Radical Vic: Politics and Performance on the Popular London Stage, ca. 1820–50

Abstract

In nineteenth-century London, theater-going was a genuinely mass activity. Within a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, working-class playgoers abounded. Opened to the public in 1818, the Coburg Theatre, later renamed the Victoria and known as the Vic, developed an especially strong association with popular drama. Although much has been written on the kind of work that places like the Vic presented, much less has been said about their operation as plebeian public spheres, or what I term here “radical half-spaces.” Active in the campaign for political reform in the early 1830s, and the site of numerous socially critical melodramas, under the joint managerial team of David Osbaldiston and Eliza Vincent, the Coburg/Victoria would later align itself to Chartism. All the while, the theater continued to function as a profitable commercial enterprise. By showing how audiences at the Vic sought (and found) knowledge and cultural capital, as much as entertainment and spectacle, the article suggests that when considering the period's alternative radical spaces, account should be made of such avowedly populist establishments as London's minor theaters, and the complex assemblages of time, place, and people they represented.