The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel

Author:Virginia Postrel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

From the enticing lovelies of poster art to shop windows bright against the night, the commercial metropolis forged the vernacular of glamour. Glamour in turn shaped the city. Despite vastly different cultural and political arrangements, certain commonalities emerged. Consider the theater, one of the defining institutions of urban life. Boswell, later famous for his biography of Samuel Johnson, regularly attended plays and argued their merits; he had affairs with actresses; he circulated among playwrights and actors. By the end of Sister Carrie, the protagonist enjoys a comfortable living as an actress, a career unimaginable in her small hometown. In cities as different as London and Edo, theater enthusiasts purchased popular prints of their favorite actors and read books about performers’ real or imagined lives. Stage productions seem as intrinsic to urban life as crowded streets.

The crowds allowed theaters to flourish. In the age before film, only a geographically concentrated population could furnish the consistently large audiences needed to sustain frequent performances by multiple professional companies. As cities grew, audiences swelled to astounding numbers. “In the 1880s and 1890s,” writes the historian Eugen Weber, “half a million Parisians went to the theater once a week, more than twice as many once a month. ‘The population of Paris,’ a journalist observed, ‘lives in the theater, for the theater, by the theater.’ ”46

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