A Dying Art: T. S. Eliot on Marie Lloyd

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In 1922, the year that his poem The Waste Land was published, T. S. Eliot wrote something that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from the high priest of modernist difficulty and (according to his first wife, Vivienne, at least) a man who could be a bit of a snob. It’s also a fascinating essay because, over a century after he wrote it, Eliot’s words about technological developments in entertainment leading to a feeling of boredom amongst ordinary people now seem to be eerily prescient of our own times.

In his ‘London Letter’ for The Dial magazine in December 1922, Eliot wrote a short appreciation of the popular music-hall artist, Marie Lloyd, who had died two months earlier. Lloyd (1870-1922) was a Londoner born and bred, and her singalong performances to numbers including ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ and ‘Oh Mr Porter What Shall I Do’, and her (for the time) risqué use of sexual innuendo in her act made her hugely popular among East Londoners in particular.

In his essay, Eliot argues that Lloyd, of all music-hall performers, possessed unparalleled greatness as an artist because she understood her audience. Ordinary working-class Londoners recognised her great affinity for, and understanding of, them and their lives, which she reflected back at them with affection and sympathy. The same cannot be said for Lloyd’s followers and contemporaries: Eliot recounts being in an audience at a Nellie Wallace show and hearing the audience jeering at her. They would never have jeered at Lloyd, because they were ‘on her side’.

But Eliot also recognises something else about Lloyd and, more broadly, something about the nature of live entertainment of the kind Lloyd had perfected: namely, that the working-class patron who ‘joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act’. We can see how this would’ve worked: audiences would sing along to ‘My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)’, and if anyone dared to heckle her, she’d give as good as she got, making the heckler part of the show.

Eliot contrasts such working-class entertainment with that enjoyed by the ‘morally corrupt’ middle classes. There’s no equivalent figure to Marie Lloyd for the middle class, because that stratum of society lacks the ‘independent virtues’ which might give them ‘dignity’. Eliot makes a prophetic remark that the ever-expanding middle classes are absorbing the upper classes, and that the lower classes may not exist for much longer as a cohesive cultural unit. Whereas Marie Lloyd and music-hall stars give expression to the soul of working-class people, the expensive revue shows enjoyed by the middle classes express ‘almost nothing’.

But with Marie Lloyd gone, Eliot’s led to wonder what the future of music-hall itself will be. This is 1922, remember: talking pictures or ‘talkies’ at still five years away, but only five years, and ‘cheap and rapid-breeding cinema’ (as Eliot puts it) is already becoming the mass entertainment for people in the early 1920s. Charlie Chaplin’s first full feature-length film, The Kid, had been released in 1921 and had proved extremely popular. Music hall was on the way out.

Towards the end of his essay, Eliot frames Lloyd’s death as a historical milestone signifying the death of the music hall itself. He warns that mechanical forms of mass entertainment, such as cinema, gramophones, and radio, are replacing genuine culture. He compares this creeping modern standardisation to the ‘depopulation of Melanesia’, predicting that modern industrial civilisation will eventually cause humanity to die of pure boredom. So, we’re not that far away from The Waste Land after all: it’s notable that in ‘The Fire Sermon’, the third part of that poem, the typist who has just endured soulless, mechanical sex with her boyfriend puts a record on her gramophone after he’s left. Eliot then segues to an allusion from The Tempest and lines spoken by Ferdinand as he follows the magical, ethereal music played by Ariel. Music really is magical in Shakespeare’s play; in 1922, it’s simply a recorded facsimile of the live experience.

Eliot’s other examples of how technology is worsening culture are worth dwelling on, too. Perhaps the most poignant is the image of children hearing their bedtime stories, not from one of their parents, but ‘from a loudspeaker’ (i.e., the ‘wireless’ or radio). In our own age, a lazy or tired parent may well shove a tablet in front of their offspring and get them to watch videos on it; when I was growing up, the equivalent was parents who sat their child down in front of children’s TV for hours on end. In both cases, parents – and their children – are losing out on the chance to share a collaborative social experience and an opportunity to bond over culture, whether it’s fairy tales, Roald Dahl, or Harry Potter.

Things have only got worse. Eliot’s right that technology leads us to lose the energising and collaborative aspects of much art, and although he doesn’t mention it in ‘Marie Lloyd’, poetry itself was another casualty of the demise of the music-halls – or at least poetry as mass, popular entertainment. Many music-hall artists would recite poems in front of huge audiences, but since the cinema killed off the music halls, poetry has never enjoyed such popularity among the general population.

I recently read Mark Forsyth’s new book, Rhyme & Reason (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and he essentially makes this point, seeing the music halls as the last venue where poetry truly had a place in society. Since then, its place has been the classroom, in the bedrooms of solitary and introspective people (like literature bloggers and academics), and in certain pockets of the internet. But the internet is not real life; and although spoken-word nights and poetry slams exist, these are but a tiny area of the great cultural space that music hall occupied a hundred or so years ago.