Digital Transgender Archive

Tom E. Murray in character as "Mother Goose". Photographic postcard, 1907.

Tom. E. Murray as Mother Goose. R. Brown

Part of James Gardiner Collection: photograph album labelled ‘Drag’.

The actor playing the drag role is dressed in a large white dress and holds a tea cup in front of a plain background. The pantomime dame, as seen here played by Tom E. Murray as Mother Goose, slowly evolved from various elements in British popular theatre since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. By the time the best known exponent of the genre, Dan Leno, played in a series of remarkably successful Christmas shows at London's Drury Lane theatre in the 1890s, she was a fully-formed stock character in a fully-formed and extremely popular form of entertainment: the pantomime. The pantomime dame was not a female impersonator. Nobody was fooled, no attempt was made to pass, the whole gag was that the entire audience knew this was a man dressed in a woman's clothes, and the full comic potential of that situation could be exploited. Plots were borrowed from a variety of sources including fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and from the very beginning this was an entertainment designed to amuse children, of all ages. In the present photograph, Mother Goose is dressed as some kind of nurse or governess, and is wearing a semi-bald comedy wig (James Gardiner)