The Great British Burlesque Invasion of 1868

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Up next, we have our regular contributor, Ashley Lebinski. Ashley is the former co-host of Discovery Channel’s Master of Arms, and she’s also the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law’s Firearms Research Center. Here’s Ashley.

When we speak about the British Invasion, pretty much everyone is referring to the cultural phenomenon when British rock stars, especially The Beatles, came to America in the nineteen sixties, which, of course, sparked fear into the homes of American parents everywhere.

And now this has happened again. Last Sunday on our show in New York, The Beatles played to the greatest TV audience it’s ever been assembled in the history of American TV. Now tonight here in Miami Beach, again, the elace our record questioning audience. Ladies and gentlemen, here are four of the nice and chantage we’ve ever had on our stage. That Baslom.

But how about a century earlier? In the eighteen sixties, in eighteen sixty eight, there was another British Invasion that created outright hysteria in the middle-class. Thanks, of course, to the media. Lydia Thompson and her British Blonde brought a popular performance r to the United States back in eighteen sixty eight, and surprisingly, it actually didn’t exist in the U.S. before that, and that was the art of burlesque. Now, one thing that should be noted is that this idea of burlesque, or belly dancing, or any form of kind of risky dancing, actually is depicted in cave drawings, Walm Man.

Wo Man.

So this is not something that is new at all, and in fact, in Greek and Roman cultures, this style of dance was seen as something that was sacred rather than salacious. It was actually considered a part of kind of a fertility routine, and every country throughout history has had their own version of that. In the fourteenth century, belly dancing was incredibly popular, but the birthplace of true burlesque was in the eighteen hundreds in England. So, what is burlesque? It’s not just dancing, not just performances as scantily clad women, although that is, of course, part of it, but it has this flair of camp to it, with comedy routines, singing, dancing, and even in some cases there’s circus levels of performing; so, aerial performances, different types of circus acts that appear in burlesque, and one of the best was Lydia Thompson. She was born in eighteen thirty eight in London, and she was one of several children, and one of her sisters was a famous English stage actress named Clara T. Bracy. But Thompson was a dancer, and she also kind of had this great humor about her, so she became known for her dancing. She became known as a comedian-actor and then ultimately a producer, and she started dancing, believe it or not, in her teenage years in eighteen fifty two, and she was traveling all around England and Europe. And the one thing about Thompson that was kind of what made her iconic was the fact that she had this troupe that she created known as the British Blonde. And so she decided to take the show on the road, quite literally, and went to America in eighteen sixty eight, and she adapted English burlesque because the British always have different levels of humor today and back in the past. And so she adapted her for last performance that she would do all over Europe and target it really to middle-class New Yorkers. That was kind of the goal, was to get the middle-class to be interested in this style of art form. And initially it was very popular among men and women, so it wasn’t something that was exclusively men like you think of a lot of dancing today. And she wanted to create kind of topical and local references, so she reworked lyrics in the song she sang and made sure that New Yorkers felt like it wasn’t just this British group coming in, that they actually were a part of this culture in the city. And the first show that she had was in New York City. It was called “Ixion,” and it included wit, parody, song, dance, music, and believe it or not, it had this aura of empowering women. All the performers that she had had a range of different skills, and they were the most popular entertainers during the New York theater season from eighteen sixty eight to eighteen sixty nine; so, when they came into the area, they were incredibly popular. In fact, a news article said about their performances: “The eccentricities of pantomime and burlesque with their curious combination of comedy, parody, satire, improvisation, song, and dance, variety acts, extravagant stage effects, risky jokes, and saucy costume, while familiar enough by British audiences, took New York by storm.” So, while the public loved burlesque now in New York City in the eighteen sixties, the media decided that it was the absolute lowest form of entertainment. And the one media powerhouse that really hated Lydia and her girls was The New York Times. And what it did was it ultimately forced Lydia to go on tour. So she didn’t leave America, but she decided to take the show on the road because there was such hostility in New York City. After The New York Times and different media publications and scholars started kind of hating on burlesque, this hatred grew within American culture. And one of the articles that was quoted about burlesque in The New York Times was that it was “a disgraceful spectacle of padded legs, jiggling and wriggling in the incident follies, and indecency of the hour.” So that’s a big change from a year prior when they found it to be charming and eccentric and intelligent in its style of performance. The New York Times actually headlined an entire article with the title, quote, “Exit British Burlesque.” So Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes, they decided to take the show on the road. They decided that New York is not the place for them right now, and so they go all over the country until about eighteen seventy four, and they encountered some interesting trouble along the way. They obviously maintained some level of popularity, or else they would have gone back to England well before. But I think one of the weirder stories has to do with the owner of The Chicago Times. His name was Wilbur’s Story, and when the British Blondes were performing in Chicago, he started creating accusations that the girls weren’t virtuous. I mean, it was definitely low-hanging fruit, because they were risky performers. But Thompson did not appreciate that her women were being categorized as people who were promiscuous. Just because they were dancing that way didn’t mean that that’s how they lived their lives off stage, and so Thompson very publicly called him a liar. And then in eighteen seventy, Thompson, her husband, and one of her colleagues horsewhipped Story at gunpoint, and of course, he was all right. But they were arrested and fined, but they did not stop performing. They were let go, and then they traveled over to Nevada and California. And when Thompson was asked about this behavior and what she had done to Story, she did not have any remorse. She said that his statements about her women were repugnant, and she, quote, “was glad” at what she had done. But what happens here is something that you hear time and time again. The media hates it, and they talk about it. But by talking about it, you create publicity, and the expression, “all publicity is good publicity,” and that was very much the case, because they developed a level of notoriety that drove audiences to their shows until about eighteen seventy four, when Thompson and her performers returned to England. Now, the style of burlesque might have started in the eighteen hundreds in England; the style of dancing dated centuries before, but it also continued to evolve around the world after this. And one of the more prominent, more well-known movements of burlesque-style performance is the popular French Moulin Rouge that goes on into the twentieth century. And subsets of Americans will continue to like burlesque, especially when you look at Prohibition. There’s a lot of things going on under the table there, and burlesque performances were one of them. But Americans — the American government — ultimately maybe took a nod from The New York Times, and decency laws were something that were incredibly prominent in the U.S. in the twentieth century and have actually impacted all forms of burlesque and other types of risqué dance performances in the country up through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, and there’s some things that have trickled into the twenty first century, which was an attempt to kind of drive the art form (or people would probably not argue it wasn’t art), but would drive the form into the darkness. But for a brief moment in the eighteen sixties, Lydia Thompson brought a class to burlesque, showcasing and bringing to America a typical British sense of humor, but one that would ultimately leave many Americans aghast.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler. And we heard the story about burlesque, in burlesque as the British did it. Burlesque was more than just racy dancing. Lydia Thompson raised it to a high art form, and her desire was to target it to the middle-class New Yorker. And there it was a mixture of pantomime, and satire, and wit, saucy costumes, yes, but also just sheer fun. The story of the British Invasion of burlesque on Our American Stories.