What the poet found in the most popular music hall artiste of his time shines a light on a misunderstood genius and the time he lived in
The year 1922 represented a turning point for culture. It marked the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the creation of the BBC and the founding of a small production company by a young animator called Walt Disney. It was also when TS Eliot published his great, knotty poem The Waste Land, pushing modernism to the high ground of English language poetry. And the music hall artiste Marie Lloyd was laid to rest in a funeral that is said to have attracted a bigger crowd than any since the Duke of Wellington’s 70 years earlier.
These last two events have more in common than mere chronology. Lloyd was a woman of the people, a singer of popular ballads, some wistful, some nudge and wink, whose death plunged Eliot into a state of histrionic mourning. She began her career as a teenager singing temperance songs in church and suffered the cruel irony that the last song she performed was about a woman – like her – who had ignored such warnings. Her death, wrote Eliot, was a significant moment in English history, due to her appeal to working-class audiences and “the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest”.
