"The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. At the same time, these social arbiters were devotees of the spontaneous culture of "the people."" "Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the burgeoning middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes a new perspective to a growing body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism."--BOOK JACKET.