Entertaining the Empire - (Studies in Popular Culture) by Andrew Horrall (Hardcover)

About the Book

Comic songs and sketches created in London traversed the British empire in the half century before the First World War. The amateurs and professionals who performed them in colonial venues resemblingthose at Home transformed an inane popular culture into a bulwark of an increasingly racialised British overseas identity.

Book Synopsis

The stage entertainments known as music hall emerged in mid-Victorian London just as the British began colonising large parts of the world.Settlers recreated this metropolitan popular culture throughout the empire and in places under foreign control. They erected music halls resembling those at home, imported songs and sketches, performed inamateur shows and watched touring professionals. London originals were rewritten as commentaries on local conditions. This activity transformed music hall into a marker of an exclusionary British identity overseas and made colonies look and sound more like Britain. The result was that settlers separated by vast distances were linked by a shared popular culture. The touring circuits and cultural affinities the Victorians created endure to this day.

From the Back Cover

The British Empire rang with comic songs performed byresplendently dressed, idling dandies and young women winking cheekily at lyrics laden with innuendo.

Making innovative use of digitised sources from many countries, this book reveals how stage charactersoriginating in Victorian London's boisterous, alcohol-soaked music halls became the empire's popular culture.

London songs and sketches reached settlers as fast as ships, trains and wagons travelled, enabling amateurs from Montreal to Melbourneand Bulawayo to perform shows that recreatedthe music halls of Home. Audiences were transported imaginatively to the metropolis, making them feel more British and less isolated. Professional performers soon followed, knowing there was adulation and money to be found in imperial outposts.

Music hall performances revolved around fast-changing deliberately disposable songs and sketches sending-up social class, political opinions and other beliefs. But shards of evidencecollected from throughout the empire show that the imperial context changed the meanings and messages in these London creations. Stage characters were transformed into paragons of an idealised imperial capital. Songs and sketches were rewritten to parody colonial conditions and to proclaiman exclusive, increasingly racialised settler identity. Impresarios whounderstoodhow music hall alleviated yearnings for Home and buttressed Britishnessimported London stars and createdglobal tours.

Music hall fostered and maintained British identity in the empire across generations, whileperformers forged transnational links that still connect English-language global popular culture.

About the Author

Andrew Horrall is senior archivist at Canada's national archives and adjunct professor of History at Carleton University. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge.