ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 177

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN

Moralists charged that at the Oxford Music Hall ‘the
promenades and drinking bars thereof are permitted to be used
largely and habitually as a resort of common prostitutes for
purposes of solicitation and immoral bargaining and that excessive
drinking indecent conversation and disorderly conduct take place
therein’.25 Prostitutes’ objective in the promenades was obvious:
many of them sat all night at tables by the bar where they could
not even see the show.26 Most moral reformers believed that the
danger of the promenades lay in the ready supply of women and
strong liquors together in the same place. Thus, James Greenwood
writes in 1869:
It is at the refreshment-bars of these palatial shams and
impostures, as midnight and closing time approaches, that
profligacy may be seen reigning rampant. Generally at one
end of the hall is a long strip of metal counter, behind which
superbly-attired barmaids vend strong liquors…the
unblushing immodesty of the place concentrates at this long
bar. Any night may here be found dozens of prostitutes
enticing simpletons to drink…her main undisguised object
being to induce him to prolong the companionship after the
glaring gaslight of the liquor-bar is lowered.27
Soliciting zones within music halls varied from one to another. At
Collins’ on Islington Green, an inspector found the gallery free of
prostitutes, though the stalls level was less praiseworthy:
This part is besieged by a goodly number of unfortunates of
the better-class sort. The bar, which is at the back, is supplied
with side lounges and these are the hunting grounds of these
women. I observed no importuning but it is not required
with such conveniences. A tipsy young man will invariably

drop down beside one of these females.
The skirt dance of Alice Leamar, in which ‘the high pitching of
the legs and the continual twirling, with the hands, of the muslin
petticoats’ was judged ‘very suggestive’ so as to give the audience
‘unbounded satisfaction’ is mentioned in the same report, as if to
verify that the patrons of the stalls had some stimulus to be patrons
of another kind.28
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