ARTicles vol. 5 i.3B: Merry Music in Dickens’ London

Britannia “ruled the waves”. Industry flourished. Attracting hordes of people looking for jobs in the factories or on the docks, London’s population exploded. Hard-laboring men and women crowded the city’s narrow, filthy streets – the expanding working class of Victorian England. For this new proletariat, these were the hey days of opportunity and despair. The music hall answered the masses’ need for amusement after a day of toil, and marks the emergence of a theatre originating in working class culture. This popular theatre sprang out of the London taverns where men met to eat, drink and do business. Cheered up by pints of beer and popular ballads, the guests would leave their sorrows outside and join in on the choruses. In 1852, Mr. Charles Morton opened the first of the great music halls. Canterbury Hall accommodated 700 guests; a platform erected at one end of the hall introduced a packed night of musical acts. Audiences sat at tables, eating and drinking throughout the performance. Presiding at one side of the platform, the Chairman introduced a variety of musical numbers: cheerful tunes, “nigger minstrels,” and selections from popular operas. An immediate hit, Morton soon renovated the venue into an ornate hall seating 1,500 spectators. Inspired by this success, numerous music halls sprouted all over the city. By 1875, 375 music halls dotted Greater London. Although at first wild audiences and carousing dominated the performances, with the building of large “variety” theatres – the Alhambra, the Empire, the Tivoli – a wider audience started to attend, including members of le beau monde. As the music hall’s popularity thrived, entertainment prevailed over drinking. Singing was the heart of the music hall, but other kinds of performances added variety: sword swallowers and slapstick sketches, aerialists and adagio dancers, magicians and male impersonators. The demand for performers created a star system – the most successful artists performed in numerous halls each night, crossing London in carriages. Since they came from the working class, their songs and comedy acts reflected the social conditions and everyday life of the urban poor. The lyrics ridiculed lodgers and mothers-in-law, drink debts and overdue rent, bailiffs and hen-pecked husbands. One or two “hits” could make a name, and before the phonograph and radio, the audience would return to the music halls again and again to hear their favorite tunes. Soon these songs were whistled by the tailor, hummed by the butcher and chanted by the whore – building a merry soundtrack to the bustle of London. Given the importance of music hall in Victorian England, Neil Bartlett has woven it into his production of Oliver Twist. In collaboration with composer Gerard McBurney and music director Simon Deacon, Bartlett will integrate live musicians onstage and intersperse the narrative with choral passages. The criminal hordes in the streets play folk instruments: the violin, the serpent and the hurdy-gurdy. Although rarely seen today, the latter two were popular at the time of Dickens. The hurdy-gurdy, a “mechanical violin,” is arranged with several strings to be played simultaneously by a rotating, rosin-covered wheel, thus creating a continuous, grinding tonality reminiscent of a bagpipe. The serpent, an ancient wind instrument related to the tuba, derives its name from its curving shape – the seven-foot long, sinuous conical tube resembles a giant, coiling snake. Played softly it has a firm, mellow timbre, at medium volume it produces a robust sound that becomes unpleasant noise when played loudly. Thus the instrument achieved a two-fold reputation. Composer Charles Burney described it as “not only overblown and detestably out of tune, but exactly resembling in tone that of a great hungry, or rather angry Essex calf.” In Oliver Twist these instruments will bring the sounds of Dickens’s England back to life. Alleviating the backbreaking toil of working class life, music filled Victorian London. Out of the brightly lit music halls, merry tunes reverberated in the dark city, piercing the fog, piercing the hearts of its people. Njal Mjoes is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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