[In the following essay, Wilson asserts Hardy's poem was adapted from a popular music-hall song. Wilson examines how these works, along with works like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, characterize compromised women and use of fashion in making statements about power.]

In 1941, the actress, comedienne and singer Elsa Lanchester (then best known for her film rôles in The Bride of Frankenstein [1935] and as supporting actress to her husband, Charles Laughton, in his career-defining performances in The Private Life of Henry VIII [1933] and Rembrandt [1936]) joined forces with a group called the Yale Puppeteers to stage a review at the Turnabout Theatre on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.¹ She continued to appear there periodically for more than ten years, performing songs that were a combination of nineteenth-century music-hall and more contemporary material. The music-hall element was a natural resource upon which to draw, for reasons more related to Lanchester's former varied career than to Hollywood's wartime affection and cultural nostalgia for all things British. Back in the winter of 1920-21, she had opened in London's Charlotte Street, in collaboration with the actor Harold Scott (who was also an accomplished pianist and singer) and songwriter-actor Philip Godfrey, an underground club called the Cave of Harmony, its name adopted, at the suggestion of Sylvia Townsend Warner, from that of the supper rooms in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1854).² Assembling out-of-print songs for performance there, she claimed to have spent hours in the British Museum researching such music-hall stand-bys as “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” and “The Ratcatcher's Daughter,” one of the songs that helped establish the legendary Sam Cowell's name in the 1840s.³ The Cave of Harmony lasted until 1927, by which time Lanchester had already incorporated some of the same songs into her performances in Nigel Playfair's revue, Riverside Nights, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, taking them with her again to the Midnight Follies at the Metropole Hotel.⁴ Thus her repertoire had long-since contained such freely appropriatable music-hall material, which had travelled with her across the Atlantic. While still working at the Turnabout Theatre, she began to prepare, with pianist Ray Henderson, a nightclub show that eventually evolved into a touring production whose title—“Elsa Lanchester's Private Music Hall”—made the anachronistic generic associations specific.

Lanchester's act continued to feature a combination of older music-hall songs and newer 1940s material written specifically for the Turnabout Theatre, in the main by composer/songwriter Forman Brown. Brown's songs had the ambience of music hall if not the authentic lineage. Double entendre featured obtrusively, as evidenced in the title of his first Lanchester song (its subject was a cleaning lady): “If You Can't Get in the Corners You Might as Well Give Up.” According to Lanchester, the terms of her appearance at the Turnabout, like the songs she sang there, were somewhat risky: “We arranged that I would receive no pay for my appearances, but all songs written for me would automatically become mine”⁵ The risk seems to have paid off. The songs stayed hers for a very long time, became the backbone of her cabaret and night-club performances for the rest of her life, and were enduring enough to appear on two 1961 long-playing records, Songs for a Shuttered Parlor and Songs for a Smoke-Filled Room, and to be re-issued in C.D. format under the seductive title Elsa Lanchester Sings Bawdy Cockney Songs.⁶

Few of them have any cockney credentials, real or simulated, and one of them in particular could scarcely have been said to be in the genuine possession of either Elsa Lanchester or Forman Brown. Indeed, assuming that it was cobbled together during Forman Brown's Turnabout years, approximately 1941-51, those with the greatest claim to its ownership would seem to have been the Macmillan press and the Hardy/Dugdale estate. It is a version of Thomas Hardy's poem “The Ruined Maid,” substantially the same as the more orthodox version but with an introductory stanza apparently provided by Forman Brown (there is a “Hardy-Brown” authorial acknowledgement attached to the song on the original L.P. issue). The stanza's banality offers unwitting testimony to the felicity of Hardy's failure himself to write it:

Amelia out strolling as fine as you please
Met Audrey who'd come up to town with her cheese.
Poor Audrey agog at her friend's finery
Stood gaping and gasping “It cannot be thee!”

The unyielding imperatives of rhyming couplets rather than a more-than-usually inscrutable reaching after suggestiveness on Brown's part presumably dictated a cheese-laden journey for Audrey—although on an initial puzzled hearing, this listener, at least, did fleetingly wonder whether “cheese” (analogously with the phrase “big cheese”) was designed to indicate the imminence of Audrey's own fall into fashion, through the agency of some brash toff or masher who had spirited her off to the wicked city. Regrettably, cooler and less picturesque hermeneutic logic must prevail: the cheese is obviously intended as a merely literal, if scarcely adequate, evocation of the drear rustic life that still encumbers Audrey.

There are only a few other changes, of which the most major is the entire omission of the third stanza, presumably with a view to circumventing what would be to an American night-club audience the somewhat puzzling dialect (“barton,” “thik oon,” “theäs oon”) with which it is peppered. The rest of the song version remains substantially true to the original, although “fair” and “bright” are both rendered as “fine,” “spudding up” as “grubbing up,” “sock” as “sulk,” “raw” as “poor,” and the final “‘You ain't ruined,’ said she” becomes “‘You ain't ruined, you see.’” Lanchester also assumes that her audience will be unfamiliar with “megrims” and substitutes the more conventional “migraines.” For Audrey's accent Lanchester adopts a nondescript regional burr, part cockney, part west-country yokel, part Midlands-cum-Lancashire-cum-Yorkshire, but bearing absolutely no resemblance at all to authentic, or even stage, Dorset. The music is little more than a trite piano trill to help advance the poem's claim to being a song (if neither a cockney nor even a particularly bawdy one), and is punctuated by a sprightly between-verses tambourine flourish.

Hardy showed occasional, although far from consistent, casualness in his response to projected popular performances of his work, as evidenced in his famous comment on “The Three Wayfarers,” his adaptation for the stage of his short story “The Three Strangers”: “I am willing to let anybody play it for a guinea a night, but I cannot possibly attend to the matter myself.”⁷ Perhaps, then, there is an appropriate irony in this surprising, and one assumes unauthorised, commandeering of one of his best-known poems, apparently for disguised appearance as quasi-authentic music-hall performance before North American night-club audiences. Its subject matter is certainly one that the halls found perennially enticing, and, like its appearances in Hardy's work, amenable to considerable modal variation in the continuum between comedy and tragedy. When Hardy himself revisited the subject in a later poem, “A Daughter Returns,” the tone is very different, the perspective that of a devastated father musing on “that dainty-cut raiment, those earrings of pearl” flaunted by the fallen daughter he orders to “sport thy new gains far away.”⁸ Whether couched in comic, tragic, or satiric mode, the reflex association between sexual irregularity and fashionable ostentation is made recurrently in Hardy's work, nowhere more tortuously than in “In the Days of Crinoline” (Satires of Circumstance [1914]), where the mere replacement of a “plain tilt bonnet” by an “ostrich-feathered hat,” hitherto concealed beneath the voluminous skirts of a vicar's deceitful wife, is in itself adequate external emblem of the extremity of her sexual misconduct.⁹

What the compromised women of “The Ruined Maid” or “In the Days of Crinoline” figure in comic or ironic terms, Hardy's most famous ruined maid, Tess Durbeyfield, translates into tragedy. In her post-seduction/rape revulsion from Alec, she resists the fashionable temptations he parades before her—“You know you may clothe yourself with the best, instead of in the bald plain way you have lately affected, as if you couldn't get a ribbon more than you earn”¹⁰—and re-assumes the modest clothing that seems to offer some partial access to lost virtue. Correspondingly, when she receives Angel Clare in the Sandbourne lodging-house, “[h]er great natural beauty … rendered more obvious by her attire” (which includes a cashmere dressing-gown), she defines her state for the appalled Angel by the oblique confession “These clothes are what he's put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me!”¹¹

The distinction between comic and tragic ruin is in considerable part that between active and passive rôles, between the appropriation of subjectivity and the acceptance of mere object status, between dressing and being dressed. When, in a passage excised in post-serial versions of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Lucetta Templeman caustically describes her transformation, courtesy of a welcome legacy, into fashionable sophistication at the hands of a Parisian couturier, her passivity is emblematic of what is already a sexually compromised identity far advanced on the path to eventual disaster:

“I went to Paris to the largest Magasin, and said, ‘Make me fashionable,’ holding out some bank-notes. They half stripped me, and put on me what they chose. Four women hovered round me, fixed me on a pedestal like an image, and arranged me and pinned me and stitched me and padded me. When it was over I told them to send several more dresses of that same size, and so it was done.”¹²

Lucetta's eventual identification as the woman paired in skimmington-ride effigy with Michael Henchard is made in her own hearing by envious maidservants, entirely through recognition of her clothes and fashion accessories:

“My—why—'tis dressed just as she was dressed when she sat in the front seat at the time the play-actors came to the Town Hall!” … “Her neck is uncovered, and her hair in bands, and her back-comb in place; she's got on a puce silk, and white stockings, and coloured shoes.” …

“She's me—she's me—even to the parasol—my green parasol!” cried Lucetta with a wild laugh as she stepped in. She stood motionless for one second—then fell heavily to the floor.¹³

Thus Lucetta's ultimate passivity in death is expressly linked, at least for Hardy's serial readers, to her earlier passivity in the process of fashionable reconstruction. For both Tess and Lucetta, the surrender of sartorial control attendant upon the fall into fashion (harrowingly resisted in the one case, listlessly embraced in the other) is manifestation of the more fundamental loss of physical/bodily self-direction.

The different fates attendant upon engagement with the accoutrements of fashion awaiting a Tess Durbeyfield (the “pure woman” who is her own harshest judge), a Lucetta Templeman (whose ascent into small-town social eminence is directly productive of the domestic tragedy that overwhelms her), and a “ruined” Amelia (thus far more than content with her comfortably changed lot) are as much a function of attitudinal or temperamental as situational circumstance. The same held true for the array of compromised women whose varying socio-sexual fates became the stock-in-trade of numerous music-hall songs. On the boards if not on the actual streets, for every poor but honest victim of a rich man's game there existed a considerable number of self-confident controllers of their own comfortable, fashionable, and “ruined” lives. This, for example, is the current situation of the erstwhile young country maiden in “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of its Own”, one of the most popular songs of music hall's best loved portrayer of tarnished but cheerful women, Marie Lloyd:

Up to the West End, right to the best end,
Straight from the country came Miss Maudie Brown.
Father a curate—couldn't endure it—
That's why the lady's residing in town.
Twelve months ago her modesty was quite sublime
To sit on a fellow's knee would be an awful crime!
And if you should want a kiss, she'd droop her eyes like this,
But now she droops them just one at a time.
And every little movement has a meaning of its own—
Every little movement tells a tale …(14)

Music-hall's penchant for arch naughtiness, its deliberate cultivation of the frisson that comes from safely vicarious engagement with the disreputable, and its untiring delight in the turning of class tables, generated countless songs whose apparently cheerful and fulfilled subjects had pursued much the same route to comfort as Amelia. Lloyd's own repertoire featured a number of them in which, as for Amelia, the clothing became definitional of the woman, or rather, by this stage in her evolution, the lady:

It is the skirt, you know,
That will invariably show
You what the lady is.
It never can fail,
Everywhere you go
You'll always find it so
It is the skirt, you know, that tells the tale.(15)

And again, the “strut about Town” that so provokes the envy of Amelia's less sophisticated country friend is crucial to the process of display that makes fashion the external cipher of both social assurance and sexuality. The following is the chorus of Marie Lloyd's “As I Take My Morning Promenade”:

As I take my morning promenade,
Quite a fashion card, on the Promenade,
Now I don't mind nice boys staring hard,
If it satisfies their desire.
Do you think my dress is a little bit,
Just a little bit—not too much of it—
If it shows my shape just a little bit,
That's the little bit the boys admire.(16)

Hardy's Amelia was therefore typologically well-suited to transformation into the popular stage paradigm that Lanchester and Brown eventually made of her. But “The Ruined Maid” has a truer ring of period authenticity than some of Lanchester's other imitation “music-hall” material, for reasons additional to the sub-genre conventionality of its pragmatic subversion of rectitude and its relishing of the fashionable material profits derivable from sexual careerism. Although not published until its appearance in Poems of the Past and the Present (1902 [1901]), it was written as early as 1866, at 16 Westbourne Park Villas, Hardy's home for most of his early years in London. During those years he visited the kind of establishment that Lanchester's Cave of Harmony was designed nominally to evoke—indeed, had he wanted to he might even have been able to catch one of Sam Cowell's own last debilitated renderings of “The Rat-Catcher's Daughter,” although there is no evidence that he actually did.¹⁷

In The Life and Work, Hardy himself directly recalls the context that Lanchester's choice of club-name tacitly conjures up: “It was the London of Dickens and Thackeray, and Evans's supper-rooms were still in existence in an underground hall in Covent Garden, which Hardy once at least visited. The Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole were still flourishing …”.¹⁸ As if to underline the appropriateness of the literary reference points, all of the places Hardy names here have been candidates for the putative originals of Thackeray's Cave of Harmony and Back Kitchen (Pendennis), although Hardy's recollections are not entirely accurate. By the late-1850s both the Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole in the Strand, neither the most salubrious of places even in their heydays, were in terminal decline, and in 1862 both were refused license renewals.¹⁹ But it is the experience of the London of his youth, mediated in memory through literary embodiments, that in considerable part informs the raffish wit of “The Ruined Maid.” Such a heritage made the poem tonally easily adaptable to Lanchester's latter-day resurrection of a moribund music-hall tradition, a tradition that could exist for her only in the mediated form garnered by “research” in the British Museum and the somewhat coy and self-conscious recreation of a fictional icon: the Cave of Harmony.

Hardy's days of music-hall attendance were long over even by the time a very young Elsa Lanchester was appearing in her own Cave of Harmony, singing fallen-woman songs far more explicit than anything Marie Lloyd ever had censorship troubles with. The following, for example, written for Lanchester by Herbert Fargeon, shows how far by the 1920s the distinctive type has travelled from mere innuendo, although she still defines herself by aspiration to social superiority:

I may be fast, I may be loose,
I may be easy to seduce.
I may not be particular
To keep the perpendicular.
But all my horizontal friends
Are Princes, Peers, and Reverends,
When Tom or Dick or Bertie call
You'll find me strictly vertical!(20)

She sang these songs to audiences that included writers of the H. G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley generations rather than Hardy's (indeed, Huxley's visits to the Cave of Harmony are thought to have inspired the club scenes in his early novel Antic Hay [1923]). But there had been a period when the original halls and allied entertainments on which such retro-cabarets so self-consciously drew had attracted Hardy's appreciative attention, causing him once and apparently sincerely, to declare that he had found “far more interesting forms of art at the music halls than at the conventional theatre.”²¹ The Lanchester-Brown version of “The Ruined Maid” would hardly qualify as an example of such demotic gems, but it is a curious—and seemingly thus far unremarked—manifestation of the generic variety and adaptability of Hardy's work, and its unpredictably wide-ranging appeal. It would be interesting to know what the members of Lanchester's audiences made of it, and how many recognised its source.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Linda Edwards, webmaster of the Elsa Lanchester web-site, for discographical information about the original LP issues of Elsa Lanchester's songs.

Notes

1. For a full discussion of this enterprise, see Lanchester's autobiography, Elsa Lanchester Herself (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), pp. 171-7.

2. See Harold Scott, The Early Doors: Origins of the Music Hall (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1946; repr. EP Publishing, 1977), p. 226.

3. Lanchester, p. 54. Although “The Rat-Catcher's Daughter” was one of Sam Cowell's best-known songs, it was sung by a number of other mid-Victorian performers. “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” was a temperance song, published in The Temperance Vocalist in 1886 (Christopher Pulling, They Were Singing [London: Harrap, 1952], p. 125). Harold Scott's involvement with these researches helped in his compilation of an English Song Book (New York: Robert M. McBridge, 1926), which contained nearly 100 pages (pp. 50-148) of nineteenth-century songs.

4. For fuller details of these productions, see Lanchester, pp. 72-80, and Pulling, pp. 162, 228.

5. Lanchester, pp. 173-4.

6. Songs for a Shuttered Parlor (Vogue VA 160139); Songs for a Smoke-Filled Room (Vogue VA 160126); Elsa Lanchester Sings Bawdy Cockney Songs (Legacy International CD 363). She also issued another collection of songs entitled Cockney London (Verve MGV-15015).

7. Thomas Hardy to J. M. Barrie, 1 December 1911 (The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Purdy and Millgate, Vol. 4 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], p. 193). See also his letter to R. Golding Bright, 7 December 1911 (Letters 4, p. 194).

8. “A Daughter Returns” appeared in the posthumously published Winter Words (1928) but was written on 17 December 1901. See Samuel Hynes, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 245-6.

9. Hynes, ed., Complete Poetical Works, II, pp. 115-6.

10. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford World's Classics, 1988), p. 83 (Chapter XII).

11. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, pp. 365-6 (Chapter LV).

12. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Graphic, 6 March 1886, p. 270 (Chapter XXII).

13. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Keith Wilson (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 275-6. The serial version (The Graphic, 1 May 1886, p. 478) has the maidservants elaborating even more on the accessories, which include a gold necklace and ear-drops “like the pendulum of the clock that shows his inside in Facey's window.”

14. Fred Cliffe and C. J. Moore, “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its Own.” The song entered Lloyd's repertoire in 1912, the year in which she recorded it, and can be heard on A Little of What You Fancy: the Marie Lloyd Record (Pavilion Records: Pearl Gemm CD 9097). While there is no evidence that Hardy ever saw Lloyd herself perform, his interest in the redoubtable Lottie Collins and her spectacular performance of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” said to have been so draining as to have contributed to her early death, is well documented. See Thomas Hardy to Sir George Douglas, 13 April 1892 (Letters 7, pp. 121-22).

15. Fred W. Leigh and George le Brunn, “The Tale of the Skirt.” This song entered Lloyd's repertoire in 1904, the year in which she recorded it (Gemm CD 9097).

16. A. J. Mills and Bennett Scott, “As I Take My Morning Promenade.” Marie Lloyd recorded this in 1912 (Gemm CD 9097).

17. Cowell himself was in cruel decline by the 1860s, after years of poor health brought on in part by alcoholism. In 1860, he went on a gruelling American tour and returned to England a broken man. While the young Hardy was lodged at Westbourne Park Villas, experiencing the pleasures of mid-Victorian London, Cowell took the reverse direction, spending his last racked days in lodgings in Dorset. He died on 11 March 1864 and is buried in Blandford.

18. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 43.

19. See Diana Howard, London Theatres and Music Halls 1850-1950 (London: Library Association, 1970), pp. 48, 61-62. For an eye-witness account of what were genuinely their flourishing days, see Edmund Yates, Fifty Years of London Life (New York: Harper, 1885), pp. 107-11. See also Scott, The Early Doors, pp. 20-61 for detailed discussions of these and other taverns and supper-rooms.

20. Lanchester, p. 56.

21. Thomas Hardy to Florence Henniker, 25 July 1899 (Letters 2, p. 225).