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ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN We are so beautiful, dancing in tights, Mashers adore us for hundreds of nights, Sending us bracelets and little invites, Waiting outside on the mat!62 The Shop Girl also asserts the appropriateness of a modern ‘dancing girl, burlesque or operatic’ to be ‘mother of a race aristocratic/Who will have their noble rights to ancestress in tights’, in this case reinforcing the notion of actresses’ challenge to class rigidity by revealing that a charming shop attendant is the lost heiress to £5 million This enables the foundling to marry her beau, son of a knighted solicitor, overturning his mother’s objections All of these scripts assert that women from the formerly despised classes really provide the more appropriate genetic material for aristocratic regeneration The teleology of their social position, as the Frivolity Theatre actress Miss Plantagenet (‘Andantino Spagnoletti’) asserts in The Shop Girl, closely resembles the upper crust’s They both, for example, are the subjects of photographs and the focus of the masses’ and gentlemen’s fascination in the fashionable West End: I’m a lady not unknown to fame Critics call me by my Christian name And you see my photograph on show Just wherever you may care to go! I’ve been taken in my dinner gown Looking modestly and shyly down, Or kicking high with petticoats that fly, The smartest girl in town! Her transformation to Duchess is, therefore, an easy matter, for social success is a matter of acting correctly: Ah, dear boys you won’t be very glad, When I’m married to a noble lad I shall turn most singularly prim, And I reckon I’ll look after him! Oh, I’ll be a very proper sort, Quite propriety itself in short, And all the peers will vote me a success, The grandest dame at Court!63 162