Sausages and Red-Hot Poker

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 371, 2 August 1946, Page 11

Sausages and Red-Hot Poker

‘] HE English Theatre series from 3YA has now reached the stage of "Pantomime," and what with this and "Melodrama" and "Music Hall" it is clear that the authors have taken a deep plunge into the 19th Century, which is beginning to be recognised as a great age of popular entertainment, thronged with mute inglorious Dickenses, Under traditional fog, reinforced by industrial soot, iri streets and between houses without doubt the ugliest ever inhabited by Western man, there was furiously. alive a spontaneous plebian culture, native especially to London, as anonymous and as capable of infinite variations on familiar themes as the folksong cultures one had believed const to primitive peoples. An odd sidelight’ on this culture is its reaction outside England: there was a definite school among French aesthetics of the mid19th Century which saw London as a sort of ogre’s den, filled, with macabre and’ grotesque . (but unquestionably romantic) horror. These gentry had put their refined fingers on sdmething very teal; Dickens interpolates the pages of Pickwick with three stories and a poem of this very quality and there are besides two or three anecdotes, told chiefly by Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller, which reflect the common trick of Cockney wit in finding uproarious humour in picturesque methods of decease. One of Sam Weller’s tales, you recall, was that of the old gentleman "‘who in a fit of temporary insanity rashly converted hisself into sausages." This brings us back to the pantomime and the policemar made into the same article of diet; and it is the case that the French school found one of their most exquisite shudders in watching certain versions of the wWarlequinade.