Today’s celebrity charity work has deep historical roots. In the 1880s and 1890s, the stars of fin-de-siècle London’s fashionable stage culture—particularly the women—transformed theatre’s connection with fundraising. They refreshed, remolded, and reenergized celebrity charity work at a time when organized benevolence and women’s public roles were also being transformed. In the process, actresses established a model and set of practices that persist today among the stars of both London’s West End and Hollywood. In the late nineteenth century, theatre’s fundraising for charitable causes shifted from male-dominated and private to female-directed and public. Although elite women had long been involved in such enterprises, they took on more authority in this period. At the same time, regular, high-profile public charity events became more important and much more visible than private philanthropy. Actresses became key figures in making the growing number of large and heavily publicized fundraisers successful. By 1920, the attitude was “Get an actress first. If you can’t get an actress, then get a duchess.” Actresses’ star power, their ability to orchestrate large events quickly, and their skill at performing a kind of genteel extortion made them essential to this model of charity. Actresses also benefited from this new role. Taking a prominent, public, offstage position was crucial in making them, individually and collectively, respectable professionals. Author Catherine Hindson reveals this history by examining the major types of charity events at the turn of the twentieth century, including fundraising matinees, charity bazaars and costume parties, theatrical tea and garden parties, and benefit performances. Her study concludes with a look at the involvement of actresses in raising funds for British soldiers serving in the Anglo-Boer War and the First World War.

How did the West End of London become the world's leading pleasure district? What is the source of its magnetic appeal? How did the centre of London become Theatreland? London's West End, 1800-1914 is the first ever history of the area which has enthralled millions. The reader will discover the growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry. The area from the Strand to Oxford Street came to stand for sensation and vulgarity but also the promotion of high culture. The West End produced shows and fashions whose impact rippled outwards around the globe. During the nineteenth century, an area that serviced the needs of the aristocracy was opened up to a wider public whilst retaining the imprint of luxury and prestige. Rohan McWilliam tells the story of the great artists, actors and entrepreneurs who made the West End: figures such as Gilbert and Sullivan, the playwright Dion Boucicault, the music hall artiste Jenny Hill, and the American Harry Gordon Selfridge who wanted to create the best shop in the world. At the same time, McWilliam explores the distinctive spaces created in the West End, from the glamour of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, through to low life bars and taverns. We encounter the origins of the modern star system and celebrity culture. London's West End, 1800-1914 moves from the creation of Regent Street to the glory days of the Edwardian period when the West End was the heart of empire and the entertainment industry. Much of modern culture and consumer society was shaped by a relatively small area in the middle of London. This pioneering study establishes why that was.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book presents a collection of cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. The chapters explore women’s networks of professional practice in the theatre and performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women’s sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men. The book is divided into two sections: ‘Female theatre workers in the social and theatrical realm’ looks at the relationship between women’s work – on and off stage – and autobiography, activism, technique, touring, education and the law. ‘Women and popular performance’ focuses on the careers of individual artists, once household names, including Lily Brayton, Ellen Terry, radio star Mabel Constanduros and Oscar-winning film star Margaret Rutherford.

This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.

This volume, an original combination of biography, cultural history, and media studies, investigates the first moment in history when philanthropy was used as a self-standing claim to fame and philanthropists started being considered as a distinct breed of public figures. In its search for the cause of this development, it examines the way in which public images of early philanthropists in different parts of Europe were shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a comparison between British prison reformer John Howard, Alsatian pastor and humanitarian Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, and Stanisław Staszic, a key figure of Enlightenment politics in Congress Poland. Revealing parallel mechanisms at play in different national contexts, it argues that famous philanthropists ushered in a new genre of fame, ‘philanthropic celebrity’, that placed Enlightenment ideals about virtue within the framework of early celebrity culture. The book is primarily aimed at advanced students and scholars of history, cultural studies, and social sciences, especially those interested in the concepts of fame and celebrity and in the origins of modern humanitarianism.

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

Though best known for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also a pioneering critic. He introduced the idea that criticism was an act of creation, not just appraisal. Wilde transformed the genre by extending its ambit beyond art to include society itself, all while injecting it with his trademark wit and style.