very long ago) Theatres with entrance-prices up to half-a-guinea a
head, whose arrangements were not half so civilised. Surely,
therefore, a dear Theatre? Not very dear. A gallery at threepence,
another gallery at fourpence, a pit at sixpence, boxes and
pit-stalls at a shilling, and a few private boxes at half-a-crown.
My uncommercial curiosity induced me to go into every nook of this
great place, and among every class of the audience assembled in it
– amounting that evening, as I calculated, to about two thousand
and odd hundreds. Magnificently lighted by a firmament of
sparkling chandeliers, the building was ventilated to perfection.
Page 19
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
My sense of smell, without being particularly delicate, has been so
offended in some of the commoner places of public resort, that I
have often been obliged to leave them when I have made an
uncommercial journey expressly to look on. The air of this Theatre
was fresh, cool, and wholesome. To help towards this end, very
sensible precautions had been used, ingeniously combining the
experience of hospitals and railway stations. Asphalt pavements
substituted for wooden floors, honest bare walls of glazed brick
and tile – even at the back of the boxes – for plaster and paper,
no benches stuffed, and no carpeting or baize used; a cool material
with a light glazed surface, being the covering of the seats.
These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in
question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is
sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to
the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every
corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the
appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium – with
every face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably
raked and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in
the great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence –
is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness.
The stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery,
cellarage, height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala
at Milan, or the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris,
than any notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia
Theatre at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Oldstreet-
road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and
every thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in
his oil jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of
the way. This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one
man’s enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient
old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-andtwenty
thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and
still to render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his
due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to
make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a
highly agreeable sign of these times.
As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently
show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the
night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about
me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of people, and we
had a good many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls
and young women. To represent, however, that we did not include a
very great number, and a very fair proportion of family groups,
would be to make a gross mis-statement. Such groups were to be
seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls
particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent
appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian
and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our
young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them,