The feverish invention and innuendo of the British music hall
TA-RA-RA-BOOM-DE-AY. The British Music Hall song, 1850-1920. Bodleian Library, until October 29.
In 1894, the Social Purity Alliance, led by a reformer called Laura Ormiston Chant, mounted an attack on London's music halls, which it saw as places that encouraged the consumption of alcohol, smoking and vices of other unspeakable kinds. Alliance members, or "Prudes on the Prowl" as they were nicknamed, opposed the renewal of a licence for the largest and grandest of the West End halls, the Empire in Leicester Square. Although the SPA failed in this specific mission, its reforming zeal can be seen as the start of the decline in music hall at its most robust.
Early twentieth-century impresarios, looking to increase the size of their audiences, set about cleaning up the halls, making them respectable, and in so doing wrote their death warrant.
A section of this merry, succinct exhibition at the Bodleian, the first of its kind to be mounted by a university library, is devoted to "Conflict and Respectability". In his book English Night Life, Thomas Burke, discussing the moralists' disapproval of Victorian music halls, wrote:
There were those who could see quite a lot in them, they could even see Satan.
They were places where the workers wasted their time and money, when they should have been home resting in their masters' interest for the next day's labour. The Varieties they offered were varieties of temptation. Sin stalked on the stage, and flaunted itself among the young men of the audience, in the guise of jest and jollity.
The history of the music hall is bound up with the development of modern transport, the availability of gas and later electric light, and especially the invention of cheaper colour printing, which resulted in hundreds of little masterpieces from the illustrators and lithographers who immortalized the singers, occasionally the composers, and most often the comic subtext of the songs, in vignettes in which they were often able to show things the writers only hinted at in the lyrics. It is the Bodleian's remarkably rich collection of these song covers that forms the basis of this exhibition.
