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Title: | Music Hall and the Age of Resistance |
Other Titles: | Music Hall and the Age of Resistance: A Study of the Censorship Practices Which Influenced the Form of the Victorian Music Hall Leading to the 1912 Royal Command Performance and Beyond |
Authors: | Feldner, Kirsten |
Advisor: | Grisé, Catherine |
Department: | English and Cultural Studies |
Keywords: | Music hall, London County Council, Marie Lloyd, self-reflexive censorship, Censorship, Resistance, Victorian Era, Edwardian Era, Class-Relations, Female Performance, Taste-Making |
Publication Date: | 2019 |
Abstract: | Building on Penelope Summerfield’s argument that the end of the Victorian music hall in the early twentieth century signaled not “death” but a class-conscious evolution of the genre prompted by a “process of deliberate selection later made to look natural and inevitable,” this project examines the acts of censorship and resistance which characterised the final years of the Victorian music hall. Selecting the 1912 Royal Variety or Royal Command Performance as the “end” point of the genre, and limiting my focus to London music halls, this project examines competing aims of working, middle, and upper class participants: it suggests that the upper-class aspirations of the managers of London’s music halls, paired with middle-class moral desire for social control over the working-classes, eventually enforced by the London County Council in the mid-late nineteenth century, saw the rise of “respectability” in the genre while severing its ties to London’s working classes. Juxtaposing ephemeral evidence produced by or focused on London music halls in the late nineteenth century (leading up to and including the 1912 Royal Command Performance) with contemporary research on the classed nature of social control and censorship practices, this thesis intends to make the classed-struggle for power and ownership over the identity of London’s music halls evident. In doing so, the thesis alludes to the potential success of a third wave of music hall or the neo-music hall, to replace out-dated reflections of the music hall revival sparked by “The Good Old Days” and nostalgia post World War II. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/24955 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Feldner_Kirsten_EH_finalsubmission201909_MA.pdf | 894.84 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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