‘The D'Oyly Carte Boarding School’: Female Respectability in the Theatrical Workplace, 1877–1903

Abstract

In this article, Michael Goron examines the working lives of the ‘refined girls’ employed in what was popularly referred to as the ‘D'Oyly Carte Boarding School’ – the working environment in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company of the 1880s and 1890s, in which backstage gender segregation was strictly enforced, and where a patriarchal management personally regulated the private behaviour of female performers. Here, the attempted ‘gentrification’ of the West End theatrical milieu in the later nineteenth century was transposed by Richard D'Oyly Carte to the popular musical stage. Just as ‘unwholesome’ elements of late-nineteenth-century burlesque were absent from both the content and presentation of comic opera at the Savoy, so the ‘respectability’ of its female performers, offstage as well as on, was actively promoted to forestall middle-class antitheatrical prejudice. The working lives of these performers helped to create an image of theatrical respectability which transformed public perceptions of musical theatre in the final decades of the Victorian era. Michael Goron is a PhD student and part-time Associate Lecturer at Winchester and Southampton Solent Universities.