In 1882, Walter Besant declared that the hinterland beyond Aldgate had two million people yet “no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera—they have nothing.” The fact that Whitechapel first appeared in the theatrical annals in 1557, Stepney contained several of the largest engineering projects in Regency London, and Shoreditch's Britannia was one of the most successful theatres in Victorian Britain belies the prejudice in Besant's statement. Cultural historians of all types need to resist such propaganda and have good cause to suspect the entire record of life, leisure, and entertainment in the industrialized inner suburbs. The history of nineteenth-century English theatre has—with very few exceptions—focussed on London, yet apart from essays by Michael Booth and Clive Barker little serious attention has been paid to theatre in the East End. Booth points out the limitations arising from scholarship that ignores the area where half of the metropolitan theatre seats were located, while Barker shows the methodological difficulties that arise once a redressive investigation into the audience is undertaken. The omissions from the historical record are compounded by narrow selectivity of enquiries: leading performers receive scholarly attention while supernumeraries (supers), ballet dancers, front of house staff, property makers, and the many functionaries who made up the whole community responsible for running a theatre are consistently neglected. These characteristics are somehow more evident in scholarship on the East End, where no matter how sociogeographically biased the enquirers may be the working class and its conditions are central themes, and the repertoire has always been allowed (perhaps stereotyped) as sensational.
