Andrew Horrall – författare

Fred Flintstone lived in a sunny Stone Age American suburb, but his ancestors were respectable, middle-class Victorians. They were very amused to think that prehistory was an archaic version of their own world because it suggested that British ideals were eternal. In the 1850s, our prehistoric ancestors were portrayed in satirical cartoons, songs, sketches and plays as ape-like, reflecting the threat posed by evolutionary ideas. By the end of the century, recognisably human cave men inhabited a Stone Age version of late-imperial Britain, sending-up its ideals and institutions. Cave men appeared constantly in parades, civic pageants and costume parties. In the early 1900s American cartoonists and early Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton adopted and reimagined this very British character, cementing it in global popular culture. Cave men are an appealing way to explore and understand Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

The stage entertainments known as music hall emerged in mid-Victorian London just as the British began colonising large parts of the world.Settlers recreated this metropolitan popular culture throughout the empire and in places under foreign control. They erected music halls resembling those at home, imported songs and sketches, performed inamateur shows and watched touring professionals. London originals were rewritten as commentaries on local conditions. This activity transformed music hall into a marker of an exclusionary British identity overseas and made colonies look and sound more like Britain. The result was that settlers separated by vast distances were linked by a shared popular culture. The touring circuits and cultural affinities the Victorians created endure to this day.