Between fact and imagination: tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century Britain

The practice of tableaux vivants in Victorian culture is well known and has received scholarly attention both as a constituent of early Victorian staged photography and as a component of commercial theatrical practices in the variety theatre and music hall. The importance of the performance of amateur tableaux vivants to Victorian culture has, however, until now eluded critical expression. Their affiliation with women’s domestic and leisure cultures on the one hand and their elusiveness as an ephemeral art practice on the other has meant that they have slipped below the critical radar.   

This thesis responds to this elision by recovering a history of tableaux vivants as a practice at the heart of many aspects of Victorian cultural life. It suggests that the tableau, although in some ways an intrinsically conservative form, also retains a capacity to undermine dominant Victorian orthodoxies on gender and class. Through the recovery of networks of amateur performance established in the second half of the nineteenth century this thesis argues that the tableau vivant offered vital opportunities for interactions between women, artists, aesthetes and theatre professionals that helped to mutually transform the public image and social inclusion of all these groups. Benefitting from the aesthetic credibility and performance opportunities that the tableau vivant conferred – a status that has become obscured over time - women enthusiastically engaged with tableau performance as a platform for a range of philanthropic, political and reform activities.   

In recovering the nuanced history of the tableau vivant this thesis not only offers an account of an important and missing practice, it also reshapes the ways in which we understand the visual culture of the Victorian period. Identifying a shared vocabulary within nineteenth-century tableaux vivants, art, literary and print cultures, the thesis proposes that tableaux are involved in the process by which cultural forms of the period recast the time and space of political experience. As exercises in the reanimation of history, and reflections on the possibility of transhistorical or transhuman subjectivity, tableaux take their place in the wider culture of the nineteenth century, a technological, photographic age that ushered in new conceptions of the real.