ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 167

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN curiosity about her parcel is stimulated Actresses, after all, are one of the few types of women who change their clothes away from home and whose occupation necessitates the use of numerous fetishized garments When the bundle bursts, the spectators note the significant objects: the wings that denote her as a ballet girl (suggesting low status and high sensuality) rather than a dramatic actress (inferring, by contrast, high status and high sensuality), and the tights that are worn by women in all genres of popular entertainment from music hall to pantomime, ballet, extravaganza, burlesque, opera bouffe, and Shakespeare When the swell picks up the ballet girl’s tights he not only holds the symbol of her profession and the icon of her sexual appeal, but he also manipulates the indexical sign of her skin—of her actual self Prostrate on the sidewalk, the hapless dancer is deprived of her pelvis and legs: the swell restores them to her Though they are hers to have, they are his to hold Her embarrassment in acknowledging this (and having to succumb obeisantly to it in the glaring midday sun) is understandable The coherent system of sensual referents is played out in this episode at high noon, and not surprisingly culminates with the actress’s hurried concealment of the tights from public view The story is set in a particular place—the Strand in Westminster (the West End)—which in the nineteenth century was as much a theatrical thoroughfare and the focus of London’s dramatic life as New York’s Broadway The Strand was also the principal link between the leisured club land of Mayfair and the commercial square mile in the City of London Aside from these official functions, the Strand sported a major nocturnal street market for prostitution all along its considerable length Expectations of the dancer and her bundle were formed in part by the geography of sensual activity in the neighbourhood Augmenting erotic associations of the theatres and street prostitution, Holywell Street (known throughout the British Empire as Booksellers’ Row) stood at the eastern end of the Strand; the source of the anecdote, Here and There, was just the sort of serial sold for threepence or a penny in the shops of Booksellers’ Row in every decade from the Regency period (when there were already at least ninety retailers of erotica on the street)2 until it was cleared for the Aldwych reconstruction in 1899 The inclusion of actresses and incidents within and around theatres in so much pornography throughout the Victorian period demonstrates the theatre’s enduring erotic fascination By specifying certain performers and setting stories in the West End where these 138