The Victorian Era

What Were Victorian Music Halls

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian music halls were the central popular entertainment of the working class, an institution the Victorians themselves called the poor man’s theatre or the people’s theatre. The music hall was a new institution of the 1850s that quickly became the principal amusement of the new urban working class, offering cheap and frequent entertainment in the form of comic songs, sentimental ballads, acrobats, dancing, and spectacle, served alongside food and drink, and its stars became some of the first national celebrities of popular culture. The wider context of Victorian entertainment is set out in Victorian Entertainment and Leisure.

The Principal Music Halls

The principal London music halls of the period included the Canterbury Music Hall in Lambeth (opened 1852, generally regarded as the first purpose-built music hall in London, with Charles Morton as the great early proprietor); the Oxford Music Hall in Oxford Street (opened 1861); the Alhambra in Leicester Square (opened 1854 as the Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts, converted to a music hall in 1860); the Empire in Leicester Square (opened 1884 by the Moss Empires combine, the great new variety theatre); and the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus (opened 1891). Provincial cities had their own music halls: the Britannia in Hoxton (1842), the Star in Bermondsey (1850s), the Tivoli in Sheffield, the Alhambra in Bradford, the Pavilion in Glasgow, and the Empire in Liverpool. By the 1890s there were several hundred music halls in London alone, and many hundreds more in the country at large.

The Programme

The music hall programme was a long evening’s entertainment, typically from 7pm to 11pm, in which a dozen or more turns appeared on the same bill, each turn lasting ten or fifteen minutes. The chairman — a master of ceremonies, originally the landlord of the pub that had been converted to a hall — introduced the acts from his chair at the side of the stage. The programme included comic songs, sentimental ballads, character sketches, acrobats, jugglers, conjurers, dancers, ventriloquists, and speciality acts, and the audience ate, drank, smoked, and talked throughout.

The principal performers of the period included Dan Leno (1860–1904), the great comic of the music hall stage; Albert Chevalier (1861–1923), the cockney comedian and author of the famous coster song “My Old Dutch” (1892); Marie Lloyd (1870–1922), the queen of the music hall; Vesta Tilley (1864–1952), the male impersonator who introduced “Burlington Bertie from Bow” in 1900; Hetty King (1883–1972), the principal boy of the music hall; Gus Elen (1862–1940), the cockney coster singer; and Charles Coborn (1852–1945), the author of “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” (1891). Their songs passed into the common memory of the nation and the songs of the period remained popular into the twentieth century.

The Architecture and the Audience

The music hall was a new kind of building, designed for the working-class audience of the new industrial city. The auditorium was large, with a single open floor, a balcony, and sometimes a gallery, and was equipped with gas lighting and (from the 1880s) electric lighting; the orchestra was typically at the rear of the stage rather than in a pit. The stage was shallow, with a proscenium and a small fly tower, and was equipped with footlights and limelight. The audience — typically a few hundred to a couple of thousand — sat at long tables in the stalls, ate and drank, and could see, hear, and interact with the performers.

The audience was working class. Cheap seats cost threepence or sixpence, and the halls were filled with clerks, shop assistants, artisans, and their wives and girlfriends. The audiences of the great London halls were sometimes exclusively male, and the bar was the principal refreshment. The music hall came under repeated pressure from the censors — the Lord Chamberlain’s office in London — to remove indecent material from the programmes, and the Music Hall Association, founded in 1878, established a code of conduct for its members.

The End of the Music Hall

The music hall was at the height of its popularity in the 1890s, but its decline had already begun. The new variety theatre — a cleaner and more respectable form of the same entertainment, of which the Moss Empires’ Empire Leicester Square (1884) was the model — was replacing the older halls; the new musical comedy, of which the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were the model, was drawing the middle classes away; and the early cinema, which began as an act in the music hall programme and was to become its successor, was beginning to attract the same audience. By the 1920s the music hall had been replaced by the music hall-variety theatre, and by the 1950s the variety theatre in turn had been replaced by the television.