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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
looks of the swell. Here an emotional appeal to the charity of the audience was
jettisoned for a gentle mocking of its pretensions. Thus in Harry Champion’s Any
Old Iron a dapper young man’s boasts regarding his inheritance from “uncle Bill”
are ridiculed when his gold watch and chain are found to be no better than base
metal, fit only for the rag and bone collector: “You look neat, talk about a treat, /
You look dapper from your napper to your feet, / Dressed in style, brand new tile
[hat], / And your father’s old green tie on, / But I wouldn’t give you tuppence for
your old watch chain, / Old Iron, Old Iron.” 108 Similarly, Gus Elen’s coster song
The Golden Dustman drew its humor from the juxtaposition of everyday squalor
and new-found wealth, in which malapropisms betrayed the aspirant dandy’s social
origins, and class allegiances threw the trappings of an idealized swell existence
into sharper relief:
And now I’m going to be a reg’lar toff,
A-riding in me carriage and me pair,
A top hat on me head,
Fevvers in me bed
And call meself the Dook of Barnet Fair.
Asterrymakam round the bottom of me coat,
A Piccadilly window in me eye –
Fancy all the dustmen a-shouting in me ear,
“Leave us in your will afore you die!” 109
The masher song traded less on the disruptive potential of fashionable emulation,
presenting its heroes as standard bearers for the liberating effects of commodity
culture. Distanced from the rousing pomposity of the lion comique, whose version
of heightened masculine beauty had dictated the characteristics of swelldom with
the rhetoric borrowed from the 1860s, the masher encapsulated the commercial
energy of the men’s retail trade from the 1890s, and the propensity of broad
swathes of young men to engage with its sartorial offerings. Occasionally the links
between music hall representation and the marketplace converged completely, as
in The Great Vance’s late rendition of The Chickaleary Cove which functioned as
an advertising coup for the tailoring firm of Edward Grove of Lower Marsh and
Shoreditch. His marketing ploys engineered a street slang similar to that utilized
by C. Greenburg and Harris of Whitechapel:
I’m a checkaleary bloke with my one-two-three
Vitechapel was the willage I was born in;
To catch me on the hop,
Or on my tibby drop,
You must vake up wery early in the mornin’
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