Matthew Dennison on the life of Augustus Harris, the Victorian showman who invented the Christmas pantomime and pioneered sex, celebrity and excess as an art form
Forget Lord Leighton and his fleshy goddesses forced to bare all in the interests of classical scholarship. Forget Wilkie Collins and Mary E. Braddon, and those sensational stories of exciting young women with a past. Foremost among 19th-century efforts to cloak titillation in the garb of respectability is the invention of the principal boy of pantomime.
You know the scenario. The stage is set. Young boy is looking for love. Bad guys — an overdressed middle-aged transvestite plus accomplices, most of whom appear and disappear in puffs of smoke to the accompaniment of hissing and booing on the part of the audience — do their best to stop him.
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