Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet

Abstract

On 11 January 1890, a critic by the name of ‘G.A.S.’ wrote in the newly founded liberal periodical, The Speaker, that the music hall was a ‘half-graceful, half-grotesque medley of spectacle and buffoonery … [it] is in a condition of hopeless decline, and that its total disappearance from the English stage is only a question of a few more years‘. Yet to some of G.A.S.'s contemporaries, such as the emerging music critic Ernest Newman, the music hall was a place of wholesome entertainment. Such polarized views on the value of music hall in the late Victorian period were common, but the music hall, as an important cultural institution, could not be easily dismissed or ignored. As F.Vr Robinson noted in The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper on 8 June 1878, there were over 400 music halls in London to which 175,900 people went each night. Even though G.A.S. was writing some twelve years after these statistics were published, the music hall was far from languishing in the 1890s.