Song of the perfect cure, music cover by Concanen & Lee, showing performer J H Stead, 1861 © Reading University Library

This Victorian music cover portrays the performer James Henry Stead in the song which he made famous. Stead’s performance of the song with its accompanying dance was extraordinary. He was really a dancer, and after singing the verse and chorus, he would leap up and down over 400 times with both feet at once. According to ‘Household Words’, a contemporary magazine, Stead could actually perform this jump an astonishing 1,600 times in succession.

The original lithographic music cover was printed in three colours. The costume consisted of plain red and white vertical stripes with the usual brownish lithotint background. The design was very simple, and yet very striking. The stark figure of Stead suspended in mid-air rivets the attention of the viewer, and the conical hat makes Stead appear ten feet tall.

During his short career Stead, like so many music-hall artistes, appeared at three or four theatres in one evening, performing the same act at each. This must have required superhuman physical endurance for Stead. The song was advertised as ’sung for upwards of nine hundred nights with unbounded success’ at Weston’s Music Hall in Holborn, London. For a short time Stead achieved great fame with his performance of ‘Song of the Perfect Cure’, but his reputation dwindled into obscurity soon afterwards, and in 1886 he died in an attic a poor man.

This music cover was produced in 1861 by the prolific lithographer Alfred Concanen (1835-1886) who portrayed many figures of the Victorian theatre and the London streets in his music cover work, capturing the liveliness and eccentricity of the mid-Victorian theatre and music-hall scene for posterity.

Text by Fiona Melhuish, Rare Books Librarian, Special Collections Services, University of Reading.

View the Spellman Collection of Victorian Music Covers