14 - The East-End theatre

Summary

The inherited view of the East-End, largely working-class, theatres of Victorian and Edwardian London, is all too often that of someone firmly planted in the West End. Many of the contemporary reports on East-End entertainments come to us via critics and commentators who are ostentatiously “visitors”: explorers who will report back to an audience of middle- and upper-class readers on the amusements of the denizens of “darkest London.” The problem, for historians and students of the nineteenth-century theatres of London, is to discern the ways in which the East-End theatres were both like and unlike their better-known and much commented-on counterparts to the west.

Certainly the East-End theatres merit analysis, if only for the sake of the sheer number of theatregoers they entertained. Even before the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 broke the patent system restricting the performance of spoken drama to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, “illegitimate” theatres such as the Pavilion in Whitechapel were catering to a booming population. The area encompassed by the East End was remarkably diverse, and changing. Hackney, for instance, was considered, in the 1860s, to be “one of the handsomest suburbs in London” (although this district would suffer economic decline in later decades); while Stepney in the 1850s had “no public drainage, but a name for cholera.” In mid-century London, more than half of the population was “working class.” The rise in population was the result of the building boom of the first half of the century, particularly the development of the London Docks.