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Michael Pickering sets out to provide a serious historical study of blackface minstrelsy in Britain from the 1840s to the 1970s, a trend that has been neglected in academic scholarship despite its integral role in Victorian Music Hall (which has been the subject of studies by authors such as Peter Bailey and Dagmar Kift). Conscious of the potential pitfalls of analysing a historical phenomenon through a modern lens, Pickering attempts to place himself in a contemporaneous mindset and evaluate minstrelsy on its own terms. Throughout, he illustrates and augments his argument with detailed and often anecdotal reference to individuals and specific stage acts.
In his Preface, he explains the differing role of the blackface minstrel in Britain from that in America, and its enduring longevity and success despite racist elements in its reception. British minstrelsy, Pickering explains, was not an imitation of black critical expression and practice, but rather a caricature based on white conceptions of Africans and African-Americans. Examples of distinctively British characteristics that emerged in British minstrelsy include word play and puns in songs (e.g. p. 47), and the use of blackface buffoonery as a racial foil for the promotion of English nationalism at a time when the old Empire was in decline.
In nine wide-ranging chapters, Pickering covers the emergence of minstrelsy in 1840s Britain, its urban and rural practitioners, issues of race and the use of blackface as a mask by white minstrels, and later developments in minstrelsy and its legacy. This approach is useful in providing a commentary on the issues from different viewpoints, but chronological cohesiveness suffers. A running theme of the book is the way in which minstrelsy was able to cross traditional class and social boundaries. (Pickering claims that such distinctions were eliminated, because 'the eschewal of vulgarity was central to British minstrelsy's cross-class appeal', p. 40). A further recurring element of Pickering's argument...