“Charly and Family come home to Bath”: The On- and Off-Stage Masculinities of a Touring Entertainer (1899 – 1904). 

In August 1899, Bath-born “Refined Entertainer” Carl Fredericks joined Charles W. Poole’s No. 1 Myriorama tour in Dublin along with his wife, daughter and son, taking in around two hundred locations across Britain and Ireland over the course of around five years. On stage, Fredericks specialised in popular, family-appropriate material in line with the Myriorama’s core ethic of ‘amusement with instruction’, with his up-to-date ventriloquial act and his abilities as a ‘Genial Guide’ (a master of ceremonies, of sorts), receiving positive journalistic responses. Off stage, surviving documentation reveals a negotiation of several roles in the course of the tour, including father, husband, son and business manager. These shifting personas were particularly pronounced through the demands of touring employment, calling into question any claims to a secure middle-class “domesticity” (Tosh, 1999). During these years, certain challenges would be presented to the family in the form of uncomfortable travel, cramped accommodation and significantly the expectancy of a third child. In this light, we might surmise that Fredericks’ clean-cut, refined presentation on stage was in persistent dialogue with the every-day realities off it. This paper has two lines of inquiry. The first is methodological – what resources can we draw on to construct the biographical histories of touring entertainers in the absence of first-hand ‘ego-documents’ and how do we fill in the inevitable blanks? The second concerns the tricky terrain of social identity, specifically the ways in which the touring life squared with normative models of late Victorian and Edwardian masculinity. I hope to show that a biographical approach towards the histories of touring entertainers may provide a unique answer to the question “is the history of masculinity to be a history of representations or practices?” (Griffin, 2018: 7).  At least with Carl Fredericks, the answer might be both.

Nick Havergal is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate based at the University of Bristol and University of Exeter, supported by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. His thesis focusses on practices of masculinity in leisure and popular performance between 1880 and 1914, drawing on the South West of England as a core case study. He is developing future projects on the interplay between sport and popular entertainment in Edwardian Britain, and on biographical approaches to turn-of-the-century touring infrastructures. He is also an active playwright, having been on attachment at Bristol Old Vic.