Sir Ned Sherrin is beautifully vindicated by Mrs Beeton. He had wondered (Mind your language, 15 March) whether ‘morning performances’ of plays mightn’t, like other morning social activities of the mid-19th century, have been undertaken in the afternoon. His particular interest was the
matinée performances staged by Squire Bancroft at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, which he took over in 1865. This theatre, later named the Scala, was in Tottenham Street, near Tottenham Court Road, London, and was in the later 1860s the sharp end of new, realistic drama by playwrights such as Tom Robertson.
The use of morning to mean ‘afternoon’ is nowhere more neatly illustrated than in the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861, just a few years before Bancroft’s matinées). A facsimile of this otherwise rare and subsequently much adulterated book is published at a moderate price by the enterprising Southover Press.
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