Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment

Reviewed by: Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment by Lee Jackson Peter Bailey (bio) Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson; pp. xii + 304. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $30.00. In this congenially informative study, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, Lee Jackson tours the major sites, promoters, performers, and publics involved in the dramatic growth of Victorian entertainments. The music hall is the lynchpin account occupying the first third of the book; further chapters cover the commercialized dance scene, the pleasure garden, and the exhibition ground; concluding excursions to the seaside and football ground move beyond the book's main focus on London. The gin palace, a novel enhancement of the pub, foreshadows the music hall in the opulence of its amenities amid the cramped and dismal conditions of city life in the 1840s. Jackson captures the alluring ambience of its "gaslight and gilding," its efficient service and logistics likened by contemporaries to the new retail stores of the day (6). The same sources labeled gin palace proprietors as capitalists, a term and phenomenon Jackson seems to resist. Pubs were also the site of the traditional "free-and-easy," or local amateur entertainments that expanded into singing saloons to accommodate surging demand from the growing working-class population (33). Crucial for business were annual licenses for music and dancing and the sale of alcohol. These were contested by temperance and moral reform lobbies, who charged the halls with drunkenness and prostitution encouraged by licentious songs and performances. Jackson pays new attention to the magistracy in the ongoing struggle. The music hall, Jackson emphasizes, was "the century's greatest entertainment innovation" (33), and he re-examines the mythical figure of Charles Morton of the Canterbury Hall in suburban Lambeth as "Father of the Halls" (61). Morton's "ostentatious respectability" is credited with countering the music hall's dubious public image as the haunt of prostitutes and drunks, attracting working-class families, middle-class visitors and respectable females with more refined professional entertainment (58). Performers in a professionalizing work force played several halls across town a night in the "turns system," and the first national stars emerged (61). Competition from the new halls provoked fights over artistic trespass with the legitimate theater, as well as continuing charges of obscenity and a government enquiry in 1866. Jackson demonstrates how the halls' signature comic song exploited its sexualized double entendre to the delight of the crowd and exasperation of reformers. He also revisits notorious clashes between managements and [End Page 126] reformers, including the controversy over prostitution at the Empire in Leicester Square in 1894, which the young libertine Winston Churchill riotously joined. By then music halls were the prime site of a mass entertainment industry: they were purpose-built variety theaters, corporately financed and managed, truly palatial in size and appointments, and they attracted audiences in the thousands. Jackson stops short of any comparatively sustained study of the very institutions that contemporaries and historians branded as such whose "invention" is foregrounded in the book title. Jackson breaks new ground in examining the commercial dance scene, from genteel provincial assembly rooms to London's louche casinos and the notorious Argyll Rooms, to Blackpool's grand ballrooms for the working classes at the end of the century, though a mass dancing public was not realized until after the First World War. Pleasure gardens and their dancing platforms are followed by accounts of exhibition grounds of varying success that added entertainment to the more high-minded formula of London's Great Exhibition. Among the showmen entrepreneurs awarded heroic stature by Jackson, Imre Kiralfy is singled out for his White City, a vast exhibition site in 1890s suburban London, pronounced "the zenith, the ultimate in mass entertainment … amusement on an industrial scale, using industrial methods—from the tollgate to the mechanized rides" (247). Seaside towns became popular holiday sites as cheap and rapid transport by steamship and railway drew a new working-class public that was eager...