‘Holding up the mirror’: Readership and Authorship in the Era’s Pantomime Reviews from the 1870s

Abstract

From Covent Garden or Colchester or Coatbridge, if a performer or manager wanted to review the state of the theatrical world in the 1870s, she or he would invariably turn to the Era.¹ Indeed, as the correspondent claimed in his column ‘The Christmas Novelties’ for 1878:

if any future historian should want to know a hundred years hence what was the social life of England at this period of the century, he could scarcely avail himself of a more comprehensive descriptive guide than he will find in the pages of the week’s Era.².