Hunt the Slipper

What could be more of a British institution than the Christmas Pantomime? – and what Pantomime could be more typical of the genre than Cinderella? My paper focuses on one particular production from The Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1804 which serves as the foundation of “Modern English Pantomime” and attempts to place this production in context within the dance-culture of late Georgian Theatre in London, within the popular culture of the day, and examines the increasing role of children both on the stage and in the audience. 

Keith Cavers is an independent curator, scholar and consulting iconographer. He studied Stage Management at RADA and History of Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell. His thesis on James Harvey D’Egville (Surrey) led to a visiting research fellowship at Harvard in 1996 where he returned in both 2015 and 2016. He was Slide Librarian and a Visiting Lecturer at Camberwell for twenty years and Information Officer at the National Gallery London for twelve. During lockdown he assembled a chronological sourcebook of late Georgian published sources (now well over 570,000 words), with a matching Iconography (460+). In 2021 he contributed a chapter on D’Egville to ‘With a Grace Not to Be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer, 1760-1830’, and on Clarissa Wybrow for the Queen’s University Belfast ‘Dance Biographies’ blog. He is currently working on an historical study: “Ballet in Late Georgian London 1776 – 1836.”