The Postcard
An Oilette Popular Plays Series postcard that was published by Raphael Tuck & Sons, Art Publishers to Their Majesties the King and Queen.
The card was posted in Sittingbourne in Kent, although the date of posting has been removed along with the stamp.
The card was posted to:
Miss Olive Glover,
64, Providence Street,
South Ashford,
Kent.
The brief pencilled message on the divided back was as follows:
"Anything like
this.
G."
The edge of the postcard shows the consequences of the man's flirtation with the maid - a considerably slimmed-down version of his wife has packed her bags and is leaving him, and a family law barrister is waiting in the wings. Or maybe it's the maid who's been given the push?
'A Wife Without a Smile', and Why it Was Banned
The postcard's title refers to the play 'A Wife Without a Smile' which is a comedy in three acts written by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero.
It was first performed at Wyndham's Theatre, London on the 9th. October 1904.
There can't be many plays that have been banned on account of a dancing doll, but Pinero's "Comedy in Disguise", A Wife Without a Smile, suffered precisely that fate.
The clue was in the stage directions: the doll was not just any doll, but a toy bought by Pinero's hero Seymour Rippingill in an attempt to cheer his humourless wife.
So keen is he to make her smile that when his friends come to visit, he bores a hole in his own ceiling, ties a string to the springs of the upstairs sofa and attaches the other end to the doll, so that, as the Illustrated London News's critic drily pointed out:
"The doll acts as indicator of the different
degrees of amorousness of persons using
the couch".
Occasionally, this went so far as to result in a "wild jigging".
As a way of representing sex on stage, it seems pretty tame by today's standards. The couple were married, the sex was implicit rather than explicit and it was, after all, a farce.
At first the critics didn't seem to mind. Pinero was, as the Illustrated London News's critic put it, "Our Premier Dramatist", and while his social dramas (such as The Second Mrs. Tanqueray) had made him a rival to George Bernard Shaw, he was most famous for his farces.
The Times defined the doll as an "Erotometer", but the Illustrated London News's critic protested:
"There is no need to take the joke,
even if it is rather broad, at more
than its face-value".
He went so far as to nominate the doll itself as the most important member of the cast at Wyndham's, and the most popular.
The London News's only cavil was that Dion ("Dot") Boucicault, son of the flamboyant Irish actor-playwright of the same name, was too serious an actor for farce, and was wasted in the role of the joker husband.
The Observer also pitied Boucicault:
"He was required to laugh consumedly
during the first act - an invidious task.
It was the dancing doll that won the trick;
the toy was funnier than Pinero's "Glancing
Wit" or his "Gallery of Contemporary Foibles".
The only person who wasn't laughing was the wife (played by Lettice Fairfax), who cracked only a smile when it transpired that her marriage to Rippingill was, quite literally, a farce - his previous marriage had not been properly annulled.
The Banning of A Wife Without a Smile
The trouble came on the 15th. October 1904, when Brigadier Surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel J. B. B. Myers wrote to Lord Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, in a fury.
Myers hadn't actually seen the play; he had only read a review of it in the Sunday Referee, but he was incensed. He wrote:
"There can be but one inference from the
movements of the dancing doll - in plain
language - of sexual intercourse taking place.
If my surmise be correct, could anything be
more repugnant to every sense of decency?"
Lord Clarendon went to see the play and concluded that:
"Although the doll incident might be indelicately
construed, it might also be regarded as a childish
accessory."
However a week later, a review appeared in The Free Lance under the headline The Dirty Drama:
"The doll is grossly indecent, and the play is
the latest in a slippery slope from Ibscenity
to unashamed obscenity".
The critic also singled out Lord Clarendon:
"For not having saved the British stage a
greater degredation than it ever suffered
at the hands of the Restoration dramatists".
Clarendon started to lose the courage of his convictions, and arranged a meeting with the management at Wyndham's, who vowed to take action, and told him:
"We have moderated the transports
of the doll considerably".
However this was not enough; Clarendon came under pressure from so many people (including the Bishop of London, who asked him "to relieve London of what many felt to be a degrading spectacle") that he withdrew the play's licence, forcing it to close.
However it didn't significantly dent Pinero's glittering career; he continued to be the toast of the West End, and five years later, after the success of another farce about marital distress, Mid-Channel, he was knighted. But there doesn't seem to have ever been a revival of A Wife Without a Smile.