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Christopher Breward
The quiet airy reserve and nonchalance of the stage gentleman would seem at the music
hall to be unintelligible, or uninteresting. But the East Ender has created his idea from a
gentleman or “gent” of which he has had glimpses at the “bars” and finds it in perfection
at his music hall. At the music hall everything is tinselled over, and we find a kind of
racy, gin borne affection to the mode; everyone being “dear boy”or a “pall.” There is a
frank, cordial bearing, a familiarity which stands for candour and open heartedness, a
suggestion of perpetual dress suit, with deep side packets, in which the hands are ever
plunged . . . and we must ever recollect to strut and stride rather than walk. 86
In its most concentrated form, the words and gestures of the music hall artiste
provided the most fitting summation of popular masculine consumerism, largely
through the projection of recognizable stage types. The swell song enacted by the
lion comique had the most distinguished lineage in the repertoire, providing the
basis for later explorations of fashionable masculinity after the turn of the century.
Promoted at first during the 1860s and 1870s by performers including George
Leybourne known as “Champagne Charlie,” Arthur Lloyd, George MacDermott
and Alfred Peck Stevens known as “The Great Vance,” the swell bore a direct
relationship to straight theatrical comedy and particularly to the celebrated figure
of Lord Dundreary, the aristocratic fop of the 1861 play Our American Cousin. 87
Generally presented as an upper-class dandy addicted to the pleasures of club life,
horse racing, and various forms of alcohol, the visual image of the swell conformed
to established notions of how the upper ten dressed and behaved. Henry Chance
Newton recalled how George Leybourne’s “lithe splendid figure, handsome
semi-Jewish visage and majestic sweep of his hand play [made him] quite an
Apollo among men, and able to ‘carry’ the most distinguished apparel. He flaunted
the broad check suits, the puce jackets, widely striped trousers and lurid vests of
his so-called swells,” and this despite his own origins as “a hammerman at
Maudsley’s, the marine engineers then in the Westminster Bridge Road” who was
prone to display “flashes of illiteracy quite amazing to those who saw or who spoke
to him for the first time.” 88 Thus military bearing and a broad chest shown off
through exquisite Savile Row tailoring, together with extravagant treatments in
facial hair and an ostentatious use of the cane and top hat, arrived at a convincing
approximation of Rotten Row style whose impact relied on the tension between
illusory authenticity and the overblown talents of the performer. A late version of
the type from the 1880s is illustrated in a song cover for T.W. Barrett’s He’s Got
’Em On in which the protagonist stands in tight morning coat with the requisite
ivory handled cane, monocle, cigar, striped shirt, button hole, love heart tie pin,
and gold fob chain. 89 The American investigative journalist Daniel Kirwan writing
at the height of the lion comique’s popularity in 1871 transcribed the lines of a
song he had heard performed at the Alhambra which relied for its humour on just
such a combination of gesture, pronunciation and visual attire:
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