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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.
1. Dublin University Magazine, August 1874, p. 233.
2. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1876, p. 6.
3. ‘To the Honourable Lord Provost and Magistrates of the City of Glasgow. The Memorial of the several Persons whose Names are hereunto subscribed, Citizens of Glasgow’, dated 24 February 1875, Strathclyde Regional Archives; see also North British Daily Mail, 13 February 1875, p. 5; 22 February 1875, p. 4; 24 February 1875, p. 4; ‘Report of Visits to Music Halls on 27 February 1875’ by Police Superintendent Brown, Strathclyde Regional Archives; The Era, 14 February 1875, p. 7.
4. North British Daily Mail, 26 February 1875, p. 4.
5. See ‘Memorial’; The Era, 7 March 1875, p. 4; League Journal, 6 March 1875, p. 1; North British Daily Mail, 2 March 1875, p. 5.
6. None of their names appear in the list of members of the council or magistracy.
7. See Note 3, above.
8. North British Daily Mail, 27 February 1875, p. 2.
9. See Orchard, B., The Clerks of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1971), Chapters. 6 and 7Google Scholar; Anderson, G., Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1976)Google Scholar, and ‘The Social Economy of Late Victorian Clerks’, in Crossick, Geoffrey, The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London, 1977), p. 121Google Scholar.
10. See Bailey, Peter, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London, 1979), p. 161Google Scholar.
11. See North British Daily Mail, 2 March 1875, p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 5.
13. See North British Daily Mail, 24 April 1875, p. 5, and League Journal, 1 May 1875, p. 138. Checkland wrote of the Glasgow authorities between 1870 and 1918 that they were teetotal and puritanical, had censored art exhibitions, and were diligent in the exercise of social discipline: see Checkland, S., The Upas Tree: Glasgow 1875–1975 (Glasgow 1977), p. 29Google Scholar. The events and decisions of 1875 do not confirm this.
14. The Era, 14 February 1875, p. 7.
15. Report by Police Lieutenant Andrew, 9 March 1875, Strathclyde Regional Archives.
16. Strathclyde Regional Archives.
17. Glasgow Herald, 8 March 1875, p. 4.
18. Dublin University Magazine, August 1878, p. 240.
19. North British Daily Mail, 5 March 1875, p. 4.
20. Ibid.
21. Glasgow Weekly Mail, 13 March 1875, p. 5.
22. North British Daily Mail, 8 March 1875, p. 4.
23. Glasgow Weekly Mail, 27 February 1875, p. 4.
24. Glasgow Weekly Herald, 27 February 1875, p. 4. On Glasgow's popular culture, see King, E., ‘Popular Culture in Glasgow’, in Cage, R. A., ed., The Working Class in Glasgow 1750–1914 (London, 1987), p. 142–87Google Scholar.