Victorian Music, Theatre, and Popular Entertainment — Themes and Contexts (original) (raw)

Social and Political History: Themes and Contexts

• The Licensing Act of 1737 and Censorship, 1737-1868
• Copyright law and piracy of music
• Musical settings of Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads and changing attitudes towards British soldiers

Social and Political History: Matters of Economic and Social Class

• Music and social class in Victorian London
• Late-Victorian devaluation of performance by middle-class women and working-class bands and choruses
• "Home Sweet Home," class, and audience
• Class division in the audience for opera
• The piano and middle-class prosperity
• Class politics and the minstrel show
• Working-class appropriation of bourgeois song
• Ticket prices used to produce class hierarchy of concerts

Nationalism

• England or Britain, English or British
• The music hall an arena for negotiation between working-class and middle-class values.
• "Macdermott's War Song" and the word "jingoism"
• Songs of the Crimean War
• The 1890s folksong movement and construction of Englishness
• The folksong movement and drawing-room ballads
• Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism, and Popular Son
• Folk music becomes national music aligned it with bourgeois rather than lower class aspirations and identity

Imperialism

• Stages of Victorian imperialism and popular music
• Songs of anti-imperialism — Cobden and the Manchester School

Victorian music, race, and ethnicity

• African-American
• Scotland
• Ireland
• Manx
• Racial theory and music in the 1890s

Victorian Web Social History Music & Theatre

Last modified 1 March 2017