Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character

While there are many studies of nineteenth-century race theories and scientific racism, the attitudes and stereotypes expressed in popular culture have rarely been examined, and then only for the latter half of the century. Theatre then was mass entertainment and these forgotten plays, hastily written, surviving only as hand-written manuscripts or cheap pamphlets, are a rich seam for the cultural historian. Mining them to discover how ‘race’ was viewed and how the stereotype of the black developed and degraded, sheds a fascinating light on the development of racism in English culture. In the process, this book helps to explain how a certain flexibility in attitudes towards skin colour, observable at the end of the eighteenth century, changed into the hardened jingoism of the late nineteenth. Concentrating on the period 1830 to 1860, its detailed excavation of some seventy plays makes it invaluable to the theatre historian and black studies scholar.

• Accessibly written and organised both chronologically and thematically • Provides a broad framework, covering the beginning of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century • An important addition to the growing body of studies on transatlantic culture

Introduction; 1. From vengeance to sentiment; 2. The beginning of the end for the black avenger; 3. Ira Aldridge and the battlefield of race; 4. The comic and the grotesque: the American influence; 5. The consolidation of the black grotesque; 6. Slavery freed from the constraint of blackness; 7. Uncle Tom - moral high ground or low comedy?; Afterword.

\'As always, Water\'s assumption is that this theatrical racism was not self-generated but the result of immediate ideological pressures. The rigour of her research has produced not only an important work of theatre history but, more pressingly, clear evidence of how the potency of performance can both challenge and reinforce racist attitudes.\' Times Literary Supplement

\' … packed with … lifelong historical insight …\' Tribune