AA pantomime performance is a unique blend of eccentricity and absurdity, a wild mixture of songs, jokes, outrageous costumes and slapstick physical humour. For many British children, their first family trip to see a pantomime in the Christmas holiday season is their introduction to the magic of the theatre. But what has become a quintessentially British form of entertainment is more than just simple fun. As an art form, pantomime presents a tale of good and evil, where hope finally triumphs after danger and virtual despair.

BThe story of pantomime begins with the commedia dell’arte tradition in 16th-century Italy. These improvised shows took place in streets and marketplaces in Italy and eventually throughout Europe. Distinctive masks enabled audiences to recognise the people in these stories immediately; they also allowed actors to be rude or disrespectful without fear of being recognised. The key roles in the cast were invariably rich old men, usually portrayed as cowardly and disreputable; young lovers whose parents refuse to let them marry; and ingenious and quick-witted servants. Many commedia plots show the latter, whose lives are a constant struggle to find food and money, outwitting the old men or overthrowing their masters. This theme of the victory of the underdog is still an essential feature of pantomime today.

CBy the mid-18th century, many thousands of people were going to theatres across Britain every night. Among the most popular performances were harlequinades, a new kind of entertainment which interwove Ovid’s first-century Latin poem Metamorphoses with aspects of the Italian commedia. Created by actor John Rich, these early pantomimes cleverly mixed spectacle, music, ballet and myth, and were tremendously enjoyable to watch. Amazing transformations happened at the touch of a magic wand, with mechanical serpents and flying vehicles. They also showed that even early pantomime was fascinated by the crossing of boundaries: the ambiguity of men dressed as women, and the fun of animal characters played by human beings.

DDespite their popularity, Rich’s spectacular performances attracted huge controversy. Critics bitterly attacked pantomimes, complaining that they would bring about the downfall of Shakespeare and the death of serious theatre. David Garrick, the great 18th-century actor-manager, was quick to join these criticisms, while also realising the commercial opportunities of this new art form. But how could Garrick take advantage of the craze and still maintain his position as the defender of ‘legitimate’ theatre? His tactic was to set about changing pantomime’s cultural identity, partly by confining shows to his theatre’s Christmas season. Pantomimes became associated with the frivolity of the holiday season rather than being denounced as a threat. In doing so, Garrick created a convention which has survived to this day.

EAt the end of the 18th century, popular theatre saw the arrival of the white-faced Clown, in the form of actor Joseph Grimaldi. By the early 19th century, Britain was at war with France; there was intense civil unrest and violent confrontations between the government and the people. Grimaldi’s hilarious antics embodied the freedom and liberty of British culture by contrast with the country’s supposedly dull, humourless enemies. His anarchic activities included chasing and imprisoning policemen and stealing gigantic quantities of sausages. But the Clown was never caught or sent to jail. Audiences were thrilled by his mischief and his endless eating precisely because he created on stage the fantasy of a different world: a world without hunger, a world of comic revenge against a highly repressive government. Grimaldi became one of the great satirists of his age, a character who offered ludicrous commentaries on everything from the ruling classes to fashion, technology and new forms of transport.

FBy the late 19th century, photography had arrived, the telegraph had been invented and the first motor cars were starting to appear on British streets. Meanwhile, the spotlight on the comic stage shifted away from the Clown and towards an unexpected star, the pantomime ‘Dame’: a tired housewife – always played by a man – struggling to cope in an unfriendly world. Dan Leno was the celebrated performer who created and played this talkative and eccentric working-class woman, a mother facing the difficulties of poverty, which he and his audiences knew all too well. In the Dame, Leno developed a persona whose theatrical power comes from the locking together of compassion and laughter. At the same time, artists such as Leno began to infuse pantomime with the plots and dilemmas of working people’s culture.

GPantomimes are as popular today as they have ever been. Our delight in this form comes from a complex mixture of emotions and relationships. Pantomime offers us the anarchic excitements of a topsy-turvy world only to give up the assurance of harmony restored. The engaging character of the Dame exemplifies pantomime’s self-proclaimed absurdity. Her comical conversations with the audience cut across the boundaries between performers and spectators, drawing us into her chaotic world. While she presides over the anarchy which Grimaldi once visited on policemen, the Dame also embodies the collective ties which bind us together as families, as neighbours, and as members of society.

Ever since its elevation to the status of an academic discipline, history has been very largely concerned with problems of its own making. These may be gaps which the young researcher is advised by supervisors to fill, or established views which he or she is encouraged to challenge. In either case, the need for the researcher to provide new insights in order to gain professional advancement often counts for more than the intrinsic interest of the topic.

Social history is quite different. It touches on, and arguably helps to focus, major issues of public debate. It mobilises popular enthusiasm and engages popular passions. It prides itself on being concerned with everyday things rather than sensational events and is directed against the ‘Great Man’ theories that originally characterised history, and the tedious focus on bureaucratic issues that subsequently dominated the 1920s and 30s. This is also reflected in the way it is taught, through the adoption of multi-disciplinary perspectives rather than a narrow historical interpretation.

Social history emerged, both as a popular enthusiasm and as a scholarly practice, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s in North America and Europe, and reproduces its leading inspirations. The spirit of social history was pre-eminently a modernising one, as reflected in its choice of subject matter. Whereas traditional history had focused on the 12th to 17th centuries, social history was apt to make its historical homeland in the 19th century, while latterly, it has even begun to extend its inquiry up to contemporary events and movements.

The subject matter favoured by the new social history, with its move away from the aristocracy and the establishment, corresponds to other cultural manifestations of the 1960s, as for instance New Wave British cinema, with its working-class protagonists, or ‘pop art’, with its use of everyday artefacts. Similarly, the anti-institutional bias of the new social history – the renewed determination to write the history of ‘ordinary’ people as against that of statecraft – could be said to echo a much more widespread collapse of social deference, and a questioning of authority figures of all kinds.

Another major 1960s influence on the new social history – very different in its origins and effects – was the ‘nostalgia industry’, which focused on the sale of memorabilia and artefacts from recent history. This emerged as a kind of negative counterpart to the otherwise dominant modernisation of the decade and reflected a disenchantment, no less apparent on the Left of the political spectrum than on the Right, with post-war social change.

Industrial archaeology, an invention of the 1960s, elevated disused factories and mills to the status of national monuments. Following in the same track, property restorers turned houses built for 19th-century factory workers, once emblems of poverty, overcrowding and ill-health, into picturesque residences. In another sphere one could point to the proliferation of folk clubs and the discovery of industrial folk song as prefiguring one of the major themes of the new social history: the dignity of labour.

So far as historical work was concerned, by the 1970s the sense of disenchantment had crystallised into an idealised view of the past, and a nostalgic regard for disappearing communities. Restoration of the vanished components of the world we have lost became a major impetus in historical writing and research. The dignity of ordinary people could be said to be the unifying theme of this line of historical inquiry and retrieval, a celebration of everyday life, even, perhaps especially, when it involved hardship and suffering.

Despite the novelty of its subject matter, social history reproduces many of the characteristic biases of its predecessors. Social historians are good at amassing details on household artefacts, budgets, daily purchases, but at times the evidence is assumed to speak for itself, and the simple reproduction of fact masquerades as explanation. The facts accumulated may leave no conceptual space for the great absences, for the many areas where the documentary record is silent.

The indulgence which social historians extend towards their subjects and the desire to establish ‘empathy’ – seeing the past in terms of its own values rather than those of today – can also serve to flatter our self-esteem, making history a field in which, at no great cost to ourselves, we can demonstrate our enlarged sympathies and benevolence. Recognising our kinship to people in the past, and tracing, or discovering, their likeness to ourselves, we are flattered in the belief that underneath we are all lovable; eccentric perhaps and even absurd, but large-hearted, generous and frank.

Social history, if it is to fulfil its subversive potential, needs to be a great deal more disturbing. If it is to celebrate a common humanity, and to bring past and present closer together, far more weight needs to be given to the effects of insecurities and emergencies – the fears that shadow the growing up of children, the oppositions we encounter during our lives – experiences which may be hard for an individual to categorise but which nevertheless have a significance which goes beyond that individual.

Perhaps too we might recognise that there is a profound condescension in the notion of ‘ordinary people’ – that unified totality in which social historians are apt to deal. Implicitly it is a category from which we tend to exclude ourselves, although in fact we are exceptional only by our privilege of hindsight. ‘There are … no masses,’ Raymond Williams wrote, ‘only ways of seeing people as masses.’ It is perhaps time for historians to scrutinise the term ‘ordinary people’ in the same way.