Fifty years ago the Theatre was, far more than at present, the favourite amusement of the Londoners. It was a passion with them. They did not go only to laugh and be pleased as we go now; they went as critics; the pit preserves to this day a reputation, long since lost, for critical power. A large number of the audience went to every new performance of a stock piece in order to criticise. After the theatre they repaired to the Albion or the Cock for supper, and to talk over the performance. Fifty years ago there were about eighteen theatres, for a London of two millions.2

These theatres were not open all the year round, but it was reckoned that 20,000 people went every night to the theatre. There are now thirty theatres at least open nearly the whole year round. I doubt if there are many more than 20,000 at all of them together on an average in one night. Yet London has doubled, and the visitors to London have been multiplied by ten. It is by the visitors that the theatres are kept up. The people of London have in great measure lost their taste for the theatres, because they have gone to live in the suburbs. Who, for instance, that lives in Hampstead and wishes to get up in good time in the morning can take his wife often to the theatre? It takes an hour to drive into town, the hour after dinner. The play is over at a little after eleven; if he takes a cab, the driver is sulky at the thought of going up the hill and getting back again without another fare; if he goes and returns in a brougham, it doubles the expense. Formerly, when everybody lived in town, they could walk. Again, the price of seats has enormously gone up. Where there were two rows of stalls at the same price as the dress circle—namely, four shillings—there are now a dozen at the price of half a guinea. And it is very much more the fashion to take the best places, so that the dress circle is no longer the same highly respectable part of the house, while the upper boxes are now ‘out of it’ altogether, and, as for the pit, no man knoweth whether there be any pit still.

Besides, there are so many more distractions; a more widely spread habit of reading, more music, more art, more society, a fuller life. The theatre was formerly—it is still to many—the only school of conversation, wit, manners, and sentiment, the chief excitement which took them out of their daily lives, the most delightful, the most entrancing manner of spending the evening. If the theatre were the same to the people of London as it used to be, the average attendance, counting the visitors, would be not 20,000 but 120,000.

The reason why some of the houses were open for six months only was that the Lord Chancellor granted a licence for that period only, except to the patent houses. The Haymarket was a summer house, from April to October; the Adelphi a winter house, from October to April.

The most fashionable of the houses was Her Majesty’s, where only Italian Opera was performed. Everybody in society was obliged to have a box for the season, for which sums were paid varying with the place in the house and the rank and wealth of the tenant. Thus the old Duke of Gloucester used to pay three hundred guineas for the season. On levÉe days and drawing-rooms the fashionable world went to the Opera in their Court dresses, feathers, and diamonds, and all—a very moving spectacle. Those who only took a box in order to keep up appearances, and because it was necessary for one in society to have a box, used to sell seats—commonly called bones, because a round numbered bone was the ticket of admission—to their friends; sometimes they let their box for a single night, a month, or the whole season, by means of the agents, so that, except for the honour of it, as the man said when the bottom of his sedan-chair fell out, one might as well have had none at all. The prices of admission to the theatres were very much less than obtain at the present day. At Drury Lane the boxes and stalls, of which there were two or three rows only, were 7s. each; the pit was 3s. 6d., the upper boxes 2s., and the gallery 1s. At Covent Garden, where they were great at spectacle, with performing animals, the great Bunn being lessee, the prices were lower, the boxes being 4s., the pit 2s., the upper boxes 1s. 6d., and gallery 1s. At the Haymarket the boxes were 5s., the pit 3s., and the gallery 1s. 6d.

The actors and actresses were many and good. At the Haymarket they had Farren, Webster, Buckstone, Mrs. Glover, and Mrs. Humby. At the Olympic, Elliston, Liston, and Madame Vestris. Helen Faucit made her first appearance in 1835; Miss Fanny Kemble hers in 1830. Charles Mathews, Harley, Macready, and Charles Kean were all playing. I hardly think that in fifty years’ time so good a list will be made of actors of the present day whose memory has lasted so long as those of 1837. The salaries of actors and singers varied greatly, of course. Malibran received 125l. a night, Charles Kean 50l. a night, Macready 30l. a week, Farren 20l. a week, and so on, down to the humble chorister—they then called her a figurante—with her 12s. or 18s. a week.

As for the national drama, I suppose it had never before been in so wretched a state. Talfourd’s play of ‘Ion’ was produced about this time; but one good play—supposing ‘Ion’ to be a good play—is hardly enough to redeem the character of the age. There were also tragedies by Miss Mitford and Miss Baillie—strange that no woman has ever written even a tolerable play—but these failed to keep the stage. One Mr. Maturin, now dying out of recollection, also wrote tragedies. The comedies and farces were written by PlanchÉ, Reynolds, Peake, Theodore Hook, Dibdin, Leman Rede, Poole, Maddison Morton, and Moncrieff. A really popular writer, we learn with envy and astonishment, would make as much as 30l., or even 40l., by a good piece. Think of making 30l. or 40l. by a good piece at the theatre! Was not that noble encouragement for the playwrights? Thirty pounds for one piece! It takes one’s breath away. Would not Mr. Gilbert, Mr. Wills, and Mr. George Sims be proud and happy men if they could get 30l.—a whole lump of 30l.—for a single piece? We can imagine the tears of joy running down their cheeks.

The decline of the drama was attributed by RÄumer to the entire absence of any protection for the dramatist. This is no doubt partly true; but the dramatist was protected, to a certain extent, by the difficulty of getting copies of his work. Shorthand writers used to try—they still try—to take down, unseen, the dialogue. Generally, however, they are detected in the act and desired to withdraw. As a rule, if the dramatist did not print the plays, he was safe, except from treachery on the part of the prompter. The low prices paid for dramatic work were the chief causes of the decline—say, rather, the dreadful decay, dry rot, and galloping consumption—of the drama fifty years ago. Who, for instance, would ever expect good fiction to be produced if it was rewarded at the rate of no more than 30l., or even 300l., a novel? Great prizes are incentives for good work. Good craftsmen will no longer work if the pay is bad; or, if they work at all, they will not throw their hearts into the work. The great success of Walter Scott was the cause why Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charles Reade, and the many second-rate novelists chose fiction rather than the drama for their energies. One or two of them, Dickens and Reade, for instance, were always hankering after the stage. Had dramatists received the same treatment in England as in France, many of these writers would have seriously turned their attention to the theatre, and our modern dramatic literature would have been as rich as our work in fiction. The stage now offers a great fortune, a far greater fortune, won much more swiftly than can be got by fiction, to those who succeed.

As for the pieces actually produced about this period, they were chiefly adaptations from novels. Thus, we find ‘Esmeralda’ and ‘Quasimodo,’ two plays from Victor Hugo’s ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame;’ ‘Lucillo,’ from ‘The Pilgrims of the Rhine,’ by Lytton; Bulwer, indeed, was continually being dramatised; ‘Paul Clifford’ and ‘Rienzi,’ among others, making their appearance on the stage. For other plays there were ‘Zampa’ or ‘The Corsair,’ due to Byron; ‘The Waterman,’ ‘The Irish Tutor,’ ‘My Poll and my Partner Joe,’ with T.P. Cooke, at the Surrey Theatre. The comedy of the time is very well illustrated by Lytton’s ‘Money,’ stagey and unreal. The scenery, dresses, and general mise-en-scÈne would now be considered contemptible.

Apart from the Italian Opera, music was very well supported. There were concerts in great numbers: the Philharmonic, the Vocal Society, and the Royal Academy of Music gave their concerts at the King’s Ancient Concert Rooms, Hanover Square. Willis’s Rooms were also used for music; and the Cecilia Society gave its concerts in Moorgate Street.

There were many other shows, apart from the well-known sights of town. Madame Tussaud’s Gallery in Baker Street, the Hippodrome at Bayswater, the Colosseum, the Diorama in Regent’s Park, the Panorama in Leicester Square—where you could see ‘Peru and the Andes, or the Village engulfed by the Avalanche’—and the Panorama in Regent Street attracted the less frivolous and those who came to town for the improvement of their minds. For Londoners themselves there were the Vauxhall Gardens first and foremost—the most delightful places of amusement that London ever possessed except, perhaps, Belsize. Everybody went to Vauxhall; those who were respectable and those who were not. Far more beautiful than the electric lights in the Gardens of the ‘Colonies’ were the two hundred thousand variegated oil lamps, festooned among the trees of Vauxhall; there was to be found music, singing, acting, and dancing. Hither came the gallant and golden youth from the West End; here were seen sober and honest merchants with their wives and daughters; here were ladies of doubtful reputation and ladies about whose reputation there could be no doubt; here there were painted arbours where they brought you the famous Vauxhall ham—‘sliced cobwebs;’ the famous Vauxhall beef—‘book muslin, pickled and boiled;’ and the famous Vauxhall punch—Heavens! how the honest folk did drink that punch!

I have before me an account of an evening spent at Vauxhall about this time by an eminent drysalter of the City, his partner, a certain Tom, and two ladies, the drysalter’s wife and his daughter Lydia; ‘a laughter-loving lass of eighteen, who dearly loved a bit of gig.’ Do you know, gentle reader, what is a ‘bit of gig’? This young lady laughs at everything, and cries, ‘What a bit of gig!’ There was singing, of course, and after the singing there were fireworks, and after the fireworks an ascent on the rope. ‘The ascent on the rope, which Lydia had never before witnessed, was to her particularly interesting. For the first time during the evening she looked serious, and as the mingled rays of the moon (then shining gloriously in the dark blue heavens, attended by her twinkling handmaidens, the stars), which ever and anon shot down as the rockets mounted upwards, mocking the mimic pyrotechnia of man, and the flashes of red fire played upon her beautiful white brow and ripe lips—blushing like a cleft cherry—we thought for a moment that Tom was a happy blade. While we were gazing on her fine face, her eye suddenly assumed its wonted levity, and she exclaimed in a laughing tone—“Now, if the twopenny postman of the rockets were to mistake one of the directions and deliver it among the crowd so as to set fire to six or seven muslin dresses, what a bit of gig it would be!”’

Another delightful place was the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which occupied fifteen acres, and had a large lake in the middle, very useful for fireworks and the showing off of the Mount Vesuvius they stuck up on one side of it. The carnivorous animals were kept in a single building, under a great glazed cupola, but the elephants, bears, monkeys, &c., had separate buildings of their own. Flower shows, balloon ascents, fireworks, and all kinds of exciting things went on at the Surrey Zoo.

The Art Galleries opened every year, and, besides the National Gallery, there were the Society of British Artists, the Exhibition of Water Colours, and the British Institution in Pall Mall. At the Royal Academy of 1837, Turner exhibited his ‘Juliet,’ Etty a ‘Psyche and Venus,’ Landseer a ‘Scene in Chillingham Park,’ Wilkie the ‘Peep o’ Day Boy’s Cabin,’ and Roberts the ‘Chapel of Ferdinand and Isabella at Granada.’

There were Billiard Rooms, where a young man from the country who prided himself upon his play could get very prettily handled. There were Cigar Divans, but as yet only one or two, for the smoking of cigars was a comparatively new thing—in fact, one who wrote in the year 1829 thought it necessary to lay down twelve solemn rules for the right smoking of a cigar; there were also Gambling Hells, of which more anon. Fifty years ago, in short, we amused ourselves very well. We were fond of shows, and there were plenty of them; we liked an al fresco entertainment, and we could have it; we were not quite so picksome in the matter of company as we are now, and therefore we endured the loud vulgarities of the tradesman and his family, and shut our eyes when certain fashionably dressed ladies passed by showing their happiness by the loudness of their laughter; we even sat with our daughter in the very next box to that in which young Lord Tomnoddy was entertaining these young ladies with cold chicken and pink champagne. It is, we know, the privilege of rank to disregard morals in public as well as in private. Then we had supper and a bowl of punch, and so home to bed.

Those who are acquainted with the doings of Corinthian Tom and Bob Logic are acquainted with the Night Side of London as it was a few years before 1837. Suffice it to say that it was far darker, far more vicious, far more dangerous fifty years ago than it is now. Heaven knows that we have a Night Side still, and a very ugly side it is, but it is earlier by many hours than it used to be, and it is comparatively free from gambling-houses, from bullies, blackmailers, and sharks.