13 - Last Stages

Summary

The London theater in which Aldridge performed Titus Andronicus was the Britannia Saloon, so named because access to the auditorium was by way of the bar of the saloon. Founded in 1841 in Hoxton, an industrial community in Shoreditch slightly northeast of the City of London and about four miles from the West End, the Britannia Saloon served mainly a local working-class population that had few other opportunities for theatrical entertainment. Hoxton was reputed to be “a particularly nasty, dirty, criminal district … where policemen had to go in couples.” It was “a region of malodorous market streets, of factories, timber yards, grimy warehouses, of alleys swarming with small trades and crafts, of filthy courts and passages leading into pestilential gloom; everywhere toil in its most degrading forms; the thoroughfares thundering with high-laden waggons, the pavements trodden by working folk of the coarsest type, the corners and lurking-holes showing destitution at its ugliest.” The people living in such surroundings were among the poorest of the poor.

Its children are ragged, sharp, weasel-like; brought up from the cradle— which is often an old box or an egg-chest—to hard living and habits of bodily activity. Its men are mainly poor dock labourers, poor costermongers, poorer silk-weavers, clinging hopelessly to a withering handicraft, the lowest kind of thieves, the most ill-disguised class of swell-mobsmen, with a sprinkling of box and toy makers, shoe-makers, and cheap cabinet-makers. Its women are mainly hawkers, sempstresses, the coarsest order of prostitutes, and aged stall-keepers, who often sit at the street corners in old sedan-chairs, and sometimes die, like sentinels, at their posts.

Yet Shoreditch's Britannia, billed as the “People's Theatre,” thrived and became one of the most successful theaters in Victorian Britain, outlasting many of its metropolitan rivals. The original saloon theater held about a thousand people, but in the early 1850s it was rebuilt to hold fi fteen hundred, and in 1858 a new theater building was constructed capable of seating nearly four thousand spectators. At that time it was described as “the most complete and perfect structure of its kind in England.”