Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture

Paul Maloney has worked as a stage director in opera and has taught, researched and published widely in the fields of Scottish popular theatre and twentieth century Scottish political theatre.  Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is the author of Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850-1914 (2003).

“ … the book is a pleasure to read – a treasure trove of examples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular performance, a testimony to the ways in which managers negotiated with the community around them and a well-written investigation into the relationship between urban shifts and the tensions and representations of contemporary immigrant communities.” (Louise Wingrove, Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 23 (2), April, 2018) “Paul Maloney’s enthusiasm and meticulous re - search make this a fabulous and much welcome book. … The Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture is a rich study, thoughtfully constructed and expertly carried through. It will be of interest to all scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performance cultures and social histories, and is a much appreciated addition to the Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history series.” (Maggie B. Gale, New Theatre Quarterly, November, 2017)

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Britannia Music Hall, 1859-1905.- Chapter 3. ‘Flying Down the Saltmarket’.- Chapter 4. ‘Ikey Granitestein from Aberdeen’.- Chapter 5. Pickard’s Panopticon, 1906-1938.- Chapter 6. ‘Paradise for a couple of hours’.