ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 157

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN by hoardings showing ‘nude and semi-nude females’ and advertisements promising that ‘the reproductions of these pictures by living persons to be seen inside are exact copies of the originals’.63 Under this scheme, the Palace’s balance sheet went from a operating deficit of £37,000 in its first year as an opera house to a profit of £6,000 in its first year as a music hall under Charles Morton’s management.64 In response to a complaint about these living pictures, a LCC inspector was dispatched on 26 November 1893 He found that the dancers, singers, and eccentrics ‘involved the usual display of limbs encased in tights’, but the tableaux vivants ‘are a new departure’ Some of them are very clever representations of pictures, and statuary to which the most severe could not object, but several are of a classical nature, represented by, apparently semi-nude, or nearly nude women The last one, ‘Aphrodite’, [based on John Gibson’s Tinted Venus] was apparently quite nude, except for a scarf over the loins I say apparently, because in every case, I observed that the body, arms, and bosom were completely clothed in very delicate close fitting fleshings, which, when a warm light was thrown on them, appeared [from the vantage of the orchestra stalls] like nature The audience applauded in recognition of W.P.Dando’s artistic sensibility and Alfred Glendenning’s skill in reproducing these famous paintings of various European schools, interspersing the undraped figures with sentimental genre paintings like Luke Fildes’ The Doctor and P.A.Cot’s duo in The Storm The Tinted Venus, Solomon J.Solomon’s Cassandra, and Bouguereau’s Aurora are typical of the undraped pictures: they display female bodies, nude except for a bolt of filmy cloth wound around one arm and loosely cast over the crotch No one voiced objection, yet the inspector noted that some people would be adverse to ‘such public and complete display of the female form, by living women It is a matter of difficulty to fix the exact point where propriety ends, and impropriety begins The borderland which divides the legitimate from the objectionable is not well defined.’65 Over the ensuing months, the LCC was hounded to chart the borderland and suppress these exhibitions before other establishments, such as the Empire, copied the Palace’s precedent setting undraped presentations.66 At the premiere of the Palace’s second series on 26 February 1894, an inspector noted that 60 per cent of the pictures were ‘either wholly 128