Untitled

Christopher Breward
Fred Gilbert wrote both the words and music shortly after . . . Charles Wells brought out
a book entitled “How I broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” . . . I liked the tune very much,
especially the chorus, but I was rather afraid that some of the phrasing was rather too
highbrow for an average music hall audience. Such words as “Sunny Southern Shore,”
“Grand Triumphal Arch,” “The Charms of Mad’moiselle,” etc., seemed to me somewhat
out of the reach of say Hoxton. 101
The song’s ensuing popularity attested strongly to the contrary, providing evidence
of the capacity for men across the social spectrum to empathize with the appeal of
conspicuous consumption. As the music hall historian Harold Scott affirmed:
In Coburn one sees how nearly the two aspects of the music hall approached one another.
His adoption of the “swell” type in “The Man Who Broke the Bank” was not made
without some misgivings and its success, outstanding though it was, did not eclipse the
vogue of “Two Lovely Black Eyes” [a more proletarian “coster” song by Coburn], by
which he discovered a common denominator for the audiences of the Mile End Road
and Piccadilly Circus . . . [a] welding of flash life with the simple methods of the concert
room. 102
The distanced perfection of the swell was not the only model of fashionable style
available to the music hall audience, though it was the most voluble. Dion Calthrop
hinted at the competitive and envious tendencies which the swell’s sartorial
knowledge could engender when he recalled a companion’s reaction to the polish
of a swell performance: “I’ll bet that man’s got a fur overcoat . . . Look at him, he
has been poured into his clothes and the only crease he has got is down his trousers;
and look at his tie, it’s tied just well enough to show it isn’t ready made.” 103 If such
extremes threatened to exclude participation by their preciousness, other character
roles, including that of the shabby genteel and the masher, elicited a more
sympathetic, less awe-struck response; for these were individuals whose attitude
to the fashionable world mirrored more precisely the surface realities of a suburban
or working-class engagement with bon-ton, rather than their inner desires. The
mode of shabby gentility addressed the nature of economic restraints which
prevented the keeping up of fashionable appearances, and attributed a tragic pathos
to those whose clothing betrayed a fall from material grace. In many ways the
battered top hat and frayed frock coat of the genre represented an inverted version
of the swell and referred to the ambivalence of clothing as a signifier of status and
moral worth. Where the puffed-up self-regard of the swell’s attire often concealed
an emptiness within, the rags of the shabby genteel failed to distort the essential
“breeding” of the wearer. Henry Chance Newton recalled Victor Liston “in his
threadbare frock coat and shockingly bad top hat, as he sang in broken tones that
reached the heart ‘I’m too proud to beg, too honest to steal, I know what it is to be
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