ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 171

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN

The population of London continually grew, so notwithstanding
fluctuations in the economy the industry’s expansion is predictable.
For the most part, the West End’s theatres and music halls welcomed
women and men alike, with a pricing level favouring the middle
classes. Nevertheless, middle-class women’s access to the full erotic
life of theatres and streets in the West End was restricted by codes of
propriety. In the same manner that closed carriages prevented
women’s blunt introduction to the squalor of thoroughfares, women
were politely blinkered from contact with sordid activity inside
theatres. Young women were expected to attend in the company of
male or older female escorts, apparently because without anyone to
navigate away from the sites and situations incompatible with
innocence harm would inevitably occur. An accidental detour near
a music hall’s licensed bar, for example, would acquaint a woman
with a host of prostitutes who marked that territory as their own
every bit as distinctly as prostitutes in a doorway. Thus, middleclass men had access to the whole of theatres’ public areas and full
mobility as pedestrians in the streets surrounding theatres whereas
women did not.
Among the middle class, the greater freedom of mobility accorded
to men—even when in formal dress—determined that they, not
women, were the targets of almost all the erotic and eroticized West
End culture. The migration of the middle classes out of adjacent
neighbourhoods such as St George Bloomsbury, St Giles, and parts
of St Pancras into the deliberately pub-free and music hall-free new
Victorian suburbs further away to the north resulted partly from the
incompatibility of masculine leisure with family life.10 One of Charles
Cornell’s songs epitomizes the syndrome: it relates the views of a
man who keeps his bachelor exploits, hatred of his mother-in-law,
attraction to a servant, and theatre-going habits secret from his wife:

I’m a very strong admirer of the ballet and the play,
But I haven’t told the missus up to now!
And to watch the fairies dancing I pass may an hour away,
But I haven’t told the missus up to now!
When I see their graceful attitudes with love I’m burning hot,
And when the angels flap their wings, they mash me on the
spot,
And I feel as if I’d like to go at once and kiss the lot,
But I haven’t told the missus up to now!11
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