9 - The music hall

Summary

The music hall is a specially Victorian institution. It came into existence as the queen was crowned, flowered with her reign, and entered the twentieth century ready to decline. Its heyday was roughly from 1890 to 1910. The first purpose-built halls for this kind of entertainment began to be erected in numbers in the early 1840s, with forerunners such as the Star at Bolton which opened in 1832. Signs of the end were the 1907 performers' strike and the 1912 Royal Command performance. During this period huge success attended the transformation of a multitude of small-scale entertainments presided over by pub proprietors and semi-professional chairmen into seriously capitalized big business that operated according to increasingly strictly enforced and eventually overdetermining rules. At first the growth of the halls provided a leisure service to growing urban populations, and enabled talented individuals to develop star careers and fortunes. Cultural change and aspiration, the broadening of the audience to include more segments of late-Victorian society, and concomitant moves to increase discipline and market control shifted power into the hands of business managers and investors.