While house clearing (long, sad story not to be told here) my sister-in-law came across old magazines about the theatre, 'The Play Pictorial', bound into books. We think they're Edwardian, and they recount plots, praise actresses (all Miss somebody) and actors, and go into great detail about the costumes, stuffed with photographs, and all described in marvellously flowery language.

On a play called 'Passers By':
"Let me own up at once, and without circumlocution, that I was among the great majority of the audience who wept. Not a distressing weep, but just a gentle, pleasurable cry that makes us ejaculate to ourselves, or nearest neighbour, 'how nice.'

"Next to laughing heartily there is nothing for pure enjoyment which can beat the mellow moistening of the eye, when the sentiment catches your breath and the little rivulet of emotion produces the silent sob."

I don't know why there is a prevalent idea that the Victorians and Edwardians were completely stiff-necked - in my limited knowledge of the art and literature of these periods, there may be a stern moral code at work, but they're also just oozing with sentiment. Absolutely no shame attached to shedding a manly tear. Constantly weeping like leaky buckets, the lot of them. Have you read no Dickens, man?

Anyway, point is, I'm drawing using the pictures as reference, for position, costume, etc, and just because some of them are frankly pretty daft. Here is a somewhat rough pen & ink drawing of a serious- looking actress I drew from a photo. I think I may have shrunk her hat slightly: it made her head look the size of a tennis ball in the original pic.