Most social historians would probably agree that the quest for the “origins” of social practice is a problematic and slippery project. Certainly, this is true of British music hall, which had antecedents in the early century “tavern” theaters, eighteenth-century taproom concerts, or even the seventeenth-century variety performers hired by Dick Sadler to help sell the beer he brewed from his famous well in Islington. The corporate nature of late-century music hall suggests other influences as well—ones related to the commodification of cultural practice, a hallmark of modernity as well as of the reifying effects of nineteenth-century capitalism. Slippery, too, is the notion of class, a construct inherently phenomenological and maddeningly fluid in its definition. Music hall, for example, retained a Victorian association as a working-class entertainment, even as it established a significant presence in London's West End and boasted a substantial number of middle-class patrons and devotees.

And even if the middle class had been “rising” since the fourteenth century, it is not until the nineteenth that we begin to see a self-conscious examination of exactly what it meant to belong to it. In a century that saw, in conjunction with a massive extension of the franchise, an explosion in mass circulation magazines and eclectic journals dedicated to middle-class readerships, we have an ongoing national conversation in which a newly empowered social and political class conducts a very public process of self-definition. In Music Hall and Modernity, Barry J. Faulk examines the rhetorical strategies employed by middle-class taste arbiters in their discussion of late-century music hall, part of what he sees as a “crucial transformation in the development and middle-class reception of London music hall in the late-Victorian era, and nothing less than a structural change in discourse on the halls” (5).

The reader with a casual understanding of the history of music hall might expect this discourse to be grounded in class snobbery and to be substantially negative in its reception of music hall culture. Certainly mid-century critics such as Henry Mayhew saw music hall as a vice-ridden underworld percolating with enticements that could only lead to the moral corruption of its patrons. Decades later, in 1892, Henry Irving would publicly disparage the “desultory” nature of the music hall artist, and in 1894, moral reformer Laura Ormiston Chant would campaign against the loose sexuality she claimed was in evidence on the promenade of the Empire music hall. But by the 1890s, Mayhew's hall had morphed into something much more of a corporate entity, a big business, commercial entertainment with a sizeable middle-class clientele, and Irving's criticisms must be read in light of his own vested interest in the theater, which saw the halls as upstart, yet serious, economic competitors. As for Chant, her attempt to stoke the public's moral indignation was met by a reaction somewhere between defensive irritation and a collective middle-class yawn. Faulk's point is not so much that music hall had become safely respectable so much as that discourse surrounding the halls “helped consolidate the tastes and identity of an emergent professional class” (21).

The late Victorians invented the idea of the “professional,” a social category that privileges knowledge or “expertise” as a form of social capital, and which permeates middle-class discussion of fin de siècle music hall. On the one hand, music hall was associated with “the people,” with frequent comparisons made between the commercialism of contemporary music hall and the putatively “authentic” venue of the irrecoverable past. On the other hand, middle-class critics and commentators, such as Frederick Wedmore and Arthur Symons, became the “experts” through whom the “popular” could be explicated and defined. In this strange model, the entertainment of the “people” could only be fully appreciated when viewed through the perspective of the specialist.

Using a number of case studies, including Symons's essays and the press controversy surrounding the Chant campaign, Faulk unpacks the convoluted subject positions and language games that emerge as a result of such paradoxical thinking. Symons, for instance, adopts the pose of “aficionado,” a position that resides tenuously in a space between critic and “enthusiast.” The nature of the aficionado is protean, shifting constantly between the unbridled passion of the “fan” and the dispassionate and distanced perspective of the professional critic. The aficionado is therefore able to assume the mantle of cultural arbiter while retaining a position as one of the “people.” No less paradoxical are fictional narratives by such writers as Walter Besant (Dorothy Wallis), Henry Nevinson (Little Scotty), and Hall Caine (The Christian), who tended to see the halls as a positive transformational influence on working-class culture while at the same time imputing to them a mysterious and iniquitous potential as sites of criminality and vice. In these writings we find familiar middle-class paternalism (and misogyny) mixed with a sense that music hall remains a force for the improvement and sustenance of a healthy, working-class communal life. But in order for the community to realize this benefit, music hall culture must be managed, subjected as Faulk puts it, to “tutelary control of the right sort: experts, either from within [music hall itself] … or without” (140).

It would be too easy to dismiss these writings as attempts to co-opt the idea of “the popular” as a basis for the assertion of moral authority and control on the part of an ascendant bourgeoisie. Instead, Faulk discerns a complex, cross-class dialectic that unites the seemingly irreconcilable notions of taste criticism and working-class consciousness. Perhaps it is through the emergence of another contradiction, the idea of the working-class professional, that this dialectic begins to resolve itself. If these narratives ultimately establish “the popular” as “a foundation for cultural authority,” they also leave open the question of the nature of that authority, whenever, Faulk concludes, “the rules of expertise shift to accommodate new practices” (196).

In Music Hall and Modernity, Barry Faulk gives us a densely theoretical, richly explicated examination of the complex cultural mechanisms at play in the construction and negotiation of class identity. It will, no doubt, become known as an authoritative source for nineteenth-century theater scholars, British social historians, and students of cultural studies.