Cambridge Opera Journal, 23, 1-2, 2750 6 Cambridge University Press, 2012

doi:10.1017/S0954586712000018
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping1 at the opera
in London before 18302
MICHAEL BURDEN
Abstract: What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour
at Londons eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be
a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to docu-
ment as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from
the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the rst water-closets, addressing ques-
tions of the audiences general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a listening audience,
and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed
without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience
members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the
pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their
performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.
We can, without doubt, name the components of the routine todays audience
enacts when attending an opera performance in London. Patrons arrive at the
venue, check coats, perhaps collect pre-paid tickets and order interval drinks. In-
deed, our routines on attending musical performances of any sort have become so
settled that Christopher Small has attempted to transform our understanding of
them by promoting the process from routine to ritual.3 However, while Small
seems quite happy with the rituals of sipping coffee and alcoholic drinks, he does
not mention the ritual of using the facilities before purchasing a programme,
having ones ticket torn (or scanned) and entering the auditorium. In the case of
women attending performances of opera at Covent Garden, for example, these
facilities used until recently to be of such an inadequate provision, that the
bulk of an interval was spent queuing, sometimes to no avail. Until recently, too,
for men visiting the same theatre, it meant (at least in one case) nding the darkest
possible staircase, descending to the lowest possible level of the building and nd-
ing the least ventilated room in the entire edice. Such were the lavatories at the
Royal Opera House in its previous incarnation.
It may not at rst be clear what relevance this subject has to our understanding
of the history of opera in London before 1830, but among the questions it illumi-
nates are: how much did (or could) the audience concentrate on the performance?
How much movement was there in the auditorium? When we read written criticism
of opera, what were the circumstances in which its contents were conceived? Can
1 Crap or to crap is dened as crude slang for defecate, according to the OED, recorded in
Joseph Wright, English Dialect Dictionary ( London, 1898).
2 This article was conceived while working at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California on
an Andrew Mellon Fellowship; Alexandra Lumbers, Andrew Cambers, Catherine Molineux and
Emma Christopher were present at the time.
3 See, for example, Christopher Small, Musicking : The Meanings of Performing and Listening
( Hanover, 1998), 1929.
the critics really have heard what they were writing about? What strategies might
the composers, musical directors and performers have developed to hold an
audiences attention? The answers to some of these questions are known in the
broadest sense, but when examined closely our knowledge often proves to be
illusory, based on assumptions of what must have happened as opposed to what
can be shown to have happened. And when this is coupled with, on one hand, the
general failure to record organisational details which are so basic as to be assumed
and, on the other, a natural reticence about plumbing, then what we can show
happened amounts to a great deal less than one would like.
In reading the following narrative, it is helpful to remember that there were
three main theatres in London during the period 1660 to 1830: the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane; the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden; and the Kings Theatre (also the
Queens), also known as the Opera House. All three theatres performed opera,
but the rst two staged mainly operas with spoken dialogue and all-sung after-
pieces, while the Kings Theatre was limited to all-sung Italian opera. And it might
be as well also to note some aspects of the terminology used at the outset. The
pot of this articles title was a chamber pot, a term in use from about 15404 for a
bowl used for urine and excreta. Particularly in use in the bedroom, its emptying
frequently through the window into the street was one of the less welcome
tasks of the servants in any household lucky enough to afford such help. Privy
is an ancient term used to describe a space to which one might repair, particularly
one that was outside a building and without plumbing; the size, shape and ttings
are not specied. Some privies clearly had chamber pots, others simply seats with
the appropriate holes and a cess-pit below. The term was also put to a variety of
uses, as suggested by the proverb A true friend should be like a Privie, open in
time of necessity.5 The term water-closet came into use about 1755, and was a
privy with a mechanism to ush water through pan or chamber pot, and carry its
contents out to a cess-pit.6 The actual principle was promoted as early as 1596 by
Sir John Harrington (15611612), who advocated regular maintenance of these
facilities:
To keepe your homes sweet, cleanse privy vaults,
To keepe your soules as sweet, mend privie faults.7
Harringtons device was described in his volume A New Discourse upon a Stale
Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax, and his name is immortalised in the still-used
slang term for a toilet, The John, a term which may derive from its use by
Elizabeth I to describe her version of Harringtons device. The terms pot and
privy would have been clearly understood by audience members in the London
4 The OED cites an Inventory in Lisle Papers ( PRO: SP 1/161), f. 56
v
; it also locates mentions
in 1570, (OED, III, 4), and in 1598, in Florios Worlde of Words, (OED, XII, 210).
5 J. Howell, Proverbs 18 in Lex. Tetraglootton (1660).
6 it was always my ofce to hold his head during the operation of an emetic, to attend him to the
water-closet when he took a cathartic, and sometimes to administer a clyster; George Colman,
The Connoisseur by Mr Town, No. 100, 25 December 1755 ( London, 1756), II, 602.
7 Misacmos [ John Harrington], A New Discourse of a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax
( London, 1596), 120.
Michael Burden 28
theatres, and by the later part of the century all would been familiar with if not
had direct experience of the water-closet.
Before we turn to considering these theatres conveniences, it is worthwhile
recalling behavioural norms for the rituals of opera-going in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century London, for they provide a framework in which to interpret
our data and help us appreciate what audience expectations might have been
for the theatrical experience in general and the quality of the toilet facilities in
particular. In general, the documented behaviour of London audiences suggests
that it had little or nothing in common with anything that might be experienced
by opera-goers today. These audiences pushed, shoved, argued and, as the vomiting
character in the centre of Figure 1 suggests, the crush could be tight. Recorded
incidents in the nineteenth century include a terric squeeze at the Opera House
in 1830, where there were torn clothes and a few fainting ts;8 a Mr Jones who
was knocked over and crushed, and emerged gushing blood from his ears, eyes
and mouth;9 the positioning of re engines at the stage doors in an effort to
persuade the audience to remain under control;10 and a crowd violent beyond
precedent for Jenny Linds long-expected debut that gave currency to the expres-
sion a Jenny Lind crush.11 Also evident in Figure 1 is a row a spikes, the standard
device for London audience crowd control, which were so ubiquitous that they
are even visible among the details included by Fanny Burney in her sketch of the
Royal Box at Covent Garden in 1776.12 That these spikes Covent Garden gilded
theirs were also dangerous, is indicated by the experience of a Mr Lorrimer in
1810, who was one of two young men forced back by the crowd on to the spikes
of the orchestra, and who received two severe wounds in the back part of his
thighs.13
Once in the auditorium, the eighteenth-century audience was considered bois-
terous, but just what that means in todays terms is far from obvious. Received
wisdom has swung in two directions. On one hand, the drama of the various
London riots the Chinese Festival riots (1755), the Half-Price riots (1763) and
the O. P. (Old Price) riots (1809), to name but three have allowed modern
authors to present a picture of a populace that was always rioting.14 But it is not
always clear how a riot was dened. For example, Isaac Reeds far-from-unusual
report that the last two Acts [of The Baron] and Epli. [were] unheard owing to
the riot,15 is almost off-hand in its assumption that he was describing normal
8 The Theatrical Observer, No. 2682 (20 July 1830).
9 The Theatrical Observer, No. 592 (16 October 1823).
10 [ John Joseph Stockdale], The Covent Garden Journal, 2 vols. ( London, 1810), I, 162.
11 Benjamin Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera ( London, 1864), 184.
12 Drawing of the Royal Box, Covent Garden, 16 October 1776 at a performance of Arthur
Murphys All in the wrong; collection of Frederick W. Hilles. For a reproduction see The London
Stage, V/1, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, 1968), plates between 102 and 103.
13 [Stockdale], Covent Garden Journal, I, 180.
14 See, for instance, Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford, 1992); Clive
Bloom, Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels, and Revolts ( London, 2003); and Robert B.
Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England ( London, 2004).
15 [Isaac Reed], Isaac Reed Diaries 17621804, ed. Claude E. Jones (Berkeley, 1946), 110, 10 July
1781.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 29
Fig. 1: The Pit Door, La Porte du Parterre (with vomiting gure). Carington Bowles,
after Robert Dighton, 1784. BM 1860,0623.100. 6 The Trustees of the British Museum.
Michael Burden 30
audience behaviour. But there is some case law that might help with a denition;
in the trial during the 1809 O. P. riots of one Mr Clifford for disturbing the peace,
the court was informed that although there was a lot of noise, this could not be
construed as a riot since not a chandelier was broken.16 The breaking of the
chandeliers was used in a number of plays about the theatre to indicate that a
riot was under way; one character in Leonard MacNallys 1792 Critic upon Critic,
comments that he can hear the audience hiss and roar like the devils in Milton
Pandemonium Eh! I hear them breaking the chandeliers.17 Counter to this
image of lawlessness, other authors have been keen to suggest that in fact audiences
were mostly well behaved, particularly at the Opera House, but in so doing have
managed to create an impression of gentility which was totally absent from the
eighteenth-century theatrical experience.18 It is difcult, for example, to believe
that higher ticket prices kept the riff-raff out of the Opera House, when on a visit
to Artaserse in 1772, Edward Piggot noted that the common people throw peals
of Oranges on the stage before the play begins,19 and recorded that a man had to
come before the curtain and sweep the stage of all the orange peel thrown by the
audience before the performance even got under way. Again, we might nd it
difcult to credit that the greater status of opera as an entertainment caused the
audience to behave in a more appropriate manner, when the British bucks and
British Beaus occupied the stage on 13 May 1786 for three and a half hours,
preventing the performance of the opera, Virginia.20 The Opera Houses supposed
higher moral tone is compromised by the discovery, too, that in her 1825 memoirs
the courtesan Harriette Wilson and her sisters claimed to have taken a box there
to ply their trade, and that it was at the opera that Harriette learned to be a com-
plete irt.21 Indeed, the novelist Walter Scott complained that the males in the
Opera House audience performed their debaucheries so openly it would degrade
a bagnio.22
When the auditoria were noisy, they could be very noisy; the audience was so
loud at a staging of William Shields 1791 opera The Woodman that it was described
as being performed in dumb shew.23 If a particular issue engaged the audience it
became vocal and partisan; during an 1810 Covent Garden performance of Love
in a Village, for example, where the seasons newly raised box subscriptions and
tickets prices included the costs of employing the Italian Angelica Catalani at
a theatre considered primarily an English house, the insults hurled included
16 [Stockdale], Covent Garden Journal, I, 121.
17 Leonard MacNally, Critic upon Critic, a Dramatic Medley ( London, 1792), 623.
18 For example: the spectators behaviour was generally appropriate to their station; David
Nalbach, The Kings Theatre, 17041867 ( London, 1972), 65.
19 Edward Piggott, MS diary in the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Quoted in Elizabeth
Gibson, Edward Pigott: Eighteenth-century Theatre Chronicler, Theatre Notebook, 42/2
(1988), 65.
20 The Morning Herald (15 May 1786).
21 Harriette Wilson, Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, 3 vols. ( London, 1825), I, 35.
22 Quoted in H. Barton Baker, A History of the London Stage ( London, 1904), 140.
23 [Stockdale], Covent Garden Journal, I, 181.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 31
Dickons forever, no Catalani and No annual boxes or Italian singers.24 If a claque
was in, even more noise could be expected; William Chetwood remembered
the rst Night of Love in a Riddle [1729], a Pastoral Opera wrote by the Laureat [Colley
Cibber], which the Hydra-headed Multitude resolvd to worry without hearing, a Custom
with Authors of Merit, [but] when Miss Raftor came on in the Part of Phillida, the monstrous
Roar subsided. A Person in the Stage Box, next to my Post called out to his Companion
in the following elegant Stile Zounds, Tom! take Care; or this charming little Devil will
save [the opera].25
Here, the claque was unexpectedly thrilled by the appearance of a graceful and
engaging performer, one later better known as Mrs ( Kitty) Clive. The audiences
raucous behaviour was often alcohol-fuelled: as late as 1827 there were complaints
that those who kept the stall which sold apples in the Upper Gallery at Drury
Lane also supplied their disorderly customers with gin, which increased the already
high noise level.26 An Oxford student who visited London in 1751 complained:
Good Heavens, what a Noise of Catcalls, Hissing, Hollowing and Fighting . . . Are these
the Men who are to be Judges of a poetical Performance? If I read them aright, they
would appear with much greater Propriety in a Bear Garden.27
But, bear garden or not, the audience was to be the judge of a poetical perfor-
mance; they had, after all, paid.
These reports, however, mostly record nuisance, and it is hard to judge from
them what might be an expected norm. But it is clear that, in todays terms,
almost any evening at an eighteenth-century London theatre would probably qualify
as a riot, for its audience was partisan, was engaged by and with the entertainment,
and had a great deal more interaction with the performers on the stage much
more, in fact, than a modern audience (or indeed, modern performers) would
expect or desire. And it was certainly more restless than the audience we might
encounter today at an opera performance.
This restlessness was probably not unrelated to the length of the evening, for
the arrangement of the bill at both the playhouses and the opera house meant that
an evening at an opera performance ran for several hours, and by the latter part of
the eighteenth century four hours seems to have become usual. Anna Larpent, for
example, recording a visit to the opera in 1797 to see Giovanni Paisiellos Nina; o
sia, La pazza per amore,28 noted that she found the scenery wonderfull ne and
well done, but what with staring at the spectacle & Company for 4 hours I got
sickly and dizzy.29 The bill that night also included the ballets Le Rendezvous at
24 Ibid., I, 160.
25 William Chetwood, A General History of the Stage, from its origin in Greece to the present time. With
memoirs of most of the principal performers that have appeared on the English and Irish stage for these last fty
years ( London, 1749), 1278.
26 The Theatrical Observer, No. 1882 (20 December 1827).
27 [Anon., A gentleman of Oxford], The Devil upon Crutches ( London, 1755), 38.
28 With a libretto by G. B. Lorenzi on the play by B. J. Marsollier des Vivetie`res.
29 Anna Margaretta Larpent, Diary, US-SM HM 301201: I, 16 May 1797.
Michael Burden 32
the end of Act I, and Sapho et Phaon at the end of Act II.30 As if an evening at the
theatre was not already long enough, the bill became even more lengthy during the
early years of the nineteenth century; at the Opera House on 19 January 1822,
Mozarts Marriage of Figaro had a divertissement in the second act, and the evening
closed with Pandore, a new ballet by M. Anatole with new scenery, machinery,
dresses, decorations, &c..31 Hermann Ludwig H. Puchler-Muskau, visiting the
English Opera company at the Lyceum in the mid 1820s, noted that the perfor-
mance lasted from seven to half-past twelve,32 while the Italian Opera lasted until
1am.33 One oclock was early in some cases. Rosa Curionis Benet at the Kings
Theatre in 1830 was recorded as nishing at around 2am perhaps not surprisingly,
considering that the programme included the whole of Cimarosas Gli Orazi e
Curiazi, an act of Rossinis Il Turco in Italia, and an abridgement of a ballet set to
music from Rossinis Guillaume Tell.34 Benets had become notorious for their
bizarre programming and length, and Curionis was not by any means unusual.35
In the long and ever-lengthening evening, there is no doubt, then, of the neces-
sity of a comfort stop, but here we hit a snag; there is no stop, for the London
theatres apparently ran the bill with no intervals. The extent of our uncertainty
about precisely what happened is indicated by the fact that even the doyen of
the history of continental opera house administration, John Rosselli, has admitted
that the issue was unclear.36 We can get closer, though, to a solution for London.
In seventeenth-century English opera and plays for that matter each act ended
with an act tune. The dramatic structure of some of the pieces suggests that there
is a possibility they linked the acts in narrative fashion. Purcells Fairy-Queen pro-
vides one of the best examples of the possibilities offered here. At the end of Act
II, the manic sprite Robin Good Fellow rushes off stage with the lines Farewell
Lovers, I am gone; I must now to Oberon, leading into a vigorous act tune; at its
close, the bass line has a rushing falling semiquaver line, and Helena, opening Act
III, runs onto the stage with I am out of breath with following him so fast. If it
is correct to surmise that this act tune facilitated a dramatic connection between
the acts, then having an interval proper would only have undermined the effect
desired.37
30 The London Stage, V/3, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, 1968), 1963.
31 The Theatrical Observer, No. 66 (19 January 1822).
32 [Hermann Ludwig H. Puckler-Muskau], A Tour in Germany, Holland and England in the years 1826,
1827, and 1828, 4 vols. ( London, 1832), III, 66.
33 Ibid., III, 364.
34 The Theatrical Observer, No. 2657 (19 June 1830).
35 The benet system allowed members of the theatre company (including staff such as the
prompter) to have a performance from which they were entitled, after expenses, to the box-
ofce income. The programmes often included both new works and old warhorses especially
suited to the performers skills. For a fuller explanation, see St Vincent Troubridge, The Benet
System in the British Theatre ( London, 1967).
36 John Rosselli, Interval, in Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. ( London, 1992),
II, 811.
37 See Roger Savage, The Theatre Music, in The Purcell Companion, ed. Michael Burden ( London,
1995), 323ff., and Henry Purcell, The Fairy-Queen, An Opera, ed. Michael Burden ( London,
2009), for discussions of this issue.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 33
These act tunes disappeared with dramatick opera of the 1690s, and there is
no evidence to suggest that other later varieties of opera had anything similar.
But from the early eighteenth century, reports begin to refer to activities or musical
items between the acts. Certainly, it appears to have been the practice for members
of the audience to stretch and move around; the author of The Prompter complained
of the lack of decorum of the occupants of the boxes who turned their backs
on the audience during the intervals between the acts,38 and during the O. P.
riots at Covent Garden, protesters are recorded as having reversed their normal
behaviour: they stood on the benches, with their hats on during the perfor-
mance, but sat down uncovered during the intervals.39 And one of the managers
claims in support of the contentious private retiring rooms behind the boxes was
that the ladies and gentlemen can refresh themselves between the acts (a claim
ridiculed by Leigh Hunt, who asked rhetorically what kind of refreshment can
people want, who dine at ve or six, drink their coffee directly, and then go to the
Theatre to sit upon easy cushions?).40 There were, too, other types of refreshment
between the acts; William Gardiner records the exploits of the town sparks at the
Opera: Between the acts it was common practice for many fashionable young men
to leave the pit, and, by a secret door, gain admission to the stage.41 Gardiner
clearly implies that there was enough time for such a move to be made.
The closest we come to a denitive answer on this issue is the information
found in the preface to The Dramatic Time-Piece of 1767. This is a handy little volume
written by the John Brownsmith, who worked on and off as a prompter in the
London theatres from about 1751, and who was part of Samuel Footes company
at the Haymarket in the summer of 1767. The Dramatic Time-Piece contains the
timings of popular dramas to allow any gentlemen to attend at a particular hour,
but was also designed to allow the horses and servants to be sent home and to
return at the end of the evenings entertainment, thereby preventing the horses
from catching cold and the servants from corrupting their morals in houses of
ill Fame while waiting for their masters. After his list of timings, Brownsmith
notes that allowances had to be made for
incidental Entertainments between the Acts, such as Songs, Dances, &c. . . . for by only
allowing seven Minutes between each Act, for the intervening Music, they will always be
certain of the Time any Act will be over.42
The seven minutes Brownsmith allows seems hardly time enough for the fre-
quently advertised musical interludes; these include the select pieces between
the acts of Loves Last Shift advertised for 22 November 1725, the concerto on
the violincello by Cervetti between Acts II and III of The Committee on 4 January
1743, or the monologue Buds have at ye all between the acts of the farce Love in a
38 [Anon.], The Prompter, No. 3 (27 October 1789), 16.
39 [Stockdale], Covent Garden Journal, I, 154.
40 Lawrence Huston Houtchens, Leigh Hunts Dramatic Criticism 18081830 ( New York, 1949),
19 November 1809.
41 William Gardiner, Music and Friends ( London, 1838), I, 155.
42 John Brownsmith, The Dramatic Time-piece: or the Perpetual Monitor ( London, 1767), Preface.
Michael Burden 34
Camp on 26 May 1789, to cite just a few of the many examples available to us.
The convention of playing music between acts can be found employed well into
the nineteenth century; in 1819, for example, there were symphonies between
the Acts;43 in 1820, Macbeth had Symphonies between the acts by Mr Ware;44 and
during the 1840s, Drury Lane began to use the term entre-act (a version of the
French entract) to describe, among others, those pieces by Beethoven played in
1842.45 Over at the Opera House, there is little record of what, if anything, took
place between the acts of operas in the early part of the century, but towards its
end, an evening at the Kings would include dances between the acts, and a ballet
after the opera was over.
And, true to form for the London audience that abhorred a vacuum, its members
even provided the entertainment for themselves on occasion:
Once when we were in the theatre a sailor took it into his head to sing a song during one
of the intervals. Immediately silence was called for from above, and everyone obeyed. The
sailor sang, to the best of his ability, well enough and with a voice that was altogether
acceptable, and he was quite fearless, despite the fact that his audience included some of
the nest folk in the land. He was applauded warmly, and was made to sing again. How-
ever, he tried to make it too beautiful, took on more than he could manage and literally
fell over in the middle of a roulade. This time the scene ended in general laughter.46
Clearly, as this early nineteenth-century account by visiting German, Joanna
Schopenhauer, suggests, everyone stayed in the auditorium to be silenced. How-
ever, a break between the acts occupied with musical or other activities does not
translate into the extended interval of today, and critics can be found complain-
ing about the tedious interval which is suffered to elapse between the different
pieces.47 It must be concluded that an interval in the twentieth-century sense
was in its infancy.
So, there was no break in which to disappear to use whatever facilities might
have been provided. In an opera, a suitably tedious piece of recitative needed to
be identied instead by using the handy libretto purchased at the bookseller next
to the theatre the previous day or in the theatre at the evenings performance. But
even here Londoners were at a disadvantage; their well-documented detestation
for recitative meant that long passages were few and far between. Indeed, one of
the common methods of adaptation for the introduction of extant Italian operas
in London was to shorten the recitative, a process that can be seen employed
throughout the eighteenth century.48
43 Playbill, Covent Garden, 9 June 1819, in Frederick Pollock, comp., William Charles MacCready a
memorial (a collection of playbills, letters and newspapers cuttings), US-SM 264486, I.
44 Playbill, Covent Garden, 9 June 1820, in Pollock, US-SM 264486, I.
45 Playbill, Drury Lane, 23 February 1842, in Pollock, US-SM 264486, IV.
46 Russell Jackson, Johanna Schopenhauers Journal: A German View of the London Theatre
Scene, 18035, Theatre Notebook, 52/3 (1998), 146.
47 The Theatrical Observer, No. 2613 (29 April 1830).
48 Handel shortened recitatives in those works by other composers he adapted for London, and
the process can still be seen employed later in the century in the 1797 version of Giuseppe
Sartis setting of Metastasios Ipermestra, GB-Lcm 656.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 35
But what precisely were the facilities on offer? At least one author suggests that
the audience provided these themselves. Writing on the rise of the water-closet in
nineteenth-century London theatres, Tracy C. Davis suggests that since audiences
had been bringing chamber pots to public entertainments since Imperial Rome,
presumably they continued to do so, or just relieved themselves on the spot. 49
But careful consideration of this proposition suggests difculties. Conservative
estimates of audience capacities of the London theatres in 1785 suggest that Covent
Garden held 2,200 people, Drury Lane 2,300 and the Opera House 1,800; in
1820, by which date all three theatres had burnt down and been rebuilt, audience
gures were: Covent Garden 2,800 people, Drury Lane 3,106 and the Opera
House 3,300. Even allowing for the fact that the auditoria were not always full, it
does suggest a large number of chamber pots and one immediate difculty; what
did the audience members at, say, the Opera, do with them during a sold-out per-
formance? Or, indeed, during any performance at all? They can hardly have been
left in the lobbies. How, for example, in the badly lit and generally shambolic foyers
of eighteenth-century London theatres, could the owners have retrieved their own
property? As suggested by Thomas Rowlandsons Box-Lobby Loungers, seen in
Figure 2, the foyers were crowded and unsavoury places. When the audience was
large, the House overowed in some parts,50 leaving the mass of people [who
had] paid their money to walk the lobbies ;51 at Edmund Keans farewell performance
at the Kings Theatre in 1830 (although not his last on the London stage), every
place in the house was immediately occupied when the doors were open, leaving
hundreds obliged to depart, or to content themselves with a stroll up and down
the lobbies, where they were amused by a ght between a lady and a foreign
gentleman.52 There were also constant complaints about the number of prostitutes
that worked the lobbies and boxes, and efforts, such as those of Benjamin Wyatt,
to keep them out.53 There was outrage in 1825, when it was discovered that
the management of both Drury Lane and Covent Garden regarded by the press
as national theatres kept prostitutes on the free list to ensure the attendance
of the apprentices in the pit.54 The Earl of Carlisle was keen to blame their pres-
ence on the ever-falling standard of drama; if it was as high as it should be, he
wrote:
49 Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 18001914 (Cambridge, 2000), 989. For further
discussion of the situation in the nineteenth century, see her excellent and entertaining article:
Filthy nay Pestilential: Sanitation and Victorian Theatres, in Exceptional Spaces: Essays in
Performance and History, ed. Della Pollock (Chapel Hill, 1998), 16186.
50 The Theatrical Observer, No. 210 (18 July 1822); in this case, the English Opera House in the
Strand.
51 Thomas Gilliland, Elbow Room, a pamphlet containing remarks on the shameful increase of the private
boxes of Covent Garden ( London, 1804), 13.
52 The Theatrical Observer, No. 2659 (22 June 1830).
53 Benjamin Wyatt, Observations on the principles of a design for a theatre ( London, 1811); he abolished
the basket boxes at the back of the stalls where the prostitutes plied their trade.
54 The Theatrical Observer, No. 1018 (7 March 1825).
Michael Burden 36
the lobbies would not be lled with proigates of every description, familiarizing the as
yet uncorrupted and modest, to scenes of such meretricious impudence, hardly exaggerated
by Hogarth in the supper in his Rakes Progress. What parent can conduct his wife and
daughters though this sty without trembling with the fear, that, though those sights are
to them shocking and horrible to-day, they may not be so to-morrow? An audience that
went to the play to hear and see, would quickly interfere with these orgies.55
All these comments suggest that the lobbies regularly functioned as perambula-
tion space, and their use for the storage of large numbers of used and unused
chamber pots during a performance would have been, at the very least, imprac-
tical. For the wealthy, who had footmen and other servants to go early to keep
places in the auditoria for their masters there are many versions of the phrase
Ladies are desird to send their servants to keep places by Four oclock in
eighteenth-century theatre advertisements56 it would have been possible, and
indeed, probable, that their duties also included seeing to the chamber pots, or
assisting with other coping strategies.
55 [Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle], Thoughts upon the present condition of the stage, and upon the
construction of a new theatre ( London, 1808), 67.
56 The London Stage, III/2, ed. Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale, 1961), 975.
Fig. 2: The perambulation spaces at Covent Garden, shown in Box-Lobby Loungers.
Thomas Rowlandson, after Henry Wigstead, 1786. BM 1937,0213.63. 6 The Trustees of
the British Museum.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 37
Yet chamber pots do not seem to have been taken into the auditorium and
stored under seats and benches. Apart from the (in todays terms) cramped condi-
tions, once the pots had been used, their contents would have made the auditoria
stink. The theatres already smelled: at a performance of Rossinis Otello at the
Opera House, it was noted that not withstanding the liberal use of perfume by
the ladies . . . the house retained some of the disagreeable odour left by the lthy
mob that lled it on the previous night.57 The auditoria were also considered
health hazards; Thomas Arne, in advertising his performance at the Haymarket on
12 March 1770, announced as an audience draw card that the theatre had been
thoroughly aired a week before the performance,58 and in 1823 it was noted that
Drury Lane theatre had undergone a general cleansing before the season started.59
It also seems probable that the regular painting routines of the theatre buildings
were partly maintained to disguise lingering odours of previous seasons, although
this could go awry, as it did in 1810 when the theatre had been opened too soon
and great inconvenience arose caused by the noisome smell of the fresh paint.60
The auditoria also had uncomfortable temperatures, as the reaction of a half-price
audience in 1770 indicates:
Of a cool evening the company within, generally draw up the [closed] wooden shutters of
the openings, improperly called windows. And when the gentry without, who are admitted
half-price, nd them shut, they begin a violent noise with their sticks, while those within
as obstinately insist, that being in a violent heat, they will not let them down to the en-
dangering of their healths, by suddenly letting in the cold air.61
As this suggests, even if ventilation was provided it was not always in use, as we
nd at Drury Lane on a wet night in 1791: Those who were under the ventila-
tors, objected to their being opened, because, as they asserted, the rain was then
admitted.62 It would be well into the twentieth if not the twenty-rst century
before things really improved; as Puchler-Muskau commented when visiting the
English Opera at the Lyceum in October in the mid 1820s: the heat, the exhala-
tions, and the audience were not the most agreeable.63 Even by eighteenth-century
standards, then, the additional smells given off by the contents of chamber pots
would have made the auditoria uninhabitable.
But let us assume, for the moment, that the pots were taken into the auditoria.
And let us hypothesise a footman-less eighteenth-century married couple attend-
ing a performance of the London version of J. A. Hasses setting of Metastasios
Il re Pastore on 18 January 1757 at the Kings Theatre. They have set off from their
57 The Theatrical Observer, No. 2683 (21 July 1830).
58 The London Stage, IV/3, ed. George Winchester Stone, jr. (Carbondale, 1962), 1460.
59 The Theatrical Observer, No. 563 (12 September 1823).
60 [Stockdale], Covent Garden Journal, I, 153.
61 The Freeholders Magazine ( January 1770), 247.
62 The Theatrical Guardian, 4 (1791), 17.
63 [Hermann Ludwig H. Puckler-Muskau], A tour in Germany, Holland and England in the years 1826,
1827, and 1828 ( London, 1832), III, 66.
Michael Burden 38
home in Bloomsbury Square by hackney coach cost 1s, 6d 64 dutifully clutch-
ing their chamber pot, and have managed to get a seat in the auditorium. Regina
Mingotti is at her best, and Hasses setting of Barbaro, oh Dio! mi vedi in Act II
scene 2 has roused the audience to fever pitch.65 But the prunes with which their
dinner had concluded are causing immediate distress to our Georgian theatre-
goers. They glance around; where do they go to use the chamber pot, so in-
conveniently carried from their home? It is true that the Georgians were less
concerned with privacy than later generations; La Rochefoucauld reported that at
a dinner at Euston Hall in 1784, the sideboard was: furnished with a number of
chamberpots and it is common practice to relieve oneself whilst the rest are drink-
ing; one has no kind of concealment and the practice strikes me as indecent.66 La
Rochefoucauld was, though, describing the later part of a meal, after the women
had withdrawn, and there is no indication that this behaviour would have extended
to using a chamber pot in mixed company in a lit theatre auditorium.
One nal point. We have seen that the London audience was a demonstrative
one. It seems more than likely that, had the auditorium been full of used chambers
pots, their contents would have been ung long before the chandeliers were broken
and the benches thrown; yet there is no report of such a thing. While it is always a
dangerous proceeding to build an historical case on silence, in this instance, the
further one explores the sources, the stronger the case against the use of chamber
pots in the auditorium becomes: they are not mentioned in any of the frequent
accounts by foreigners attending the theatres; they do not appear in any illustra-
tion, not even in one as seamy as Box Lobby Loungers; and there is no mention
of them in the 207 satirical plays about the theatre written between 1660 and
1800.67 It is also the case that staff for clearing up such mess do not gure on lists
of House servants at any theatre.68 The term necessary women can be found,69
but this seems to refer to a wider range of duties than just dealing with the privies
64 Samuel Adams, The Complete Servant ( London, 1825), Appendix, 21. Hackney coaches rst
appeared in London in 1620; Pepys mentions them rst in his entry for 2 February 165960,
and they were regulated by Act of Parliament in 1694 when there were about 700 of them
plying their trade. The rates set then remained unchanged for many years, as shown by a
comparison of those mentioned by W. Stow, Remarks on London ( London, 1722), and those
listed in Adams.
65 Against all the odds, it was in its original place in Metastasios libretto, having escaped Mingottis
constant alterations to operas, and the aria retained its original dramatic excitement; see Michael
Burden, Metastasio in London: A Catalogue and Critical Reader, Royal Musical Association
Research Chronicle, 49 (2007), whole issue, and US-SM La 128 and GB-Lbl 163.g.60.
66 Francois Armand Frederic de la Rochefoucauld, A Frenchman in England 1784, being the Me langes
sur lAngleterre of Franc ois de la Rochefoucauld, ed. Jean Marchand, trans. S. C. Roberts ( London,
1933), 312.
67 See Dane Farnsworth Smith, Plays About the Theatre in England from the Rehearsal in 1671 to the
Licensing Act in 1737, or, the Self-conscious Stage and its Burlesque and Satirical Reections in the Age of
Criticism ( London, 1936), 24750, and Plays about the Theatre in England 17371800; or, The Self-
Conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan ( Lewisburg, 1979), 21325, for brief listings.
68 See, for example, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Vice Chamberlain Cokes Theatrical Papers
17061715 (Carbondale, 1982), 868.
69 See the table on page 227 of Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, John Richs Covent Garden
Account Books for 173536, Theatre Survey, 31/2 (1990), 20041.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 39
or the mess from pots, and in any case, such payments may well be buried in the
general allocations for the housekeeping department of the theatre.70
So what did happen? What was the sanitary provision in an eighteenth-century
London theatre; indeed, what was, in fact, possible in the wider context of the
capitals sanitation system? To say that Londons sanitary conditions in the middle
of the eighteenth century were primitive by the standards of Daviss ancient
Rome or those of today, is to state a truism. They were responsible for the rapid
spread of disease; contributed to the high mortality rate amongst the new-born;
and in summer made the city a stench-ridden place, one that any with the means
to do so escaped. But so obvious were the problems that they were a subject of
constant public concern, and as it happens the period under consideration is framed
by two major acts which transformed the city: the 1671 Sewage and Paving Act
which required the use of a camber rather than a central ditch in Londons streets;
and the rst British Public Health Act, passed in 1848, in the face of a possible
cholera epidemic.71 Between these two Acts were numerous pieces of legislation
relating to civic hygiene, including the Westminster Paving Act of 1762, and as a
result advances in conditions were so rapid that by 1797 the author of A treatise on
the police of the metropolis could claim that nothing places England in a situation so
superior to most other countries, with regard to cleanliness as the System of the
Sewers which having been early introduced into the Metropolis . . . in consequence
of the general System, every offensive nuisance was removed through this medium,
and the Inhabitants early accustomed to the advantages and comforts of cleanli-
ness.72 However, cleaning the streets was achieved by ushing untreated sewage
of the city of London into the River Thames via rivers such as the Westbourne
and the Walbrook, and it is clear that the heroic image of the Thames presented
by Alexander Pope and others73 was directly contradicted by the actual state of
the river and its tributaries, such as the Fleet, a nauceious and abominable sink
of nastiness,74 seen in Popes later Dunciad 75 as a ditch carrying dead dogs into
the main waterway, and which in 1747 was nally lled in.76
70 See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Theatre Account Books in Eighteenth-century
London, in Superior in His Profession; Essays in Memory of Harold Love, Script and Print, 33 (2009),
12535, at 1278, for the accounting divisions found in the London theatres.
71 See, among many texts, Roy Porter, Diseases, Medicine, and Society in England 15501860
(Cambridge, 2/1995), 4558, for a consideration of some of these issues.
72 Patrick Colquhoun, A treatise of the police of the metropolis ( London, 1797), 401.
73 For example, Canto II: Where Thames, with pride surveys his rising towers; Alexander Pope,
The rape of the lock ( London, 1714), 19.
74 Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century ( London, 1978), 55. If
Defoe is to be believed, it had also been much neglected; Daniel Defoe, Curious and diverting
journies, thro the whole island of Great Britain ( London, 1734), Journey V.
75 Book 1, lines 2478: To where Fleetditch with disemboguing streams, Rolls the large tribute of
dead dogs to the Thames; Alexander Pope, The Dunciad ( London, 1728), 28.
76 For those areas which did not have access to such natural ushing mechanisms, a secondary
sewer was provided, but householders were specically forbidden from connecting privies
to such systems, since the ow of water was erratic in hot weather and the drains simply
clogged up.
Michael Burden 40
Contrary to what one might imagine, there is a deafening silence on the sub-
ject of privies in eighteenth-century builders manuals and dictionaries. The 1734
Builders Dictionary, a publication that claimed to be not only a dictionary but a
complete builders guide for, among others, plumbers, refers to sewers as those
ignoble conveyances, but gives no information of any worth, beyond suggesting
that sewers should be buried deep in the foundations of a building unless running
water was available.77 Isaac Ware, describing the common house in London, does
provide detailed plans for sewers to serve what he called the bog-house, but was
more interested in the appearance of the courtyard, and advocated building the
needful edice at the end of the yard, balancing it with something of a similar
shape and little service opposite, and then paving over the whole.78 Wares bog
house or privy, connected to a brick pit, or cesspool, was the standard method
of sanitation. The cesspool was, at times, ushed out into the sewer, with the
residual solid waste being emptied by the Nightman. As suggested by the trade
card of Samuel Foulger, Nightman for the City and Suburbs seen in Figure 3, the
method used was to transport the waste through the house in an enclosed bin
slung between the shoulders of Foulgers men, who then emptied it into a covered
cart.79 Chamber pots were obviously standard household equipment; when fur-
nished with a timber surround, they were known as a close-stool, and were
similar to that to which George II retired after his morning chocolate on 25
October 1760, and died. A royal situation also provides the context for a descrip-
tion of what appears to have been an early form of water-closet. The irrepressible
Celia Fiennes, visiting Hampton Court, reports that Queen Anne used a seate of
Easement of marble, with sluices of water to wash all down, but this was obviously
not the sort of convenience available to the general populace, and it must be
regarded as a royal ush only.80 More common or garden domestic water-closets
were rst recorded in London in 1733, and are mentioned regularly after that;
they seem to have been in general use by the 1780s.81 By the nineteenth century,
most domestic water-closets were similar to that drawn by George Scharf in 1842,
seen in Figure 4.
As far as the theatres are concerned, there is no comment at all on what may
have happened in terms of the provision of toilet facilities in the Restoration, or,
indeed, before 1732. In that year, however, the builder of the new Covent Garden
Theatre, Edward Shepherd, was taken to court by John Rich, the litigious promoter
77 The Builders Dictionary or Gentlemans and Architects Companion ( London, 1734), II, Sewers;
similar comments appear in Richard Neve, The City and Country Purchasers and Builders Dictionary
( London, 1736).
78 Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture ( London, 1761), 346.
79 Dan Cruickshank and Neil Burton, Life in the Georgian City ( London, 1990), 227.
80 Christopher Morris, ed., The Journeys of Celia Fiennes ( London, 1947), 358.
81 Cruickshank and Burton, Life in the Georgian City, 96. Others have opted for a later date, for
example, George Rude, Hanoverian London ( London, 2/2003), 254, who claims that the water-
closet was invented in the 1770s, and would soon be the order of the day.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 41
who had the theatre built as a home for his Lincolns Inn Fields company. Richs
complaint was that Shepherd had not followed the plans that provided for two
privies, one at the North West Angle and the other at the North East Angle
just without the Stage Door of the theatre. In response to Rich, Shepherd coun-
tered that he had constructed:
Fig. 3: The covered cart of Samuel Folger, Nightman for the City and Suburbs, empty-
ing the cesspool. Engraved Trade Card, [ND, but possibly c. 1755]. London Metropolitan
Archives SC/GL/TCC/FIE-GAL.
Michael Burden 42
Fig. 4: The domestic water-closet, as seen in 1842. At the top of the building, closet at
the C of S, George Scharf, Pencil, 1842. 6 The Trustees of the British Museum.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 43
three instead of two privies made (with two Holes in the Seat of each) in a paved yard
which for better accommodation and Sweetness and to prevent any nauseous Smells or
Annoyance to the Theatre are sunk down to the Springs.82
Shepherds solution was obviously sensible; six places over a spring in a paved
yard away from the building was surely doing Rich a favour, for assuming that it
owed strongly, the spring undoubtedly did much to keep the odoriferous efu-
viums to a minimum. However, those at the North East Angle just without the
Stage Door were obviously for the performers; their omission must have been
a serious matter for Rich, and they must have been built subsequently, for they
appear on Gabriel Dumonts plan of Shepherds building, published in 1774.83 It
is not known precisely when these were constructed, but the circumstances suggest
that Shepherd may have been required to complete them under the settlement of
the 1732 contract. Although claiming to include the theatres environs, Dumont
omits the paved yard, so there is no way of locating the original three privies
there, or knowing by their position for whom they might have been intended.
When Shepherds Covent Garden building was remodelled by Inigo Richards
in 1782, the provision of privies in the main building was similarly limited. In
Richardss plan, the provision of two, back-to-back, can clearly be seen. However,
the whole plan illustrates that these are the only ones at this level, and they are
also the only ones provided in the entire building. More importantly, they are only
provided for use for those working backstage. And things were not improved by
Henry Hollands remodelling of the building in 1791; the two privies on the plan
were, similarly, the only two provided, and again, were reserved for backstage use.
At the Opera House, Dumonts plan, seen in Figure 5, provides the initial data.
Unlike Covent Garden, the Opera House had undergone a number of changes in
the auditorium and stage spaces, but the layout of the rest of the building appears
to have been essentially the same as the one designed by John Vanbrugh, which
opened in 1705 and was altered in 1709. Dumonts plan shows indoor privies
for the performers; assuming his drawing to be correct, there are two single privies
in the group of four dressing rooms, the chambres ou les Acteurs shabillent, one
en suite, the other opening into the corridor. Both are grouped around a small
cour, which seems to be more of a light-well. Little or nothing is known of the
provisions at the third major London theatre, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane;
most early plans are missing, and the surviving information is unenlightening.
Water-closets are not recorded inside the theatres until they were included by
James Lewis in 1778 on his unrealised plans for an opera house in the Haymarket.
Lewis allowed for six of them, arranged in pairs: two pairs at pit level, with one
82 PRO C11/2662/1 and PRO C11/2732/81; see also John Orell, Covent Garden Theatre,
1732, Theatre Survey, 33 (1992), 3252.
83 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Coupe prise sur la longueur du Theatre de Coven Garden, a
Londres, in Parallele de Plans des Plus Belles Salles de Spectacles de Italie et de France par le Sieur Dumont
( Paris, 1778). Engraving, [c. 1774].
Michael Burden 44
placed under staircase B, and the third pair at box level.84 As can be seen on his
plan, the architect tucked them away neatly in the voids left by his curving lobbies
and staircases. Lewiss design was, however, speculative; the actual installation of
the rst water-closets appears to have been at the Opera House in 1782, installed
when the interior of the theatre was remodelled by the Polish theatre designer,
Michael Novosielski. As Figure 6 shows, his new water-closets remain sited over
the space which, in the previous building, was occupied by two privies. The fact
that they are in the same position in these successive designs suggests that, like
Shepherds privies at Covent Garden, those at the Kings Theatre opened directly
over a water-course of some sort. Indeed, a plan of one of Londons known under-
ground sewers, seen in Figure 7, shows that the Opera House, on the corner of
84 James Lewis, Original Designs in Architecture ( London, 1780), 1213 and plates XIX and XX; see
also, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, James Lewiss Plans for an Opera House in the
Haymarket (1778), Theatre Research International, 19/3 (1994), 191202.
Fig. 5: Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Plan de Salle de lOpera de Londres et de ses
dependences, in Parallele de Plans des Plus Belles Salles de Spectacles deItalie et de France par le
Sieur Dumont ( Paris, 1778). Engraving, [c. 1774] (with detail). Pennsylvania State University
Library.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 45
the Haymarket and Pall Mall, stood at the junction of the St Albans and Whitehall
sewers.85
A water-closet is also recorded at the short-lived Pantheon Opera House of
1793, where a bill survives from James Wyatt for Mahogany seat &c to the ladies
w.c.; Milhous, Dideriksen and Hume speculate that this elegant water-closet was
intended for use by box patrons.86 They also suggest that the alterations to the
privies recorded in Stephen Framptons bills putting up a Doorway leading to
one of the Privies in the basement, making a pissing place in the necessary and
altering the ap to Water-closets in Blenheim Mews indicate that these facilities
were for use by the male members of the audience,87 and, as at the 1732 Covent
Garden theatre, those in the mews were outside the main structure of the theatre.
85 Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: A Study of their Effects on London and Londoners, and the
Effects of London and Londoners on Them ( London, 2/1992), 63.
86 PRO E112/1824 #7586. Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen and Robert D. Hume, Italian
Opera in Late Eighteenth-century London, II The Pantheon Opera and its Aftermath 17891795 (Oxford,
2001), 2856.
87 Ibid., 285.
Fig. 6: Plan of the Kings Theatre in the Hay Market, attributed to the architect, Michael
Novosielski, 1782 (with detail). Sir John Soanes Museum, 61/5/9. By courtesy of the
Trustees of Sir John Soanes Museum.
Michael Burden 46
One nal lacuna in the surviving documentation is any mention in theatre
accounts for the provision of toilet roll, or necessary paper, colloquially known
as bum-fodder (a term now used in its contracted form bumf , meaning paper-
work; or worthless literature).88 Toilet paper was certainly in use, although hard
evidence of that fact is again difcult to come by. It is unsurprising that one of
its rst mentions is by the earthy and candid Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; her
comment on Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver s Travels Im glad youl write,
Youl furnish paper when I shite is one of the great eighteenth-century literary
put-downs.89 There are also reports of actual books fullling this function. Lord
Chestereld, in one of the letters to his son in which he advised him not to
waste time, suggested that he buy a cheap edition of Horace and keep it in the
necessary house, so that he could tear out the page he had nished reading as
an offering to Cloacina90 that is, to the underground drainage system.91 While
it seems unlikely that a London theatre-goer would attend an evening with a spare
volume of, say, Horace, under his or her arm, this method of providing necessary
paper may partly account for the comparatively limited survival of London playbills
88 Bumf rst appears in Albert Barre`re and C. G. Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant
( London, rev/1897), and, not surprisingly, was initially a boys schoolyard term.
89 Mary Wortley Montagu, lines from The Reasons that induced Dr S to write a poem calld the
Ladys Dressing Room, in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and
Isobel Grundy (Oxford, 1977), 276.
90 Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chestereld, The Letters of the Earl of Chestereld to his Son
( London, 1924) I, CXXXIII, 11 December 1747.
91 The goddess who presides [over] the system of sewers (from the Latin cloaca sewer) which
drained the refuse of the city of Rome. Micha F. Lindemas, Cloacina, Encyclopaedia Mythologica
(1999).
Fig. 7: Nicholas Barton, Sewers constructed by Richard Frith, and associated water-
courses in The lost rivers of London; a study of their effects on London and Londoners, and the effects
of London and Londoners on them ( London, 2/1992), 63. Reproduced by kind permission of
Historical Publications Ltd.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 47
and opera librettos; if an audience member disappeared to the bog house during
Act III, it may well be that Acts I and II of a libretto, having already served one
purpose, fullled a second before the evening was done. But as with the duties of
the necessary women, such provision may well be included in general totals for
goods and services.
In the overall picture, then, theatre plans suggest that for much of the century
the performers in all three of the main London theatres had access to a privy and,
later, a water-closet near their dressing rooms, but patrons, for the most part,
would have had to leave the theatre building and go out into a nearby yard or
mews to avail themselves of the facilities offered, whatever the details of individual
installations. Who supervised these out-of-the-building conveniences remains un-
clear. They appear on no maps or plans of the theatres, and the complete lack of
nancial records in relation to their operation there is not even a nightmans bill
for emptying the pits at the end of the season suggests either complete neglect
or the intervention of outside authority. To go outside the theatre into the darkness
of the yard must have been hazardous, however, and it seems likely that some of
the robberies and assaults reported near the theatres were actually perpetrated
on audience members while they were outside the building during a performance,
using the facilities.
Things were, however, to change. In 1809, both the Theatres Royal burnt to
the ground within months of each other, and the rebuilding proposals show a
complete change of attitude to the provision of sanitary facilities of all kinds.
The plans of Robert Smirkes Covent Garden theatre, which very clearly divide
the dressing rooms into sets for men and women, appear to show four possible
water-closets, giving each sex of performers two devices each.92 But he also pro-
vides a group of public privies near the saloon, another set at pit level, and others
throughout the building.
Benjamin Wyatts 1813 plans for Drury Lane offer even more. On the ground
oor he provided for a water-closet for the Prince Regents box, two water-
closets for the private boxes, one attached to the committee room, two for the
mens dressing room, and one in the large box and ante-room suite opposite the
Prince Regents box. On the dress-box tier, there was one in the ladies cloak-
room, two separate ones for the men, plus the kings water-closet. On the rst
tier of boxes, there were two water-closets for the men and two for the women.
On the second tier of boxes, there were two general water-closets, and four
water-closets backstage. And on the slips level there were two sets of urinals for
the gallery.93 Even when Samuel Beezleys remodelling of Wyatts building in
1822 reduced the provision somewhat, it was still a transformation from the old
House. And it seems that he may have proposed further provision for three
92 Charles Dibdin, jr., History and Illustrations of the London Theatres ( London, 1826), plate 1.
93 Benjamin Wyatt, Observations on the Design for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane ( London, 1813), 5663
and plates 17. Interestingly, in an earlier essay, Observations on the principles of a design for a theatre
( London, 1811), he makes no allusion to this dramatic increase in sanitary provisions, despite
his frank discussion of the elaborate arrangements for abolishing the basket boxes at the back
of the stall where the prostitutes plied their trade, and the segregation of the classes in access
both to the auditorium and to the refreshment rooms.
Michael Burden 48
mens urinals in the street behind Wyatts splendid (and still-extant) lamp-
standards; they were drawn about 1820 by James Winston, who was closely asso-
ciated with the alterations, and who may well have been the model for the gure
shown in the picture (Fig. 8), apparently about to test the efcacy of the design.94
Clearly, the need to leave the building to use the privy (in whatever mechanical
form it existed) had now disappeared, and while servants undoubtedly still helped
the rich, others could be assured of some safety and comfort in using the facilities.
What effect did these advances have on audience behaviour and on the per-
formers? As far as opera-goers were concerned, it seems that the changes were
part of a general move towards modern ideas of audience concentration. One
foreigner, writing in the 1770s, commented of a London audience:
The spectators refrain from applause and laughter until the end of the speech or song,
disturbing neither the listener nor the actor in the performance of his role. If one were
not otherwise aware of being amongst a serious people on this island, one would be
convinced of the fact at the plays. The unbearable jubilation and shouting of the French
over every little trie, for instance when a singer does a trill or sustains a note unusually
long, or a dancer leaps up in the air, is never heard here, except now and then when an
irrepressible youth raises his voice.95
94 A highly entertaining paper by Jim Fowler of the V & A Performance Collections entitled
James Winston: Theatre Architect Manque, given at the Society for Theatre Researchs
meeting in Richmond, Yorkshire, drew my attention to this drawing.
95 Johann Friedrich Karl Grimm, Bemerkungen eines Reisenden durch Deutschland, Frankriech, England
und Holland (Altenburg, 1775), III, 208ff., quoted in John Alexander Kelly, German Visitors to
English Theatres in the Eighteenth Century ( Princeton, 1936), 66.
Fig. 8: Drawing by James Winston of the proposal for a watering place behind the lamp-
standards of Benjamin Wyatts Drury Lane Theatre, c. 1820. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Winston Collection, S.19-1984.
Pots, privies and WCs; crapping at the opera in London before 1830 49
It might be expected that an audience would refrain from applause and laughter
during, say, opera arias; it was, after all, the singers that they had come to hear.
But early in the next century, William Parke was able to record that, at the rst
performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden on 11 March 1819, it
was gratifying to observe the advance music has made in this country during the
last fty years, particularly in our English theatres where, it is now listened to with
attention, and its beauties felt and applauded, even by those in the galleries.96 The
audience (some of the time, at least) was now listening throughout the piece, and
not just waiting for the songs and arias.
However, the singers (and, indeed, other performers) were still at a disadvantage.
The audience, now kitted out with inside facilities, were still not yet provided with
an interval during which to avail themselves, en masse, of the necessary. Indeed,
despite the extra (and improved) provision, the facilities would have been inade-
quate for the numbers which appear to have attended performances. And while
this remained the case, Parkes account of listening should not mislead us into
treating his reformed audience as a modern one. The singers still needed to
perform in a manner such that the audiences attention was attracted and held.
When the singers failed, they bored the demonstrative opera-goers, as Henry
Crabb Robinson found with a staging of Figaro that had no prominent singer;
he spent the evening lounging over the house and in the gallery etc.97 Audience
members still spent time during performances going behind the scenes to see the
dancers, calling in at the boxes to exchange gossip or, like Crabb, simply wander-
ing around the building. So although the conveniences might now be inside (and
convenient), the audience members still went in and out of the auditorium, creat-
ing the low-level noise associated with pushing and shoving in crowded spaces as
they as ritually departed for the pot, the privy or the WC.
96 William Parke, Musical Memoirs ( London, 1830), II, 1467.
97 Eluned Brown, ed., The London Theatre 18111866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson
( London, 1966), 73; 29 June 1816.
Michael Burden 50