While the elite of London toured the Royal Academy gazing at paintings of “classical beauties,” a more popular yet related spectacle called tableaux vivants, poses plastiques, living statuary, or living pictures appeared on the London music hall stage. Under subdued lighting, a female model posed in classical, historical, or mythological scenes, wearing a flesh-colored body stocking, sometimes accompanied by music or a storyteller. On occasion a rotating disk was employed on which she stood or sat, motionless; after several minutes it moved, allowing the next model to appear before the audience. A single disk might contain four or five models in different scenes.

At their peak of popularity in the 1890s, these exhibitions outraged members of the National Vigilance Association (NVA), the British Women's Temperance Association (BWTA), and other moral purity organizations. They wished to “save” the women posing in these displays before they committed other immoral acts. Concerned with the corrupting effects that these displays had on the audience, reformers hoped that the regulatory powers of municipal government could be deployed in order to end them. After all, the London County Council (LCC) had regularly incorporated a motif of municipal moralizing into its attempt to regulate and “improve” popular culture in the metropolis.Footnote ¹ However, on this occasion, the voluntary activism of moral vigilance was not to be paralleled by official action. The LCC ultimately decided that anxieties surrounding tableaux vivants were more effectively addressed by self-regulation and recommendation rather than by legal sanction.

Why moralists lost the battle against tableaux vivants is the subject of this article. Their failure illuminates the tensions between official forces, on the one hand, and commercial and cultural ones on the other, in the late Victorian period. The late nineteenth century has been seen as a period when the boundary between the state and the individual was being redrawn, particularly in regard to the regulation of sexuality. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and the high-profile trial of Oscar Wilde a decade later, suggested a dramatic enlargement of the state's capacity to regulate personal morality.Footnote ² Moreover, as Susan Pennybacker has shown, from the 1880s the state endeavored to mold a “music hall culture of a new type,” more sanitized and respectable than its previous incarnations.Footnote ³ However, the debates over tableaux vivants in the 1890s suggest that official restriction and coercion were not the only narratives in the relation between the state and popular culture. If moral policing interfered too much with commercial prerogatives and popular leisure, nineteenth-century politicians—even those identified with a more statist conception of politics—sometimes were troubled and alarmed. Cultural factors also complicated any attempt to regulate living statuary on the London stage; supporters could inscribe tableaux vivants with aesthetic registers, allowing them to be claimed for respectability rather than immorality—to be upheld as art rather than obscenity. Contemporaries, unable to discern whether what they were viewing was “nude” or “naked,” ultimately concluded that prohibition was inappropriate. The case of the tableaux vivants therefore reveals the resilience of understandings of popular culture that do not fit easily into established narratives of improvement, regulation, and modernization.

At first sight, the controversy created by tableaux vivants might appear to be yet another site on which to map the cultural anxieties of the fin de siècle, a period characterized by what Elaine Showalter has labeled “sexual anarchy.”Footnote ⁴ Certainly the vogue for poses plastiques on the music hall stage coincided with a moment of moral discomposition created by a series of interconnected challenges to established understandings of gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality. In 1894 the periodical press announced the arrival of the “new woman,” an autonomous, unmarried, sexually transgressive, and politically informed young female who sought equality with men in education and the workplace.Footnote ⁵ Anxieties about women's increased presence in public space were, however, not just confined to media interest in the activities of feminists and female socialists. The female shopper in the West End similarly appeared to embody new emancipatory narratives in which women had increased access to the urban center.Footnote ⁶ True, this access was highly conditional, as is revealed in contemporary controversies about the sexual harassment of women who entered public spaces without a chaperone. However, it certainly seemed to be the case that new retailing practices were redefining urban pleasure in female terms. Women's increased presence in the public world also accounts for the widespread purchase of what have been termed “narratives of sexual danger” in the late Victorian city.Footnote ⁷

While the debates over tableaux vivants were certainly animated by these broader changes in the cultural landscape of 1890s London, they also retain unique aspects which need to be recognized. First, many of the major anxieties about changing gender roles in the fin de siècle were about movement, especially the increased traffic of women out of the domestic realm and onto London's streets. By contrast, the body of the tableau model was literally still and fixed. If her body disturbed the respectable urban imaginary, it did so in rather different ways from that of the window shopper, the streetwalker, or the marching female suffragist. Second, cultural and sexual anxieties at the close of the nineteenth century were often yoked to the discourses of degeneration, whether moral, bodily, racial, national, or imperial. Whether expressed (as by Charles Booth or Llewellyn Smith) in environmental terms or (as in the growing enthusiasm for eugenics) attributed to hereditary factors, critics of the new urban civilization were convinced that the debilitating effects of city life were all too evident on the degraded and demoralized bodies of the city dweller.Footnote ⁸ However, while contemporary medical and social scientific tracts exposed the degenerate body and sideshow booths exhibited the distorted bodies of “freaks” such as John Merrick, tableaux vivants appeared to suggest the resilience of classical form and physical beauty in the midst of the ill-disciplined metropolis.Footnote ⁹ The sequestering of tableaux vivants to the discourses of both cultural anxiety and moral purity would therefore prove to be neither straightforward nor unconditional.

While dating back to antiquity, living pictures can be traced to the eighteenth-century Neapolitan drawing room displays by Lady Emma Hamilton (née Hart) who famously covered her seminude form with shawls. Once they dropped, she was said to portray a series of grand gestures as if the statues she represented, like Helena, Cassandra, and Andromache, had come to life.Footnote ¹⁰ Musical instruments such as urns, lyres, and tambourines sometimes further animated the act. Her transformation from “coarse and ungraceful in common life” to “highly graceful, and even beautiful” during the performance was remarked on by many whose impressions reflected the elite world in which she moved, as well as her modest family background.Footnote ¹¹ Goethe, one of her admirers, thought her attitudes to be inspired by religious tableaux, while the painter Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun saw them as resembling the nude in the artist's studio.Footnote ¹²

In the decades that followed, displays similar to those of Lady Hamilton came into vogue across the Continent and as far away as America. This artistic form became popularized, spreading from private drawing rooms to public theaters. At the Olympic Theatre in Wych Street in the Strand, manageress Mme. Vestris collaborated with playwright J. R. Planché to produce melodramas like The Brigand in 1829. This spectacle contained several tableaux borrowed from Charles Eastlake's popular series of “Banditti” pictures, first exhibited six years earlier.Footnote ¹³ These included “An Italian Brigand Chief Reposing,” “The Wife of a Brigand Chief Watching the Result of the Battle,” and “The Dying Brigand,” which were of great interest to a popular audience in the post-Napoleonic period when such visual representations evoked national sentiment and contributed to a collective memory about war.Footnote ¹⁴ Some years later, the Olympic produced another play, The Court of Beauties, which featured living pictures illustrating the duplicity of court life. Set at Hampton Court during Charles II's reign, the play is about a king and his ministers who are duped into thinking that the “beauties” in Sir Lely's paintings that hang on the wall are merely “copies.” But they seem to take on life, thereby disrupting the boundary separating their represented and real bodies.Footnote ¹⁵ As testimony to its popularity, it was repeated from March to October in 1835 and then brought back at the end of November for a month.Footnote ¹⁶

Borrowing from early melodramatic theatrical practices, the leading characters in these displays appeared in a state of suspended animation as the curtain fell and the audience awaited the plot's resolution. Apart from stage drama, living pictures appeared in circuses, as, for instance, at Astley's Amphitheatre near Waterloo Bridge in the 1830s and 1840s when Andrew Ducrow spectacularly depicted “Hercules Farnese,” a “Roman Gladiator,” “Mercury,” and “Zephyr” on horseback. Still other tableaux were presented as discrete scenes like those at the Egyptian Hall. There, star turns like the dwarf General Tom Thumb, an import from P. T. Barnum's New York museum with its cabinet of curiosities, posed as “Apollo,” Napoleon,” and “The Fighting Gladiator” during the fifties.Footnote ¹⁷ While Ducrow represented statuesque heroism, Thumb appealed to a popular baroque appetite.

By the end of the century, living pictures were adapted to state-of-the-art stagecraft. The theatrical scenic designer W. P. Dando received a patent for his tableau apparatus in 1893. It consisted of a platform with four compartments on which the scenes were displayed. With each picture, the backdrop framing it changed, much like a kaleidoscope. The entire structure turned on a pivot supported by antifriction rollers and steadying legs to prevent vibration.Footnote ¹⁸ It was used at the Palace Theatre, where scenes featuring “Erin,” “Summer,” “The Storm,” “Blind Girl,” “Tinted Venus,” and “La Cigale” were represented.Footnote ¹⁹ These were much like earlier tableaux based on Lady Hamilton's example except that they incorporated mechanical innovations. Dando's competed with the one designed by E. von Kilanyi, a Hungarian whose apparatus was also used at the Palace in the same period. His consisted of a car fixed to a frame that ran on parallel rollers, shifting from side to side. When it reached its end point, the scene on it was dismounted and a new one put in its place.Footnote ²⁰ Relying on the interplay between motion and stillness, these visual forms were like early silent film. Apart from their innovative qualities, the director-writer G. J. Goodrich believed that they were in demand because “from the oldest to youngest, we all like pictures. The baby likes them even before he can say why.”Footnote ²¹ Music hall managers knew how far audiences would travel to see them, prompting one writer for the Daily Graphic to remark in 1894 that “no self-respecting variety theatre deems itself complete without a series of tableaux.”Footnote ²² At the Palace, it was said, between eighty and ninety tableaux were produced during that year alone.Footnote ²³ Considering an average nightly audience of 45,000 at the larger halls, the public's exposure to these tableaux was widespread.Footnote ²⁴

For some, popularization was inevitably equated with vulgarization. To critical onlookers, the “uneducated” patron's gaze was said to be undisciplined, possibly indecent. Constructed thus, nakedness implied the body without borders or containment, arousing the viewer rather than bringing about stillness and wholeness as would a work of art.Footnote ²⁵ Any onlooker with knowledge of sexual fetishism, they believed, would have seen a correspondence between naked or seminaked women in the pornographer's studio and the draped ones on the music hall stage.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, with the expansion in the pornography market in the 1890s, the circulation of postcards, stereoscopes, mutoscope, and transparencies provided wider access to such images for a socially broader audience, including working-class men and “impressionable” boys.Footnote ²⁷ However, the association of living statuary with suggestive titillation was neither exclusive nor universal. Music hall audiences were remarkably heterogeneous, and stage acts inevitably had to function simultaneously on a number of different registers.Footnote ²⁸ If some audience members were sexually aroused by an apparently naked woman on stage, others might still have registered what they were seeing as “art.” One should not conclude that just because the audience was now the urban masses of late Victorian London rather than the select few of the eighteenth-century drawing room, the aesthetics had been displaced by unmediated carnality. Edward Stuart Humphries, a waiter at the Constitutional Club, recorded that the displays of the women he witnessed at the Hippodrome were like a “Fantasy,” unequaled in beauty to anything he had seen before.Footnote ²⁹

Given that it was possible to claim the tableau vivant for art, it is not surprising that moralists focused their attention not on the spectacle on stage but on the off-stage social and personal lives of the models. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 regulated subjects (like images of nude women) on the grounds that they were designed to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”Footnote ³⁰ Following this logic, some believed the tableau model to be sexually promiscuous. In the music hall song “That's as Far as I Want to Go!” the singer admits that he went to see a girl dressed as Venus in a tableau at a penny theater: “I stood staring at her so! / I didn’t believe she was alive. / The showman must have guessed. / He said, ‘put your hand and see!’ / I did so and confessed / [Chorus] `That's as far as I want to go—O! / As far as I want to go.’” His awe and admiration of the model vanishes when the impresario asks with a leer, “‘How’d you like that little dear / To be your wife?’ I simply answered `No!’ / I don’t want to see the picture, that's as far as I want to go!’”Footnote ³¹ The obvious tension between his lust for the immobile muse and his horror once she becomes real therefore animated other assumptions about the model, namely, her predatory nature. Another song written during the “tableau craze” of 1894 warned married men to be especially wary of these models: “When I spent all my cash [on frapped champagne] / They fled like a Flash / And left me to sing this refrain / Oh, the pictures that I went to see / Married men, now take advice from me / If you want to hold onto your wife and lead a quiet life, never go to see the living pictures!”Footnote ³²

Some claimed to have concrete proof of the tableau model's sexual transgressions. The sexually voracious diarist “Walter” met Sarah Mavis, a studio model who posed for Etty and Frost and also performed in tableaux with Madame Wharton's troupe, possibly in the forties when they appeared at the Walhalla in Leicester Square.Footnote ³³ Walter's intimate encounters with Mavis involved, among other things, looking at her poses in which she had on nothing “but her silk stockings and little kid boots” which “made me mad to possess her.” Nor was he alone in this, as she told him. When performing in Brussels, “every man in her troupe,” he wrote, “had at one time or another solicited her favours privately, but she never told her old man that for fear of a row,” a testimony to her apparent duplicity and promiscuity which continued in Walter's boudoir.Footnote ³⁴

While the infamous Walter was unlikely to have been conscripted to the cause of moral vigilance, advocates of prohibition fully shared his belief in the sexual incontinence of tableau models. In the summer of 1894, Lady Isabel Somerset, president of the British Women's Temperance Association, denounced such displays for damaging the models’ moral welfare in the periodical The Woman's Signal, her organization's mouthpiece.Footnote ³⁵ Some months later, her coeditor, Annie Holdsworth, added sensation to an already dramatic story in a tale depicting a “new woman” journalist who attempts to “pass” as a tableau model in order to get “good copy.” The plan predictably backfires, and rather than feeling empowered by the experience, the journalist finds herself demoralized. The manager of the hall tells her, “the less you have on the better they like it.” Not only does she feel shame when she is on stage, but so too does her suitor, who secretly observes her display, feeling “powerless to silence the coarse remarks [of audience members].”Footnote ³⁶ Such fleeting and unruly interactions—between (a largely male) audience and the artist—prompted many others, like William Alexander Coote, secretary of the National Vigilance Association, to declare publicly their support for Lady Somerset's cause.Footnote ³⁷ Lady Somerset's campaign also received support from London clergymen, such as the Archdeacon of Middlesex and the editors of the evangelical Record, the Christian Commonwealth, the Church Times, and The Christian.Footnote ³⁸

Seeing the displays as “indecent,” moral welfare advocates like Lady Somerset insisted on municipal intervention to revoke the licenses of establishments that featured tableaux. In doing so, she relied on a precedent set by the LCC only a few years earlier when its members attempted to censor the London Aquarium's “indecent” poster of the acrobat Zaeo, an advertisement that featured the artist posing with upraised arms, smiling, and wearing a tight bodice.Footnote ³⁹ The LCC's authority included the daytime inspection of the halls and theaters for safety and sanitation, though it also stretched to include inspection of the performances during the evening.Footnote ⁴⁰ In turning to the LCC, Lady Somerset and her allies assumed they would find sympathy and support, and not without good reason. Since 1889, the LCC was controlled by the Progressive Party (an alliance between Liberal, Fabian, and Labour representatives). Sometimes labeled “municipal puritans,” these councillors were mainly Nonconformist and coupled technocratic instincts with older reforming impulses, including temperance. Unfortunately for the moralists, in spite of the instincts of many of its members to sanitize the halls, the twenty-three inspectors who worked for the LCC's Theatres and Music Halls Sub-committee (created in 1890) frequently erred on the side of caution—at least when judging the quality of the performances.Footnote ⁴¹ In one such report, Richard Stanley praised the scenes in the living pictures and other turns at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in July of 1894, stating that “the whole of the entertainment was entirely free of anything of an objectionable nature.”Footnote ⁴² Similarly, after a visit to the same theater some months later, inspector Peter Newbold noted that “there was nothing in the performances to shock the feelings of the inspector or his wife who accompanied him and nothing at all objectionable in the ‘Living Pictures.’”Footnote ⁴³ That said, he added, “the only thing any one would be likely to object to was the attire in the female performances which was such as to exhibit the beautiful form of woman.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But it was good for the public to see at least “a fac similie” of high art, said the Daily Graphic.Footnote ⁴⁵ Getting “a tableau doubly second hand,” it reasoned, was better than getting none at all. Implicit in the judgment was an assumption that the lower-middle and working classes who went to the halls were unlikely to visit the Royal Academy, and that the halls had an improving function. True, one LCC inspector admitted to ambivalent feelings regarding the display. He opined that “it is a matter of difficulty to fix the actual point where propriety ends and impropriety begin[s].” However, while he appreciated that some “would simply object to such public and complete display of the female form by living women,” he also conceded that he found the display of tableaux to be “skillful and artistic.” In general, he concluded that “the borderline which divides the legitimate from the objectionable is not well defined.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The widening and democratization of the art market had arguably destabilized traditional distinctions between the “aesthete” and the “philistine.” Many Victorian cultural authorities insisted that “a work of art should appeal to the senses through its formal proprieties, and that to condemn the nude was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetic problem.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The nude body, derived from antiquity, could be disassociated from sex and rendered the subject of traditional interest to elites, the well-read, and the middle classes, as the Elgin marbles (on display since 1807), Egyptian mummies, and other “ancient curiosities” in the British Museum testified.Footnote ⁴⁸

Moreover, baring some did not mean baring all, a point that other inspectors were keen to emphasize. One inspector sent to the Palace noted how in one tableau called “Aphrodite,” a woman was “apparently quite nude, except for a scarf over the loins. I say apparently because in every case I observed … the body, arms and bosom were completely clothed in very delicate close fitting fleshings which[,] when a warm light was thrown on them, appeared like nature.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Yet when compared with other kinds of display, such as burlesque, erotically charged “natural” dancing, or acrobatics where male and female bodies entangled in quasi-sexual poses, tableaux vivants were seen to be preferable.Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast to Lady Somerset, with whom she attended the halls, Laura Ormiston Chant did not find tableau displays reprehensible, as she testified before the LCC licensing session.Footnote ⁵¹ While pointing out that the living pictures at the Empire Theatre were “not at all objectionable,” she observed that a dancer was; “she had on nothing but a very short skirt which when she danced and pirouetted flew right up to her head and left the rest of her body with the waist exposed except for a very slight white gauze between her limbs.”Footnote ⁵² Her telescopic view of the dancer's limbs (and the white gauze between them) was enhanced with the aid of opera glasses, as she admitted.Footnote ⁵³ While she made an important observation about the varying propriety of different grades of performer, her confessed knowledge of the performer's body confused her role as a moralist with that of a voyeuse.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nonetheless, she was still able to establish the case that context was everything. Tableau models appeared in the same program with these dancers and, moreover, with child acrobats who performed “indecent” handstands with outstretched legs, forming a “T” with their bodies.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Chant's view, tableaux vivants were contaminated by association with these kinetic displays, and one can only presume that she would have been more indulgent of living statuary when performed on its own.

Purity campaigners were also concerned about the presumed intimate encounters between prostitutes and their customers who were said to frequent the promenade of the Empire Theatre during the performances of tableaux there, and who, once the lights went down, engaged in “a great deal of pulling, jostling, touching and very unpleasant language,” as Chant observed.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, her friend Mrs. Amie Hicks of the BWTA, who attended the Empire with her, said before the same licensing committee that she overheard one man saying to the woman whom he groped, “you are not very young.” “I can find you a nice little one,” she responded.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to these moralists, the “painted women” who frequented the Empire and other halls were clearly there for “immoral purposes.” For Chant, living pictures constituted a relatively minor part of a larger problem that necessitated immediate municipal action. She and her allies wished to see prostitutes banned altogether from such halls, but “the next best thing was the separation of the audience (and show) from the prostitutes, thereby preventing men from moving freely between the two sites of erotic entertainment,” as Lucy Bland has argued.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the autumn of 1894 the Empire conceded to the LCC's demand to have its promenade closed off from the auditorium. The show, including its tableaux vivants, however, went on.Footnote ⁵⁹

In 1894, campaigners against tableaux vivants claimed that impropriety in the metropolis destabilized the national and racial hierarchies on which the British empire was based. A member of the executive council of the Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance applauded the BWTA's efforts and questioned (after seeing some living pictures during a recent visit to London) how “any nation that calls itself a civilised one can find enjoyment in such things.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He added that such displays “would never be allowed in poor Ireland. The people themselves would hiss the thing from the boards and … protest against such an insult to womanhood.” The immoral popular entertainment of London therefore called into question Britain's right to dominance over subject peoples whom it regularly portrayed as uncouth and uncivilized.

By the time the campaign against living statuary was revived in 1907, such anxieties about national and imperial decline had obviously become even more acute as a result of the intensification of the arms race with Germany and the malaise associated with the military setbacks of the Boer War. In 1907, the Bishop of London himself encouraged the London Temperance Council to become involved in the protest against tableaux. His efforts were part of a larger project to reform popular entertainment in the metropolis, to raise the age of consent for girls, and, moreover, to rid London of immorality “in every deanery.”Footnote ⁶¹ To these ends, the bishop allied himself with the NVA, Rabbi Morris Joseph (on behalf of London's chief rabbi), the Archbishop of Westminster, and leaders from forty other philanthropic societies. This formidable coalition protested against tableau displays before a LCC licensing session in June of 1907.Footnote ⁶²

In an effort to stem the tide not only in London but nationwide, the NVA and the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality appealed to local bodies from Hull to Manchester to Blaenavon in South Wales for support.Footnote ⁶³ Their protestations asserted that “France, Russia, Italy and other Continental countries are taking energetic steps to put down the[se] abuses.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Concerns about “national efficiency” dominated the politics of Edwardian Britain and legitimized the prerogatives of state intervention emanating from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this new climate, purity advocates might have been forgiven for believing that their demands to banish lewdness from the London stage now stood a dramatically increased chance of success.

The campaigners strongly disapproved of the ubiquitous “disagreeable” photographs of tableau models.Footnote ⁶⁶ These photographs raised anxieties about what (presumably male) consumers did with these images behind closed doors.Footnote ⁶⁷ Representations of living statuary models were diffused to an even wider public when they appeared on posters in Soho's streets near music halls, sparking the attention of one local headmaster, who in a letter to the LCC complained about the “harmful effects [they had] on the minds of schoolchildren.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The attractiveness of the posters and the cheapness of the ticket (sometimes as little as 3d) meant that these displays were visited “to a great extent by young people, the majority of whom were in their teens.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The deputation warned that if living statuary was not interfered with now, there would be no way of stopping its growth in the future.Footnote ⁷⁰ The concern, of course, was that the displays would lead to licentious behavior among boys.Footnote ⁷¹ However, after sending deputations to provincial and metropolitan licensing authorities, moral purity groups found the response to their demands was one of ambivalence. While some councillors did not wish to interfere with the displays on the grounds that the class of people who went to the music halls was entitled to amusement, others held that by abstaining from involvement they allowed a public nuisance to continue.Footnote ⁷² In London, the failure of the Progressives in the 1907 election and the subsequent redistribution of political power on the LCC in favor of the Municipal Reform Party had no obvious impact on policy affecting tableaux. In fact, there continued at County Hall a struggle between laissez-faire and purity instincts. At the LCC's licensing meeting on 19 June, at which the London deputation reported, the subcommittee recommended in favor of the continuation of tableau displays, confining itself “to keep living statuary under strict observation.”Footnote ⁷³ This cautious tone was obviously unsatisfactory to certain Progressives and many more campaigners and was challenged at the next meeting of the full council. Upon further consideration of the deputation from London's clergy, the council considered an amendment put forward by the General Purposes Committee that declared that living pictures were “undesirable.” In this debate, the licensing committee chair, Hubert John Greenwood, expressed the opinion that the exhibitions contained “nothing harmful as long as they were kept entirely to classical subjects or the representation of well known works of art.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Despite his intervention, the council voted by a majority of twenty-one votes to adopt the amendment.Footnote ⁷⁵ Explaining its revised view, its members held that by doing nothing they would be seen to be condoning exhibitions that “at least by implication” tell “poor families” (whom they presumed to be the audiences) “there is nothing sacred in the person of either men or women.” They were also now convinced—although they had heard the argument before—that impressionable schoolchildren were particularly at risk of moral degradation from the displays.Footnote ⁷⁶ Those who supported the amendment were Liberal member Sir John McDougall, a member of the NVA, and Conservative G. S. C. Swinton, while those who opposed it included Fabian activist and Christian Socialist the Rev. Stewart Headlam, who later created the Anti-Puritan League in Defense of the People's Pleasure, as well as W. Hayes Fisher of the Municipal Reform Party.Footnote ⁷⁷

However, the 1907 amendment fell well short of an outright ban. The regulatory framework relating to living statuary remained opaque, and certainly did not deliver the outcome that reformers so desired. Far from ending tableau performances, the amendment created a confusing system whereby some displays continued and others did not. For good reason, therefore, many managers, unsure about the legal status of their programs, wrote to the LCC requesting that the tableau artists they had already hired be allowed to complete their contracts.Footnote ⁷⁸ In order to protect their good reputation and avoid breach of contract, artists also appealed to the council requesting that their contracts be allowed to continue on the condition that no new ones would be negotiated.Footnote ⁷⁹ While appreciating the financial strain and professional obligations that these managers were under and approving their requests, the LCC continued to send its inspectors to the halls in order to judge the propriety of the exhibitions. However, despite the new climate created by the 1907 amendment, some of these inspectors continued to be remarkably indulgent. At the Oxford Music Hall where Dr. Angelo's “living porcelains” performed, one inspector reported that there was nothing in it to which the council could take exception, and so the display continued.Footnote ⁸⁰ But the inspector who monitored “the Lost Huntress” at the Palace in 1909 condemned the display for revealing too much. In this particular tableau, one model was seen to be “quite naked” except for a band about four inches wide across her “private parts and her loins [while] her bust (breast and nipples) st[ood] out very prominently.” The cloth was thus used to highlight her nakedness, not mask it. Another appeared “stark naked with her arm crossed over her middle as … a good substitute for the historical fig leaf.” At the same theater, a further tableau entitled “In the Mirror” was similarly censured and, within five days of the inspector's report, was withdrawn.Footnote ⁸¹ The reference to exposed breasts, protruding nipples, and scantily covered genitals was an important indicator of what defined “nakedness” as opposed to “nudity” in these discussions. The difference between the two led to a confusing policy that prohibited the former and tolerated the latter. The problem was, of course, that such a distinction was unlikely to be self-evident and free of value judgment. By 1912, the Lord Chamberlain's office had chimed in, prohibiting licensed theaters from allowing “indecency of dress, dance or gesture.”Footnote ⁸² If this intervention did little to clarify matters, it remained the case that, for the moralizing agencies of both local and central government, there were nudes and then there were nudes. In response to the skin trade's diversification and commercialization, licensing authority widened, but this only meant that official attitudes to stage nudity became even more uneven and inconsistent. State intervention revealed the difficulty of maintaining the fine balance between exerting moral authority and encouraging a dynamic, popular entertainment market.

In the decades that followed 1907, the living statue remained a feature of popular entertainment in the metropolis. Provided the models remained static, took up and left their positions unseen by the audience, and were shielded by subdued lighting, such displays could escape official interference. Moralists shifted their attention to new sites of sexual disorder, including the “expressive” dancing of, among others, Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan. In her controversial role as the Princess Judea in the “Vision of Salome,” Allan's Jewish personae confused the aesthetic registers; as “foreign” and palpitating, her body differed markedly from the motionless English one in the tableau. An editor of London Chat complained, in a letter to the LCC in April 1908, it was a “farce” that living statuary was legally restricted while Maud Allan's performance was permitted.Footnote ⁸³ In subsequent years moral purists became agitated by a variety of cultural phenomena, including the content of early feature films, young women inflamed by “khaki fever” in the First World War, and the “lesbian novel” of the 1920s.Footnote ⁸⁴

Tableaux vivants, by contrast, received little attention. In 1932 the Windmill Theatre launched its famous “Revudeville,” which featured motionless nudes. By presenting nudes that remained completely immobile, even when sharing a stage with a clothed dancer or singer, the management of the Windmill ensured that it met the Lord Chamberlain's requirements for artistry. Far from provoking moral outrage, “Revudeville” became something of a London, and even national, institution. The show was visited by the king and queen of Norway, and more prestigious theaters, such as the Palladium, Hippidrome, and Holborn Empire, found it necessary to compete by featuring nudes in their shows. The Windmill's decision not to close during the Blitz came to be seen as an embodiment of the nation's wartime spirit. What ultimately removed living statuary from the London stage were not the forces of moral regulation, but rather the changing tastes of customers. The Windmill finally closed in 1964, unable to compete with the more aggressively commercial sexual culture of the strip club and “revue bar.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The relative invulnerability of tableaux vivants to both voluntary and official moralizing in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods suggests the need for a more nuanced account of responses to popular culture in the fin de siècle metropolis. Patterns of regulation were rarely straightforward, and the discourses of permission and regulation existed side by side. While British politics certainly took a collectivist turn in this era (in the form of the 1906–14 Liberal government's welfare reforms, the Conservative Party's infatuation with tariff reform, or the anticipation of the wartime national security state in the passing of the Official Secrets Act in 1911), the debates over tableaux vivants revealed that libertarian instincts had not been entirely banished, even in that most Fabian of institutions, the London County Council.Footnote ⁸⁶ A reluctance to pursue policies of intervention and coercion partly reflected a continued respect for the integrity of market and commercial forces and the livelihoods of those employed in the industry of cultural production. However, it also suggested the impossibility of making a clear distinction between high and low culture, between art and indecency, or between the improving and the corrupting. Contemporaries were just as likely to claim the living statue as a work of art as they were to condemn it as a site of immorality.