sb. pl. A row of lights placed in front of the stage of a theater, on a level with the feet of the actors, and furnished with reflectors so as to throw all their light upon the scene. Often transf. = the ‘stage’; to smell of the footlights = to be redolent of the stage.
1836–9. Dickens, Sk. Boz (1850), 74/2. The foot-lights have just made their appearance.
1880. Ouida, Moths, II. 322–3. My own art has a little too much smell of the footlights; I have too few hours alone with Beethoven and Mozart, and too many with the gaslit crowds before me.
1883. S. C. Hall, Retrospect, II. 270. It might be said of MacIan that the heather grew in his heart. His experience of the footlights had not chilled, in the faintest degree, his love of Nature.
b. attrib. (in sing.)
1870. Lowell, Among my Bks., Ser. I. (1873), 324. Herr Stahr, who has no little fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says, ‘It may easily be imagined that he himself regarded his appointment as an insult rather than as an honor.’
1894. G. Egerton, Keynotes, 1. It seems profane, indelicate, to bring this slangy, vulgar tune, and with it the mental picture of footlight flare and fantastic dance into the lovely freshness of this perfect spring day.
