8. Musical comedy and the rhetoric of the girl, 1892–1914; 9. Breaking the sound barrier; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...it is often a pleasure to observe the dexterity with which Bailey handles his material." Times Literary Supplement

"...a captivating and eloquent contribution to the history of popular culture in Britain." Essays in Theatre

"For educated general readers as well as college and graduate collections at all levels." Choice

"In Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City Peter Bailey gives a bravura performance. The book is filled with challenging interpretations... Great fun to read as well as highly stimulating, the essays are characterised by impeccable research, elegant, lively prose, breathtaking vocabulary, and apt period illustrations. Further, the book illuminates wonderfully the evolution and maturation of the scholarly mind of one of the most imagnative Victorian social historians of the late-twentieth century." Kathleen E.McCrone, Canadian Journal of History

"[Bailey's] latest book is a collection of previously published essays exploring the expanding world of popular entertainment in the late Victorian city. Read together, they offer a fascinating overview of Bailey's achievement in shaping a field with its own set of evolving critical questions." Victorian Periodicals Review

"Bailey has cajoled conventional history into...relaxingits relentless emphasis on labor and attending to leisure. His latest book os a collection of previously published essays exploring the expanding world of popular entertainment in the late Victorian city. Read together, they offer a fascinating overview of Bailey's achievement in shaping a field with its own set of evolving critical questions." Victorian Periodicals Review 33:2 Summer 2000

From the Publisher