Lively and innovative, these well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry get inside the popular experience of the pub, music-hall, theater and comic press. In this new leisure world, audiences learned how to be performers themselves, adopting roles and styles appropriate to the unsettling dynamics of the modern city. A major advance in understanding how popular culture actually works, this is a model of the successful integration of the theory and practice of social history and cultural studies.