The Vapour Trail

After far too long, I have returned to Janet McCalman’s Struggletown (1984), a really wonderful history of Richmond, Melbourne, based on oral testimony from residents during the first half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the turn to Struggletown was inspired in part by my upcoming departure for  Melbourne. During the Australian Historical Association conference I will be staying with family in Richmond, in a yuppified converted silo (a long distance socio-economically from the period I’ve just been reading about). But I was also looking for evidence of larrikin life early in the century in MacCalman’s book, and I found it.

In 1910, MacCalman tells us, Richmond’s Rowena Parade Rats sported slouch hats and loud neckerchiefs, wearing much the same costume their flash forebears had worn in the 1880s. ‘They broke dances and in 1920 police had to be engaged to protect the respectable patrons at vaudeville concerts in the [Richmond] Town Hall. They vandalised the parks the Council tried to “make nice” for the nice people at Richmond; they jeered at churchgoers and leered at unobtainable girls; they harassed and threw stones at boating parties on the river; they commandeered the best swimming sports; they outraged the Wowsers by playing cards in public and two-up on Sundays.

“They were also capable of viciousness. In 1924 larrikins attached children in a new Council playground in North Richmond, leaving one girl with a broken leg and other children with head lacerations”. And in 1926, “two members of the Hill Mob knocked a youth unconscious in Swan Street when he refused to give them a tomato from a bag he was carrying home”.

What strikes me here is the homogeneity and longevity of larrikin culture across Australia. A lot of historical commentary on larrikinism talks about the fact that the larrikin figure became an object of sentimentality and nostalgia during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the work of C J Dennis or Louis Stone, we hear, larrikins were portrayed as good ‘uns underneath, rough blokes who would morph into loving family men if given half a chance. Regardless of this shift to the romantic in literary portrayals of larrikins, however, the intractable lairishness and violence of larrikin culture continued at the street level well into the 1920s, and arguably intensified during the Depression that followed.

References

Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond 1900-1965, South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1998 (first published 1984), p 132

cf  Hugh Anderson, Larrikin Crook: The Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor (Jacaranda Press, 1971).

When Natalie Zemon Davis wrote Fiction in the Archives (1987), she was interested in fiction for the insights it gave into sixteenth-century French culture. Her focus was on the way her historical subjects told stories: ‘what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience’ (p. 4).  She believed these things would give her a unique window into the sensibilities and habits of the time.

Davis is just one of many historians interested in stories and the telling of them, both for the view they offer of a culture and for the effects they have upon it. According to Sarah Maza, there is also a more specific subset of historians who are interested in ‘cultural narratives’. By this, she means stories which generate an extraordinary amount of interest in a given historical period, and/or prominent ways of arranging material into narratives within a particular culture.  In her work Private Lives and Public Affairs (1993), Maza herself is interested in the fact that eighteenth-century French barristers drew on the narrative conventions of melodrama when presenting court cases to the public. And in City of Dreadful Delight (1992), Judith Walkowitz was concerned with narratives of sexual danger: with William Stead’s story about the day he bought a young virgin from the back-streets of London in 1885, and other stories about rapist/murderers such as Jack the Ripper in late-Victorian London. 

As Davis’ opening comments in Fiction in the Archives suggests, historians’ interest in storytelling and ‘cultural narratives’ has largely been about the ways that different cultures ‘build coherence into immediate reality’. Even Walkowitz, who is keen to stress the multiplicity of ways in which narratives of sexual danger were interpreted and used, is concerned nonetheless with the molding and shaping of various aspects of late-Victorian London and public consciousness according to recognisable structures. For example, she noted the role played by melodramatic conventions in Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Bablyon’. As in Maza’s work, her ideas here were influenced by Peter Brooks, who insisted that melodrama was a ’certain fictional system for making sense of experience’, aimed at giving ethical order and aesthetic shape to the universe in modern society (p. xiii). 

Given this interest in melodrama as an example of a fictional system for ‘making sense of experience’, it’s worth noting that there were other popular theatrical genres which rejected notions of narrative coherence in the nineteenth century. Farce, for example, was a theatrical genre based on the absence of an orderly plotline. It attempted to create humour by presenting audiences with wild non-sequiturs, seeking to amuse them through nonsense and absurdity. Burlesque was more concerned with the ridicule of cultural icons, events, attitudes or values rather than the telling of a story. True, burlesques such as Little Jack Sheppard or Ixion had some semblance of a storyline, but the flimsiness of their plots and their routine incorporation of songs with little or no relation to the action was characteristic of the genre. The stump speech in blackface minstrel or other variety line-ups also relied on incoherence. Stump speeches turned oratorical conventions on their head, making boldly meaningless statements and then following them with radically unrelated claims, full of malapropisms and silliness, in order to draw mocking laughter.

It seems to me that what’s called for here is a consideration of the lack of cultural narrative evident in many Victorian theatrical forms – their determination to make nonsense rather than sense out of immediate experience. What insights  does this gives into popular sensibilities, and what effects did it have on them in turn? This is something I need to develop further as I (finally) begin writing my book on the relationship between Australian theatre and the larrikin classs in the 1870-1920 period. If anyone has any ideas or views on this notion of Victorian anti-narrative (and indeed on whether that is the right name for burlesque or farcical forms), I’d be keen to hear about it…

References

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976).

Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

Sarah Maza, ‘Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History’, American Historical Review 101.5 (December 1996), pp. 1493-1515.

                   , Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: California, 1993).

Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Artistically speaking, the upsurge of prudery in English culture during Victoria’s reign was a boon to its comic poetry and song. So says J S Bratton anyway, in her now-venerable work The Victorian Popular Ballad (1975).

Before inhibitions about sexual display and discussion were on the rise, hack writers put out broadsheets aplenty (home-printing jobs on single sheets of paper, offered to passers-by by roving sellers in the street), full of baldly bawdy jokes in verse. But with greater reticence came greater ingenuity. Public prudery ‘put at an end to the threadbare reiteration of old jokes about sex in the old words and with the same old range of innuendoes and variations’, Bratton says. It forced writers ‘to look for new ways of making their point’.

The rich range of sexual allusions which became part of the Victorian music hall’s comic songs would not have developed absent this growing restraint. Nor would audiences would not have found suggestive songs so delightfully risque. The prohibitions on overt references to sexuality fostered the conspiratorial rapport which developed beyween singer and audience, making it hilariously naughty when Champagne Charlie popped his bottle in an ejaculatory burst of froth, or when a girl was said to have  ’never had her [bus] ticket punched before’, or when erotic meaning was invested in a commonplace word and a raise of the eyebrows.

Advertising today still frequently trots out lines about being ’sinfully indulgent’ or deliciously ‘devillish’ or ‘naughty’ – usually by buying chocolate or drinking ice tea, or something equally banal. But since there aren’t the same restraints on public discussion of sexuality, those suggestions are hackneyed and meaningless. There isn’t the same conspiratorial allure or comic mileage to be had from the risque anymore, not in an age of gross-out comedy and the bald literalness and acessibility of porn. Perhaps that’s part of the reason that there is a growing fascination with Victorian sexual mores and the allusive comedy of the music halls (I’m mindful here of the slated docu-series on Victorian sexuality said to feature Rupert Everett as narrator, and of course the range of scholarly literature touching on the relationship of public prudery to sexual practice in the era, from the work of Peter Bailey to John Tosh to Joy Dixon to Jeffery Weeks, to the innumerable volumes on Oscar Wilde’s trial and divorce scandals a la the Beecher and Tilton affair). An age where the limits of permissiveness were more sharply drawn – in public, at least – is fascinating to those operating within quite different, if uncertain, parameters.