Blonde for Britain: The Trans-Atlantic Marketability of Lydia Thompson and the ‘British Blondes’: A Study of the Victorian Theatrical Import/Export Trade of Nationality, Notoriety, and Indecency

Millette, Holly-Gale (2005) Blonde for Britain: The Trans-Atlantic Marketability of Lydia Thompson and the ‘British Blondes’: A Study of the Victorian Theatrical Import/Export Trade of Nationality, Notoriety, and Indecency. Ruskinian Theatre Life Writing: Sources and Resources Conference, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, United Kingdom. 08 - 11 Jul 2005. (Submitted)

Abstract

In 1866 the British actress Lydia Thompson was arranging an exchange of herself and her performance troupe from London to New York. They did not open there in the burlesque of Ixion until 1868. She and her troupe, which included ‘authentic’ British Blondes, were much publicized and their performance was eagerly anticipated. This paper considers the Trans-Atlantic brokerage, reception and consumption of the work and persona of Lydia Thompson and her troupe of ‘British Blondes’ in the mid nineteenth century. These women benefited from a conspicuous and multiplicitous use of their bodies and personas, performed sexuality as mimesis, and chose to eroticise their ‘otherness’ and I am interested in how they, in the so doing, illustrate the convergence of the cult of personality on the changing Victorian economic ideology and on the economics of consumption in spectatorship. I am primarily interested in how their export both fostered and confirmed an expectation of a particularly British brand of ‘national’ theatre abroad.

Lydia Thompson and her troupe were foreigners who inculcated their way into, and gained a following in, their host’s culture by performing their own notoriety, exoticism, and liminality. Their persona, hair colour, and nationality became, in addition to their performance skills, inexorably linked to their purchase power in the economic world of the theatre. This invites the discussion in this paper of just how foreignness becomes equivalent to expertness and authenticity. To put it another way, in what ways does perceived expertise and authentication became directly proportional to quantitative ‘otherness’ (in this case national not racial)? Thompson offered performances (both on and off stage) that were viewed and publicised as being ‘illigitimate’ and irreverent. In response, she chose to exploit the censorial atmosphere that permeated her spectatorship. Such an early relationship between scandal, censure and saleability of popular culture deserves further scrutiny. In this dynamic, censorship has a performative function in the marketplace that does not so much impede a free-trade economy, as facilitate it. This paper, therefore, is secondarily concerned with the value mined from scandal and the performance of censure in these examples, and how these made for a more attuned readership and a more desirable product.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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