Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain by Flanders Judith

Author:Flanders, Judith [Flanders, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2009-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

JUPITER: Deuce take the fellow; where is Bacchus now?

MERCURY: He’s at the Punch Bowl, drunk as David’s sow.

JUPITER: Where’s Mars?

MERCURY: He’s gone to drill.

JUPITER: Where’s Juno, pray?

MERCURY: She’s in the laundry, sir; it’s washing day.42

A summary of Planché’s The Island of Jewels (1849) can stand as representative of the type of production that was to prove so popular. Princess Laidronetta is rejected by her family because she is saddled with the curse of ugliness by the malevolent Fairy Magotine. When a green serpent begs her for help, she is magically transported by a fairy boat to a rocky cavern with her friend Fidelia (played by Mme Vestris). The cavern is then transformed into a palace made of jewels, and jewel soldiers appear bearing Emerald inside a litter. From inside, Emerald asks Laidronetta to marry him, warning her that she must not look at him before the wedding in order to break Magotine’s spells over them both. She agrees, and a ‘crystal proscenium’ appears for the ballet of Cupid and Psyche. But, as in all the best fairy tales, Laidronetta succumbs to temptation and takes a peek at Emerald, who, she discovers to her horror, is the green serpent. The entire set vanishes in a violent storm, out of which Magotine appears, to take Laidronetta prisoner for seven years. After much backing and forthing over a series of impossible tasks, the good fairy Benevolentia finally appears, helps Laidronetta perform the tasks, and transforms Emerald back into the prince he had been before Magotine cast her evil spell. The scene is equally transformed, to a Fairy Garden, where Emerald is once again surrounded by his court. Magotine is banished to hell, Laidronetta’s family are remorseful (especially as she is no longer ugly), and the great transformation scene, ‘The Brilliant Discovery of the Crown Jewels in the Palm of Success’, takes place. All this is interspersed with songs, dances, jokes about current concerns, including the ‘Railway King’ and card sharps, and sideswipes at other plays being performed in London.43

It is scarcely surprising from the above two long descriptions that when David Copperfield first went to the theatre, a pantomime at Covent Garden, he came away overwhelmed by the ‘mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, [which] were so dazzling, and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if I had come from the clouds’.44 This ‘glittering and brilliant scenery’ that Dickens wrote so feelingly about had long been overseen by artists of some substantial reputation, such as David Roberts and Clarkson Stanfield, or was the work of theatrical set-painting dynasties like the Grieve family, who designed for Charles Kemble, Charles Kean, W. C. Macready, Grimaldi, Mme Vestris and more, over careers that spanned many of the innovations of the nineteenth century.45

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