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“As “As I I walked walked along along the the Bois Bois de
de
Boulogne”: Boulogne”: Subversive Subversive Performances
Performances
and and Masculine Masculine Pleasures Pleasures in
in
Fin-de-Siècle Fin-de-Siècle London
London
Christopher Breward
A feature of London street life that was peculiar to the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries was the oafish custom of crying purposeless catchphrases. The phrases had no
special application and were seldom used in any apposite sense. They were parrot cries
from one dull mind to another. One finds no record of them in earlier times; they seem
to coincide with the coming of the music hall. One of the earliest, current in the ’forties
was “Wal-ker!” intended to convey incredulity. Others of later date were “I’ll have your
hat” ”Fancy meeting you” . . . “Does your mother know you’re out?” In the later years
of the century they were chiefly used as an introduction between boys and girls at those
now vanished institutions, Monkey’s Parades. In a grosser, rather Silenian vein, but also
of the ’eighties and ’nineties, were those parading groups of young men in Inverness
capes and Gibus hats, who threw their sovereigns about, and were celebrated in such
songs as . . . “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys” . . . “Hi-tiddley-hi-ti” . . . They were the last
phase of that spirit. Getting drunk, sitting on the roofs of hansoms and singing choruses,
staying out all night . . . The present century does not know the type . . . it really died
with Mafeking Night and Victoria. 1
In his description of urban street noise and its perpetrators in late Victoria London,
popular journalist Thomas Burke recalled a “vulgarization” of the fashionable
bachelor model which dominated commercial representations of masculine
fashion in the period. Burke identified the activities of disruptive working-class
youths who parodied the significant characteristics of such metropolitan idols. The
exchange of popular catch phrases, culled from the latest music hall hit, drew
attention to the physical shortcomings or idiosyncratic dress code of their targets,
here labeled as effeminate mother’s boys or unworthy possessors of overly
spectacular headgear. At the other extreme, the disposable income and smart attire
of bachelor role-models found a distorted reflection in the antisocial carousing of
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