London’s ‘mafeking fever’ reconsidered: Popular entertainments and wartime news culture in may 1900
This article revisits London’s Mafeking celebrations of May 1900, foregrounding the hitherto underappreciated cultural and political significance of West End popular entertainments. Challenging press-focused accounts of jingoism, it demonstrates how journalism and performance culture together shaped public expressions of patriotic fervour. Newspaper coverage reveals that popular entertainment venues served as key sites for disseminating war news. Press depictions of the mafficking crowds, moreover, were them-selves theatrical, reflecting the spatial and sensory influence of the West End pleasure district. By analysing this interplay of popular performance, theatrical space and wartime news culture, the article offers a new framework for understanding the cultural mechanics of wartime patriotism and imperial senti-ment at the turn of the twentieth century
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Published in
Cultural and Social HistoryPages
1-19Publisher
Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.Acceptance date
2025-05-19Publication date
2025-05-22Copyright date
2025ISSN
1478-0038eISSN
1478-0046Publisher version
Language
- en
