Music Hall and Modernity by Faulk Barry J.;

Author:Faulk, Barry J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

East End Boys, West End Reformers

Henry Nevinson’s “Little Scotty” is a forceful attempt to protect male authority in a realm in which it is perceived as endangered: London’s East End. The music hall is conceived as a force that counters outside, emasculating forces working against the sturdy English manhood of the worker. Nevinson’s tale of a working-class boy whose natural talent for mimicry leads him to the music-hall stage portrays the halls as a natural support for working-class masculinity. The story suggests that, despite the endeavors of municipal workers and philanthropists to regulate the halls and to administrate working-class culture, music hall exists intact. Further, it suggests that the “unreformed” music hall performs the most valuable kind of cultural work: it reproduces male supremacy and a gendered hierarchy.

The late 1880s and 1890s witnessed the rise of a set of powerful concerns centered around the uses of culture and the dangers of “amusement,” primarily focused on the antagonistic social space of London’s East End. Nevinson uses his short tale of East End halls to intervene in this tangled politics of working-class life and philanthropic reform. “Little Scotty” subtly disparages the many ameliorative schemes that proliferated in late-Victorian London, schemes that endeavored to bring “real” culture to natives of darkest London.

Nevinson experienced life at both Oxford and Whitechapel, taught English literature in Hackney, and accompanied rent collectors on rounds through slums.67 A socialist who turned to practical social philanthropy, Nevinson, with his wife Margaret, took part in Canon Samuel Barnett’s effort to acculturate East Enders at Toynbee Hall, the celebrated Whitechapel settlement house. As Margaret Nevinson recounts, Toynbee Hall brought “all the most eminent in literature, art and politics . . . to pour out their wisdom to the poor of Whitechapel”; the list of luminaries included Walter Pater, Leslie Stephen, Henry Sidgwick, Charles Booth, and S. R. Gardiner.68 Henry Nevinson’s fiction, however, is profoundly critical of philanthropy and moral reform; in opposition to efforts to “civilize” workers, he extols the self-sufficiency of proletarian culture.69 Nevinson takes care to portray East End music halls as an autonomous zone, a frontier outpost of cultural resistance, persisting in the face of the forces of moral uplift. “Little Scotty” also intimates that the halls have a necessary and conservative effect on East End life: they serve as vital support for working-class manhood.

Nevinson’s “Slum Stories of London”—collected in Neighbours of Ours (1895), the volume that includes “Little Scotty”—are linked by the presence of an active, interventionist narrator, Britton, an East End native. His name, of course, emphasizes how crucial representations of the working class were to the articulation of English national identity. In the nineteenth century, the Cockney came to stand for an essential English hardiness and masculinity, and this image bears heavily on Nevinson’s Britton. In a useful and comprehensive study of working-class images and representations in late-Victorian London, Peter Keating touches briefly on Nevinson. He extols the East End of Nevinson’s portrayal, affirming it as an authentic community linked by a complex network of familial relations, language, and custom.

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