The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the - character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
