Let any one…who has undergone the penance—and it is no slight one—of going to see the burlesques, which, either alone or as introduction to pantomimes, are now filling the West-end theatres, ask himself if they are exhibitions which he can with propriety take any woman or child to witness. The sickening vulgarity of the jokes, the slang allusions, the use of words and phrases unknown in the vocabulary of ladies and gentlemen, the ridicule of associations which are all but sacred, the outrageous caricature of grave passions, the exhibition of crowds of girls in costumes only suitable for the poses plastiques of Leicester-square, above all, the way in which young actresses are made to say and do things which must destroy every shred of modesty and feminine grace in them, make these burlesques pernicious alike to performers and audience.
—Anonymous critic from Fraser’s Magazine, 1858
