The intrigue and glamour of the Georgian masquerade left an indelible mark on costumed leisure in Britain that can still be seen today in popular culture and the entertainment industry. Despite its overwhelming popularity among the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, wider changes in the commercialization of leisure caused the masquerade to experience a shift across class and space. Beginning in the Regency period and continuing well into the Victorian era, the masquerade changed from a space for exclusive, elite sociability and conspicuous display to an accessible entertainment of the middling sorts, and later middle classes. At the same time, the nobility and gentry moved their attention to a new form of costumed entertainment, the fancy dress ball.

This paper will begin with a brief overview of the socio-economic movement of the masquerade from upper to middle class and sets out the key distinctions between the two. The focus of the paper will then move to an examination of how middle-class masquerade brought practices of embodiment, racial imitation and impersonation, and appropriation to the middle class in new ways through consumption, dress, and amateur performance. The paper will use a combination of printed ephemera and newspaper reports to look at the specific instance of the Lowther Rooms ‘Indian’ masquerade and how the physical location of the entertainment and the efforts of the managers contributed to the increasing emphasis on and interest in exotic exhibition, as well as existing concepts of social and racial ordering.

Meghan Kobza is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University where she is researching the roots of commercialised cultural appropriation in costumed leisure culture (1750-1850). She has recently completed her first book, The Domino: A Social Biography of a Costume (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and her second book, Masquerade: Unmasking Georgian London, is under contract with Yale University Press. She is also working with the National Trust at the Bath Assembly Rooms to co-produce a pop-up exhibition and public engagement event that brings the Georgian experience of fancy dress to life.

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