Fugitive Material and Everyday Theatrical Practice: A Playbill Study of the City of London Theatre in 1852

Abstract The importance of the stage to Victorian life and culture is well established, especially in terms of popular dramatic forms such as melodrama and pantomime. This article is less concerned with modes of performance, however, than with the everyday practice of commercial theatrical management. More specifically it considers the use of a theatre’s playbills to build and maintain an audience. Key to an intertheatrical process of information production and exchange, playbills were the central means of communication between a given theatrical establishment and the public it sought to attract. Focusing on the City of London Theatre in Norton Folgate – and with it the management of the veteran showman Nelson Lee – I trace a year in the life of a prominent East End venue through its weekly issue of playbills. Emphasizing the riches available in the National Archives at Kew, this unusually complete survival of printed ephemera sits with the mass of theatre-based material gathered by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Building on a number of studies exploring the importance of playbills within the period’s wider theatrical economy, and following recent work on everyday theatrical practice towards the end of the nineteenth century, the article recovers a specific moment in time and space through reading a single theatre’s bills for 1852. Reflecting the growing confidence of the age, we find an ostensibly minor establishment determined to combine classically legitimate offerings with more obviously appealing fare. Considered from this perspective, customary distinctions between high and low cultural production and consumption begin to look distinctly blurred.