David Barrett

David Barrett

Connectivity – the special relationship of late Victorian and early Edwardian cockney-styled music hall entertainers with their regional audiences

  • Registration: PhD
  • Principal supervisor: Dr Marcus Morris
  • Other supervisors: Dr Sam Edwards
  • Start and end dates: January 2018 to January 2025

Background and aims

The leading cockney-styled entertainers of late Victorian and early Edwardian music hall achieved a special connectivity with their audiences that enabled them to develop national performance repertoires that were founded on London-centric material and references and employing largely cockney-London vernacular.

Despite regional audiences at that time having little or no detailed knowledge of cockney London or the nuancing of cockney vernacular embedded in the lyrics of these performers’ songs and the characters depicted, the major cockney styled performers such as Marie Lloyd, Gus Elen, Vesta Victoria and others achieved nationwide traction with their audiences.

By developing a special audience/performer connectivity they were able to undertake regular extensive regional tours encompassing the most populous cities beyond the metropolis with a ‘national’ act and performance style without the need for regional modification.

Such connectivity was only made possible by a unique convergence of four key enabling factors that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and became established by the early years of the twentieth.

This connectivity, which was essentially a circular, self-reinforcing link between the artiste, their performance act and the collective and individual emotions of their audiences was conditional upon four key enabling factors:

  • the emergence, by around 1900, of a demographically homogenised inner urban population in the metropolis and the larger cities of Britain
  • the commodification of music hall as a national mass entertainment medium from 1895
  • the reputational repositioning of the stereotypical cockney within society
  • the extent to which the London music hall cockney styled entertainer became a de facto stereotype of the inner urban working-class.

Publications

  • Will be added when available.

Conference presentations

  • Will be added when available.

Contacts