Victorian Music Hall

Music hall developed from tavern entertainment, song-and-supper rooms and other popular venues into a major commercial industry during the Victorian period. Purpose-built halls offered mixed programmes of comic songs, dancers, dramatic turns, acrobats and speciality acts to increasingly large urban audiences.

By the late nineteenth century London music hall supported managers, musicians, stage crews and a recognisable class of star performers whose public images could be carefully cultivated. The industry also attracted debates about respectability, licensing, gender and class because performers worked across a boundary between mass entertainment and the city's night-time economy.

Stories concerned primarily with criminal investigation can also use the parallel Victorian Crime context without treating the entertainment industry itself as a form of crime.