Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Nineteenth–Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies 1. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires Awam Amkpa 2. Brecht and Critical Theory Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics Sean Carney 3. Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting Jonathan Pitches 4. Performance and Cognition Theatre Studies after the Cognitive Turn Edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart 5. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture From Simulation to Embeddedness Matthew Causey 6. The Politics of New Media Theatre Life®™ Gabriella Giannachi 7. Ritual and Event Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Mark Franko 8. Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater Upstaging Dictatorship Ana Elena Puga 9. Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work Foreign Bodies of Knowledge Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento

10. Movement Training for the Modern Actor Mark Evans 11. The Politics of American Actor Training Edited by Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud 12. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama Anna McMullan 13. The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre Stephen Di Benedetto 14. Ecology and Environment in European Drama Downing Cless 15. Global Ibsen Performing Multiple Modernities Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Barbara Gronau, Christel Weiler 16. The Theatre of the Bauhaus The Modern and Postmodern Stage of Oskar Schlemmer Melissa Trimingham 17. Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama Community, Kinship, and Citizenship Kanika Batra 18. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Marty Gould

Nineteenth–Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

Marty Gould

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Marty Gould to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gould, Marty, 1972Nineteenth century theatre and the Imperial encounter / Marty Gould. p. cm. — (Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies ; 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-88984-1 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-203-81906-7 (e-book) 1. Theater—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. English drama—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Theater and society—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 4. Imperialism—Great Britain—History. I. Title. PN2594.G68 2011 792'.0941'09034—dc22

ISBN 0-203-81906-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88984-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-81906-7 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

1

viii ix

Introduction: Around the World in Eighty Plays

1

Imperial Theatrics: Spectacle and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

13

PART I Recasting the Castaway: The Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Robinsonade

2

3

4

Introduction to Part I

31

The Novel Is Not Enough: Text and Performance in The Cataract of the Ganges

34

Adapting a Nation to Empire: The Evolution of the Crusoe Pantomime

50

In Crusoe’s Clothes: Performing Authority in The Admirable Crichton

73

PART II Theatrical Nabobery: Imperial Wealth, Masculinity, and Metropolitan Identities Introduction to Part II

93

vi Contents 5

The Stage Nabob’s Eighteenth-Century Origins

6

“The Yellow Beams of His Oriental Countenance”: The Nabob as Racial and Cultural Hybrid

114

Australian Gold Rush Plays and the Anglo-Indian Nabob’s Antipodal Antithesis

139

7

98

PART III Staging the Mutiny: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Imperial Crisis Introduction to Part III

155

8

India in the Limelight: Empire and the Theatre of War

161

9

The Empire Needs Men: Mutiny Plays and the Mobilization of Masculinity

175

10 Forging a Greater Britain: The Highland Soldier and the Renegotiation of Ethnic Alterities

188

Conclusion: The Imperial Encounter from Stage to Screen

209

Notes Bibliography Index Index of Plays

215 235 251 262

Figures

1.1.

Representing the World: The Interior of Wyld’s Globe (1851).

25

1.2.

Ambassador of Civilization: Lydia Thompson as Robinson Crusoe (c. 1870).

29

The Robinsonade’s Defi ning Moment: Illustration from The Old Drury Lane Christmas Annual’s review of E. L. Blanchard’s Robinson Crusoe (1881).

65

The Blessings of Civilization: “A New Race in Africa!” Punch (1895).

70

Social Divisions among the Castaways: The Admirable Crichton, Act One, Scene Two (1914).

85

The Nabob at Home: Cover of Dick’s Standard Plays Edition of The Bengal Tiger (1837).

91

3.1.

3.2. 4.1. 5.1. 5.2.

The Pampered Nabob: “A male Anglo-Indian being washed, dressed and attended by five Indian servants” (1842).

100

Anglo-Indian Indulgence: “Sir David Ochterlony in Indian dress and smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in his house in Delhi” (1820).

101

5.4.

The Hybridized Anglo-Indian Body: “Count Roupee” (1797).

103

6.1.

Domestic Disruption and the Great Exhibition: “Perfidious Albion Lets His Drawing Room to a Distinguished Foreigner—the Result!” Punch (1851): 174.

129

The Theatre of War: “The Fall of Delhi” at Burford’s Panorama in Leicester Square (1858).

153

Britain’s Men Are Called to Duty: “Who Will Serve the Country?” Punch (1857): 140.

183

Britain’s Women Answer the Call: “We’ll Serve the Shop.” Punch (1857): 141.

184

5.3.

8.1. 9.1. 9.2.

Acknowledgments

This book began life as a course project and quickly grew into a dissertation. Since then, it has been expanded and revised in various ways. At every stage of its development, this project has been sustained through the generosity of others, and I owe enormous debts of gratitude to those who have offered advice as well as those who have provided material assistance. The research for this project required much time in many archives, from the Lilly and Newberry Libraries to the special collections at the Universities of Texas, Glasgow, and Manchester. Certainly this work would not have been possible without the theatre resources of the British Library and Victoria and Albert Museum. But the place most connected with this project is the University of Iowa, where I had the great fortune to begin this work under the direction of an incredibly patient and infi nitely helpful group of scholars: Teresa Mangum, Garrett Stewart, Judith Pascoe, Kim Marra, and Bluford Adams saw this project through its dissertation phase, and I thank them for being such thorough and thoughtful readers and for never saying no when I asked for letters of recommendation. A project of this magnitude also requires a good sum of money, and I am unbelievably fortunate to have occasion to thank a great many granting agencies for their generous fi nancial assistance. An Andrew W. Mellon Summer Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European Studies and travel grants from the Society for Theatre Research and the American Society for Theatre Research launched my project, and additional support in the form of an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at Indiana University’s Lilly Library and a Short-Term Residential Fellowship for Individual Research at Chicago’s Newberry Library helped sustain its momentum. From the University of Iowa I was granted an embarrassment of riches: the University of Iowa Student Government Research Grant, two Graduate Student Government Research Grants, the Stanley Graduate Fellowship for Research Abroad, the T. Anne Cleary Fellowship, the Frederick F. Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for Teaching and Research, and the Seashore Dissertation Fellowship. The University of South Florida has also been incredibly generous. With support from the University Research Council and the Humanities Institute, I was able to complete my research

x

Acknowledgments

and bring the project to a conclusion. I am humbled by the confidence in my work expressed by all of these organizations, and I remain grateful for the generous fi nancial resources they entrusted to me over the years. Money undoubtedly opens doors, but a book cannot progress without lively intellectual engagement. I can hardly begin to recount the debts I owe to those who have read drafts of chapters, responded to excerpts at conferences, or listened patiently as I talked my way through arguments about plays they had never heard of. The enthusiastic crowd at the Dickens Universe and my students at the Universities of Iowa and South Florida must be thanked, for they asked the right questions, listened as I tried out new material, and motivated me to approach the topic visually as well as rhetorically. Most importantly, they helped me to see the pleasures of these rather peculiar plays and showed me that this relatively obscure material was well worth talking about. I also thank those who organized and attended the various panels at which I tried out early versions of my chapters: SouthCentral MLA (2002), Victorians Institute (2003), Midwest MLA (2003), Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (2009), and USF Humanities Institute (2009). Special thanks to the fi ne folks at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, who not only invited me back to give a second paper but also honored me—twice—with the Burgan Prize (2003, 2005). The questions and comments I received during these early airings of my material have been of enormous help in shaping the arguments of this book. Friends and colleagues, too, should be thanked, though I can only begin to enumerate my various personal debts: Crisi Benford, Rebecca Mitchell, Laura Runge, Ed Mallot, Vickie Clarke. To one and all, I say “thank you” for supporting and critiquing, encouraging and enduring. One particular pair of hardy souls saw this project through from its beginning to its end, and although they fall last in this list of acknowledgments, their contributions to my present and future work deserve no end of praise. I cannot begin to repay the enormous debts I owe to them for all they have done to support my work and to shape me personally as well as professionally: Teresa Mangum—who directed my dissertation and remains a close advisor and much valued colleague—and my partner Thomas Williams—who missed me while I was busy, reassured me when I most needed it, and read attentively every word I wrote (more often than he wanted to, I’m sure). This book would not exist without either of them, and I am more grateful to both of them than I will ever be able to say.

Introduction Around the World in Eighty Plays

The British Empire of the nineteenth century was spectacular in every sense of the word. It was spectacularly big, covering roughly one-fifth of the world’s surface and embracing nearly 400 million people.1 It was spectacularly influential, reshaping political institutions, economic practices, and cultural norms all over the world. It was spectacularly celebrated, inscribed in countless monuments and generating impressive processions. And to those who lived at its metropolitan center, it was spectacularly present, in the shows, exhibitions, and plays that entertained and educated the London masses. Building and maintaining an empire of such proportions required vast human and fi nancial resources. Public funds were spent on building railroads in Africa or equipping armies to extend the borders of British India even as London’s sanitation projects languished and the working poor suffered the stings of starvation and disease. Securing the nation’s resources for overseas expansion required public commitment to the imperial project in the face of the empire’s gravest and most humbling crises: the Indian Mutiny, the Siege of Mafeking, the disaster at Khartoum. Every English soldier who did not return home raised questions about the real cost of the nation’s imperial ambitions. Countering skepticism and quieting the voices of opposition became a front-line battle, fought not with rifle and cannon but with word and image (Kitzan 2001: 166, 175). If it was to survive and grow, the British Empire could not remain “out there” as some vague, unarticulated abstraction. It needed to be brought home and engraved in the hearts and minds of the very people in whose name great sums of money were spent and large numbers of lives were lost. Empire-building was thus not just a political or military concern, but a cultural project. To shed light on how Britain sustained its imperial energies, this book explores the world of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment, showing how popular spectacles domesticated the empire for the home audience, mediating Britons’ encounter with the rest of the world and encouraging public commitment to their nation’s costly and ambitious project of global expansion. For in the nineteenth century, the theatre served as a primary site for the imperial encounter, providing dynamic representations of Britain’s ever-growing territorial claims and giving concrete form

2

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

to those remote peoples and places that had “absent-mindedly” become attached to Britain but that were, for most Britons, alien and only vaguely imagined. With authentically dressed casts numbering in the hundreds, rifle and cannon fi re, full-size replicas of Buddhist temples, live horses, and patriotic music, plays such as The Relief of Lucknow (Britannia, 1858), The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane, 1823), and The Conquest of Mysore (Adelphi, 1838) bridged the gap between documentary verisimilitude and spectacular entertainment, systematically exploiting all available visual technologies in a constant quest to satisfy an English public eager for ever-more elaborate displays of the empire. Although many scholars have pointed to the novel as the primary cultural artifact of empire, I argue not only that the empire came to England via the stage, but that it was in the theatre and related venues of popular spectacle that Britons came to see themselves as masters of an imperial domain. Newspapers reported the latest military conquests; travel writers described distant landscapes; novelists incorporated imperial themes, but the empire itself came to life in London’s popular theatrical venues. The nineteenth-century stage was a timely entertainment, nightly engaging with the most important headlines of the day. The discovery of gold at Ballarat in 1850, for example, inspired a five-year frenzy of dramatic production which yielded dozens of plays about the Australian gold mines, a moment of dramatic production I look at in Chapter 7. Imperial crises, too, found their way onto the stage. In the year following the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, theatres around London offered dramatizations of the event, from The Storming and Capture of Delhi at Astley’s to Highland Jessie Brown; or, Lucknow Rescued at the Queen’s Theatre. Nor did theatrical interest in the Mutiny end with the crushing of the rebellion by British relief forces; mutiny-themed plays continued to appear in London theatres through the remainder of the century, giving us Nana Sahib; or, a Story of Aymere at the Royal Victoria in 1863, Hand and Teale’s Pyrotechnic Spectacle, The Relief of Lucknow, which appeared in Canada in 1895, and The Victoria Cross, which received its theatrical license in 1896, forty years after the Mutiny had been suppressed. Important moments in the history of the empire were thus enshrined not only in statues and commemorative plaques, but in plays. Capable of keeping imperial history alive in a more dynamic form than was possible through the museum’s static display techniques, the theatre exhibited and celebrated empire. 2 But the theatre issued its challenges to Britain’s imperial image as well: from the Robinsonade’s critique of the civilizing mission to the theatrical nabob’s embodiment of cultural contamination, the stage cast an occasionally critical eye on the motives that drove the imperial machine as well as the potential social cost of the nation’s global ambitions. I wish in this book to consider two facets of imperial theatrics as they manifested themselves in London, the metropolitan heart of the empire and the cultural center of Great Britain. As Jacky Bratton has argued, the imperial state requires that all citizens of the metropole, regardless of individual

Introduction

3

differences, metaphorically perform the role of “Empire-builder . . . a natural superior to the other races and nations of the world” (1991: 5). In staging imperialist dramas, the metropolitan theatre modeled for its audiences the roles they were to mimic, if not internalize. Each of the book’s three divisions focuses on one of these roles—settler, citizen, soldier—and its representation within a related group of plays. As they enacted certain qualities of the imperialist character, these theatrical performances also served as sites of contact between the imperial center and its peripheral possessions. Exhibitions, military reenactments, pictorial spectacles, and conventional dramas brought the empire and its people to the metropole; for many nineteenth-century Britons, these performances were their only contact with the people and lands under British dominion.3 Out of all of Britain’s overseas possessions, it was India, the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, that the stage most frequently invoked, and so plays about India and its relationship to Britain dominate much of my discussion (see Parts II and III), though I also consider the theatre’s representation of Africa and Australia as fields of economic opportunity as well as the theatre’s creation of wholly imaginary spaces of colonization (as in the theatrical Robinsonade). In order to show how British subjects became interpellated by and mobilized in the service of empire through the theatrical encounter, I focus on three of the Victorian theatre’s topical preoccupations. The three-part structure of this book explores three recurring figures on the nineteenthcentury stage: the imperial adventurer, the repatriated colonial, and the soldier fighting Britain’s wars abroad. Each of these figures embodied different facets of imperialism: colonial settlement and the civilizing mission in the case of Robinson Crusoe, mercantilism and the importation of the exotic in the case of the nabob, and martial masculinity and the limits of cross-cultural solidarity in the case of the Scots soldier. All three figures negotiated gender and race as imperialism exerted pressure on those primary markers of identity. In addition, these three figures—Crusoe, the nabob, and the soldier—articulated some of the core elements of Britain’s relationship with its empire: the outward expansion of British culture via the colonist, the infi ltration of the foreign into the domestic via the nabob, and the exertion of military force via the soldier. While these three figures represented distinct types of the imperial operative and different aspects of the imperial encounter, they also gave the theatre an opportunity to present the empire from a variety of perspectives: the fantasy spaces of Crusoe’s island, the familiar domestic scenes of the nabob’s metropolitan life, and the timely realism of the military reenactment.

CONTESTED SPACES, CONTESTED TERMS: “EMPIRE” AND “THEATRICALITY” A large body of literature is devoted to debates about what does and does not properly constitute imperialism, that intricate interweaving of

4

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

politics, history, geography, ideology, economics, race, and culture (Robbins 1998: 206–35). By the most narrow and restrictive of defi nitions, “imperialism” is the exertion of direct political and economic control over formerly independent, and often geographically noncontiguous, territories and peoples. According to such a defi nition, imperialism does not merely imply but actually requires military conquest; political, economic, and cultural domination; territorial annexation; and conscious, systematic incorporation of new territories and peoples into a larger imperial unity, even as racial and cultural differences are rigidly reinforced. There are, of course, problems with such a restrictive equation of imperialism with the assertion of absolute force over other peoples, for it neglects to properly account for colonies of settlement, loosely administered dependencies and protectorates, and unconquered, unincorporated territories that fall into the economic orbit of a foreign power. It is a more broadly inclusive sense of the term that prompts Robert Aguirre (2005) to study Britain’s “imperial” interest in Central and South America, in areas that were never formally annexed, but over which Britain exercised considerable economic influence and which were of extreme interest to British ethnologists and archeologists. Laurence Kitzan further notes that nineteenth-century adventure writers rarely set their novels within the boundaries of the British Empire, “not in the parts of the world already painted red; they were expounding a broader, more universal doctrine that the whole world was really Britain’s empire, that their adventures everywhere served to strengthen this ‘informal empire,’ and that young Britishers could operate anywhere with impunity in the security of the Pax Britannica” (2001: 157–58). It is an attentiveness to the fi ner subtleties of empire that leads Andrew Thompson to argue that Britain’s primary interest in imperial expansion was organization, administration, and domestication rather than military conquest (2000: 18–25). These administrative and influential connections are the sorts of relationships that characterized much of what scholars commonly recognize as Britain’s Empire, yet they are also the sorts of relationships that Bernard Porter, author of The Absent-Minded Imperialists, dismisses from consideration. Porter rejects the notion of informal economic and cultural imperialisms and objects to the increasing deployment of the term “informal empire,” particularly by scholars he antagonistically brackets as “cultural ‘theorists’”: Another factor was a certain relaxation in some scholarly definitions of imperialism, which enabled more and more phenomena to be included under it. For example: if missionary proselytism were to be counted; or foreign trade; or overseas travel; or—to take some of the more bizarre candidates that have been put forward—militarism, masculinism, zookeeping and ‘England’s social mission’—then the scope for an ‘imperial’ impact on British society obviously expands enormously. (2004: 6)

Introduction

5

I highlight Porter’s objection to recent trends in studies of imperial history and culture because I wish to use his complaint to constructively differentiate between the equation and the association of these practices and concepts with imperialism. We need not claim that zoo-keeping and overseas travel are defi ning features of imperialism in order to see how they extend, display, and articulate imperial connections. These practices, in other words, may not define empire but they do animate it. And while Porter is right to argue that patriotism, masculinism, militarism—and a host of other ’isms—exist independently from imperialism and are, consequently, not inherently imperialistic, they are often sites for the expression of imperial ideologies and practices. They are, moreover, tools used in the construction of the culture of empire: the cultural articulations that realize the existence of empire for those metropolitan observers who are the supposed masters of an otherwise intangible domain. It is the cultural institutions of empire —those zoos, adventure tales, exhibitions, and spectacles—that motivated and expressed imperialism at the empire’s cultural, political, and economic center. In conceiving of empire in a broader sense, I am following the example set by other investigators of metropolitan manifestations of imperial culture such as John MacKenzie, who considers pervasive expressions of a “popular imperialism” that exceed the occasional outburst of aggressive jingoism. Furthermore, my own investigation has confirmed what MacKenzie has said about popular imperial consciousness and the consolidation of national identity: [T]he centripetal effects of Empire, [created] for the British a world view which was central to their perceptions of themselves. Even if they knew little and cared less about imperial philosophies or colonial territories, nonetheless imperial status set them apart, and united a set of national ideas which coalesced in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. As Field has put it, imperialism should be studied as an essential part of British social history. (1986: 2) MacKenzie’s notion of nationalism and imperialism united beneath a common banner is shared by other scholars who have argued for the primacy of empire in the consolidation and conceptualization of the British state.4 It is this intersection of imperialism and nationalism, mediated by and expressed through popular drama, that forms the central interest of this book. By focusing on a select set of recurring themes and figures (Robinson Crusoe, the nabob, the Scots soldier) and a collection of significant events in the history of the empire (the Indian “Mutiny,” the Australian gold rush), I hope not only to provide a framework for identifying certain durable theatrical traditions, but also a set of points at which the contact between the worlds of politics and popular culture is particularly evident. As Joseph Roach (1996), Elaine Hadley (1995), Lynn Voskuil (2004), and Jeffrey Richards (1997)—among others—have argued, theatricality

6

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

works in the service of community-formation, and it is this communitycreating and consolidating function that makes the theatre such a vital mechanism of cultural production. It is also the constructive dynamic that makes theatricality such a natural, and useful, companion to nationbuilding in the shadow of empire. Identity, as Kathleen Wilson explains, is problematic in that it is both performative and essential. On the one hand, identity is defi ned and displayed through social interaction. It is, in this way, a fundamentally theatrical expression. But at the same time, identity is commonly imagined to be a stable and internalized state, the antithesis, in fact, of the “social” self. From this perspective, identity is the authentic and private counter to the theatricalized public presentation of selfhood. Similarly, national identity is often predicated on a set of qualities or conditions believed to be both unique and inherent to the people constituting the nation, yet this innate and defi ning distinctiveness is articulated through and thus only recognizable in public performances of difference (Wilson 2003: 3–4, 62–3). This is the sense in which nationalism can be understood as a theatrical, performative act, national citizenship being a role that is observed and mimicked. The intense feeling of identification with the state and its people inspires such performance of the gestures of solidarity. This is the very essence of what Lynn Voskuil identifies as the authentic theatricality of Victorian culture: Victorians used these many types of spectacle to shape and explain the less tangible, more mysterious operations of the ideas and institutions they thought were most authentic: the inner workings of subjectivity, the apparently magical mechanisms of commodity culture, the bonds they believed knit them together organically into a single, indivisible nation. . . . This image of a performative self entails not role reversal—the exchange of authenticity for theatricality, or theatricality for authenticity—but a logic of self-construction that authenticates theatricality, that sees the self as spectacular to its very core. (2004: 11) Nation-building can thus be understood as a performative act, its central energies directed at the animation of character. To be British, in other words, is to perform Britishness. Moreover, British national identity was imaginatively forged in opposition to its imperial Other; empire, as an extension of the nation, provided a further field for the exploration and assertion of these sentiments of solidarity.

A NOTE ON METHOD My assessment of the imperialist content and consequence of nineteenthcentury drama directly contests the conclusions Bernard Porter makes in The Absent-Minded Imperialists, a book that merits attention here as it reveals both methodological errors and a grave misreading of the archival

Introduction

7

evidence. Summarily dismissing scholarly claims that prevailing Victorian cultural forms were awash with imperial images and rhetoric, Porter concludes that references to empire in nineteenth-century culture were “marginal,” and socially insignificant: Fiction was not the only non-imperial form of literature. Poets coldshouldered the topic too. So did the ‘serious’ theatre, none of the secondary works on which . . . is able to cite a single play from this period on an overtly imperial theme. All theatre plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for censorship in the nineteenth century; the surviving lists of these suggests that very few related to empire in any way. . . . The silence is deafening. (2004: 140) Porter’s conclusion is strangely discordant with other recent studies of Victorian imperial theatre. The second chapter of John MacKenzie’s book Propaganda and Empire identifies over a dozen plays with imperial overtones (1986: 40–66); Edward Ziter’s 2003 study The Orient on the Victorian Stage references approximately fi fty nineteenth-century plays that engaged with the Middle East. In short, Porter’s comment on the Victorian theatre’s “silence” on matters of empire is surprising, to say the least, and based, I believe, on a curious research oversight. That methodological misstep is worth looking at, as it highlights some of the difficulties confronting anyone embarking upon a project of this sort. In a footnote, Porter describes his selective “sampling” of the British Library’s “Catalogue of Plays Submitted to the Lord Chamberlain”: All the plays and shows listed there appear to be on domestic or occasionally European political themes, with the exceptions (before the 1890s) of a couple of Indian Mutiny-related pieces in 1858, and a very few featuring the lives of emigrants in the 1850s, the latter probably staged by colonization societies in order to encourage the poor to emigrate. None of these is likely to qualify as “serious” theatre. (2004: 370) Ascribing the production of plays on emigrants to colonization societies is mere guesswork, based on assumption and not investigation, but even more surprising to me is that Porter reaches his final pronouncement after having examined the Lord Chamberlain’s list. My own method for locating relevant play texts is not so very different from Porter’s, yet it led me to a collection of some three hundred imperially themed plays licensed in the period.5 This number does not include the more than two hundred Victorian theatrical adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, some of which I discuss in Part I. Certainly there are plenty of Victorian plays that invoke empire only incidentally, reducing Britain’s imperial domains to a rhetorical reference or geographical gesture. Even Thomas Morton’s tantalizingly titled farce Sketches in India (Strand, 1846) makes little particular use of its geographical setting, the plot seeming readily transportable to almost any

8

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

other corner of the globe. Likewise, we might just as easily watch Mrs. Ducie of Harold Lee’s On the Indian Ocean (Alexandra [Liverpool], 1878) fl irt her way across any other body of water or encounter Mrs. Lovibond’s long-lost husband aboard a vessel traversing anything other than Tom Taylor’s Overland Route to India (Haymarket, 1860). There are, indeed, plenty of plays in which the theatrical invocation of empire feels somewhat arbitrary, even artificial. In, for example, Henry Arthur Jones’s The Hypocrites (Grand [Hull], 1906), India incidentally offers some characters a place of escape, yet it remains conveniently offstage and thus visually unrepresented. In contrast, the unexpected geographical and temporal transfer of characters to the scene of the Indian Mutiny in the second act of Watts Phillips’s 1869 crime drama Not Guilty (Queen’s) animates India in a most spectacular way yet seems an almost awkwardly contrived introduction of Indian elements in a play that might more logically send its criminal characters to Australia for punishment and redemption. In a similar vein, the references to Australia in The Pembertons (St. James’s, 1890) and to India in A Compromising Case (Haymarket, 1888) are utterly incidental to plot and effect. In the latter instance, the script specifies “Anglo-Indian costumes” and lays out a very detailed plan of the bungalow in which the action is to play out, yet aside from these visual invocations of India, empire is completely irrelevant to this romantic comedy. There are, to be sure, many more plays that would seem to confi rm Bernard Porter’s claim that empire maintained only a marginal presence in Victorian popular culture, but are all theatrical invocations of empire as convenient and decorative—even painfully incongruent—as these seem at fi rst blush to be? We should pause before dismissing as arbitrary and meaningless the theatre’s myriad references to Indian culture, people, and history. Indeed, if we consider more closely some of the apparently irrelevant imperial elements in the plays I listed in the preceding paragraph, we can detect some of the outlines of empire’s dramatic resonance. The social climbing comedy of Sketches in India, for example, indirectly makes use of popular notions of India as a land of ready wealth, where members of Britain’s humbler classes can, like the nabobs of old, cast off their old class affi liations and assume a wealthier and more socially privileged guise. While Morton’s India is sufficiently foreign to allow for such socio-economic self-reinvention (and geographically distant enough to ease any domestic anxieties about class instability), it is still British territory. This is why Lady Scraggs cannot, at the end of the play, fully escape her humble Irish origins. As both foreign territory and imperial possession, India is simultaneously far and near, foreign and domestic, a place distant enough for escape yet close enough for a sudden—even triumphant—return. Thus, The Hypocrites’s Lennard can escape talk of his sexual indiscretions by accepting a commission in India, while Lovibond (in The Overland Route) can be reunited with his estranged wife on his return from self-

Introduction

9

imposed eastern exile. Even here, the theatrical deployment of India should not be considered a matter of mere geographical convenience, for both of these plays casually capitalize on popular perceptions of India as a land of sexual license and social indulgences (Hyam 1990). Although they play no direct role in the advance of the play’s plot, the hordes of Indian servants who populate the steamship Simoom in The Overland Route visually recall stereotypes of eastern society and thus quietly reinforce the play’s thematic preoccupations with idleness, intrigue, and infidelity. In a similar vein, the Indian scenes in Not Guilty bring into sensational—even exaggerated—relief that play’s interest in deception, crime, and violence.

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY PLAYS The ready discovery of the approximately three hundred plays that inform my present discussion testifies to the pervasiveness and popularity of imperial characters, situations, and themes in nineteenth-century drama. Many of these plays were, if not “serious,” then at least incredibly—and impressively—popular. For example, records indicate that W.T. Moncrieff’s The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane), a play which features giant Hindoo idols, lavish Indian processions, and heated battles on horseback, was regularly performed over a fi fty-year period, from 1823 to 1873. I look more closely at this play in Chapter 2. Charles Reade’s dramatization of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, which includes several scenes in Australia and features bushrangers, gold digging, and an Australian aborigine, was similarly popular. Victorian theatrical journals show that Reade’s play was rarely absent from the stage from its premiere in 1865 through the mid 1880s and that the play was enjoyed as much in Glasgow as it was in London.6 We will hear more about Reade’s play in reference to its treatment of Australia in Chapter 7. While it is easy to dismiss Victorian plays as badly written melodramatic excess, we must remember that the theatre was a popularly attended and widely enjoyed entertainment in the nineteenth century. Famed drama critic William Archer certainly lavished plenty of ink on plays he deemed neither “serious” nor worthy of “serious criticism,” such as the Sims and Shirley play The Star of India (Princess’s, 1896). G.B. Shaw similarly denounced the artistic merits of a number of imperially themed (and quite popular) plays, including Augustus Harris’s Cheer Boys, Cheer! (Drury Lane, 1895) and Fyles and Belasco’s The Girl I Left Behind Me (Sadler’s Wells, 1893). The admittedly overly-lavish spectacles which sophisticated modern critics dismiss as crude, low-brow, and culturally incidental brought large numbers of individuals occupying a wide range of social and economic positions together in a single space to watch nautical melodramas, military spectacles, and other dramatic entertainments with strong imperialist

10

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

content. To quote Michael Hays, “performances in theatres . . . for mixed audiences urged the unity and dominance of the British ‘race’ in the imperial enterprise” (1995: 81). J.S. Bratton similarly postulates that performance played a crucial role in the formation of a nationalist identity in nineteenth-century Britain: The part played by performance, therefore, in the structure of feeling peculiar to any historical moment is centrally important; and during most of the nineteenth century, theatre’s contribution to the maintenance of the hegemonic ideology was to focus this identity-making through the discourse of British imperialism. (1991: 3) To understand why the theatre was such a powerful site of nationalist consciousness we can look to the work of theatre scholars Elaine Hadley (1995), Peter Brooks (1976), and Lynn Voskuil (2004), who argue that as a representational mode, melodrama consolidates communal identities by providing an outlet for emotional expression, thereby promoting community-creating feelings of solidarity and sympathy.7 In order to understand more fully this socially cohesive function of the Victorian stage we might imagine the theatre in opposition to the novel, the genre generally privileged among scholars interested in nineteenth-century discourse. Where reading a novel is an isolated, individual exercise, attending a play is a communal experience, transforming all members of the audience, regardless of social position, into disciplined observers of imperial spectacles.8 People read as individuals but attend plays as members of a community, and it is this collective experience that differentiates play-going from novel-reading and thus makes the theatre the privileged vehicle for the transmission of socially reaffi rming imperialist discourse. Much of the scholarship on what I have termed “imperial theatrics” follows in the footsteps of Edward Said (1979; 1993), whose work brings together political science, cultural studies, and literary analysis, and considers the East not as a real geographical region inhabited by real biological beings but as an imagined space constructed, delimited, and animated through Europe’s engagement with it. My aim in this book is to connect Said’s insights into cultural theatrics with the institution most obviously engaged in the business of identity performance, to show how the empire was “staged” with the help of backdrops, props, costumes, and characters which invoked one or more of Britain’s imperial domains. I begin that discussion in Chapter 1 by reconnecting the stage with other forms of popular visual media, all of which worked together to provide metropolitan audiences with a window onto the world. Recognizing that the theatre was just one of the many sites at which imperial spectacles were staged in the nineteenth century, I venture beyond the formal confi nes of the proscenium arch to consider the interplay of various forms of imperial spectacles. In this chapter I argue that the interweaving of visual techniques

Introduction

11

and technologies created (or recreated) the wider world for metropolitan audiences. Thus I position Victorian drama within a broader spectrum of popular imperialism, as I demonstrate how shows and spectacles such as the Empire of India Exhibition (1895), the Fall of Delhi Panorama (1857), and D’Ennery’s dramatization of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1875), despite their obvious generic differences, similarly served as conduits through which the Victorians made contact with their empire and learned to think as imperialists. In Part I, I provide a history of Victorian stage adaptations of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the first important popular literary account of empire-building. While the prototypical Crusoe is an independent imperial adventurer, wresting civilization from a savage wilderness, his nineteenthcentury theatrical descendants are never alone, build nothing, and expose indigenous peoples to inept colonial management and even genocide. I begin my investigation of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade in Chapter 2 with a look at W.T. Moncrieff’s The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane, 1823), one of the most frequently produced plays of the nineteenth century. Moncrieff’s play dramatizes the conflicts between act and word that inhere in any instance of dramatic adaptation. The conflict between text and performance also animates The Admirable Crichton (Duke of York’s, 1902), J.M. Barrie’s Edwardian invocation of the castaway. My study of Barrie’s play in Chapter 4 brings Part I to a close. To situate Cataract and Crichton within a larger tradition, I trace in Chapter 3 the evolution of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade, a dramatic genre that helped the British public acclimate to a constantly shifting imperial role by visually recording and commenting upon changes in public attitude and governmental policies. As Britain developed more rigid racial categories that justified continued territorial acquisition, the theatre raised questions about the possibility of positive cultural change among indigenous peoples. In Part II, I consider the figure of the nabob, the wealthy colonialist who has returned to England following a period of service abroad. Motivated by many of the most fundamental of the desires that drove the imperial enterprise, the nabob was nevertheless a sobering reminder of the dangers of colonial contact. Although most scholars consider the nabob a distinctly eighteenth-century figure, nineteenth-century playwrights frequently deployed the nabob to indict colonialism’s rapacious commercial exploitation and to critique the empire’s crippling effects on England’s economy. Issues of national, sexual, and socio-economic identity were articulated through the figure of the nabob, who symbolized the unpredictability of imperial desire, both sexual and capitalist, and colonial contagion, both physical and cultural. After tracing the historical and theatrical roots of the theatrical nabob in Chapter 5, I turn in Chapter 6 to an investigation of how Victorian playwrights used the social reintegration of the theatrical nabob as a means of redirecting the energy of empire in support of British bourgeois domesticity. To further highlight the extent to which anxieties

12

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

over racial and cultural hybridity framed the presentation of theatrical nabobery, Chapter 7 looks at dramatic treatments of the Australian gold rush. In contrast to the East Indian nabob, the Australian gold miner is hailed as a hero of empire, and this difference reveals much about the fi ner points of Victorian attitudes towards colonial wealth, cultural contagion, and the domestic consequences of imperial activity. Part III takes a close look at the “Mutiny dramas,” a group of roughly a dozen plays that recreated and commented upon a turning point in British imperial history: the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. After tracing the history of the Indian military docudrama in Chapter 8, I move to a discussion of the theatre’s representation of the Mutiny as an assault on British masculinity, transforming an imperial crisis into a nationalist construction project— one focused not on besieged womanhood, as Jenny Sharpe (1993) and Nancy Paxton (1999) have argued, but on an idealized British masculinity. In Chapter 10, I look at how playwrights employed Scottish characters to forge a more expansive British identity in the face of this imperial crisis, uniting the people of England and Scotland against the undifferentiated, mutinous hordes of India. Like empire itself, a project of this sort and scope cannot be brought to a proper and convenient conclusion. The history of the nineteenth-century theatre’s engagement with Britain’s imperial project was simply too expansive, its cultural and political resonances too numerous to identify, interrogate, and index. Imperial theatrics are epitomized by a vibrant energy that resists easy reduction and confi nement to the static scholarly page. Perhaps most importantly, the last act of the Victorian theatre of empire did not come to a close with the passing of Queen Victoria and the end of her age. As the British nation and its empire continued to develop and adapt to the modern age, imperial theatrics, too, underwent transition, screen gradually replacing stage as the privileged site of imperial spectacle. A key transitional moment in this evolution of visual forms coincided with the Boer War (1899–1902), which inspired the production of more films than plays. Although certain theatrical traditions continued (J.M. Barrie’s Robinsonade, The Admirable Crichton, appearing in 1902), it is this moment, which many historians mark as the initial decline of the British Empire, in which the illumination of empire noticeably shifted from footlight to film. Consequently, it is this moment that marks the conclusion of my project. But between there and here remains much to be said, much analytical ground to be covered, and many plays to identify, discuss, and imagine. With that in mind, I welcome the reader to a nineteenth-century journey around the world in eighty (give or take) plays.

1

Imperial Theatrics Spectacle and Empire in the Nineteenth Century I puzzle my brains and fi nd no better likeness for the place. The view of Constantinople resembles the ne plus ultra of a Stanfield diorama, with a glorious accompaniment of music, spangled houris, warriors, and winding processions, feasting the eyes and the soul with light, splendor, and harmony. If you were never in this way in your youth ravished at the play-house, of course the whole comparison is useless: and you have no idea, from this description, of the effect which Constantinople produces on the mind. But if you were never affected by a theatre, no words can work upon your fancy, and typographical attempts to move it are of no use. —William Makepeace Thackeray, Eastern Sketches (1844)

Searching for words to capture the effect of seeing the city of Constantinople for the first time, William Makepeace Thackeray could find no closer approximation than the theatre. Indeed, Thackeray says, the theatre, with its appeal to the various senses, does more than merely mimic the sensation of seeing the Turkish city laid out before the traveler, for the traveler’s experience of the city is itself informed by his susceptibility to theatrical effect. The theatre offers Thackeray not only a convenient analogy through which he can communicate to a metropolitan readership the sights and sounds of eastern travel; it also serves as a necessary prerequisite for travel, a training space in which to develop the sensibilities required of the traveler in exotic locales. Thackeray’s Eastern Sketches routinely relies on its readers’ intimate knowledge of theatrical spectacle, likening the town square of Vigo, Spain, to a scene at Astley’s (1844: 5), the throne room of the king of Portugal to the set of a Drury Lane pantomime (1844: 11), the stormy seas off Gibraltar to T.P. Cooke’s tempest effects (1844: 27), and the streets of Valetta, Athens, and Smyrna to theatrical scenes (1844: 28, 37, 43). He even invokes the image of a pantomime clown in the midst of the Sultan’s seraglio (1844: 64). While it may be an exaggeration to claim that Eastern Sketches seems written for an audience of theatregoers rather than of travelers, it is nonetheless apparent that his knowledge of theatrical effects informed Thackeray’s view of the world outside of England and that he relied on his readers’ familiarity with theatrical spectacle to translate his descriptions into meaningful visions. Nor is Thackeray the only Victorian travel writer

14

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

to employ the theatre in this way. In In the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson describes himself as an alien in a playhouse (1896: 89), conveying the traveler’s feelings of detachment, a sentiment echoed by Mary Kingsley in her description of a goat chase in a village on Africa’s Rembwé river: I being very lazy did not go ashore, but watched the pantomime from the bamboo staging. The whole flock of goats enter at right end of stage, and tear violently across the scene, disappearing at left. Two minutes elapse. Obanjo and his gallant crew enter at right hand of stage, leg it like lamplighters across the front, and disappear at left. Fearful pow-wow behind the scenes. Five minutes elapse. Enter goats at right as before, followed by Obanjo and company as before, and so on da capo. It was more like a fight I once saw between the armies of Macbeth and Macduff than anything I have seen before or since; only our Rembwé play was better put on, more supers, and noise, and all that sort of thing, you know. It was a spirited performance I assure you and I and the inhabitants of the village, not personally connected in goat-catching, assumed the role of audience and cheered it to the echo. (1897: 222) Even Charles Darwin’s account of The Voyage of the Beagle invokes the stage as a way of approximating the traveler’s experience of foreign landscapes and their inhabitants. At one point he likens the people of Tierra del Fuego to “the devils which come on the stage in plays like Der Freischutz”; elsewhere, fi nding himself at a loss for words, he explains that “the general effect frequently recalled to my mind the gayest scenery of the Opera-house or the great theatres” (1839: 30). Like so many Victorian travel writers, Darwin saw the world through a theatrical lens, making sense of new sights and sensations by equating them with stage effects, and communicating the whole by using the language of drama and spectacle, a language understood by a metropolitan audience unfamiliar with the world beyond Britain but well-versed in the sights and sounds of the stage. Inhabiting a world of spectacle, from museums and exhibitions to parades and dramas, the Victorians relied on imperial theatrics to teach them their roles in the drama of empire. Although the East was often depicted as a land of spectacle and mysticism, where an elite few awed the masses into submission through elaborate displays of power, in practice the Occidental mind was just as susceptible to the influence of spectacle as its Oriental counterpart: even the British public could be transformed into imperial subjects through pomp and circumstance.1 Accordingly, the Victorian theatre evolved into a powerful institution of imperial representation by incorporating the mechanics of panoramic and exhibitionary display into its own performance practices: assimilating other forms of imperial spectacle, blending education with entertainment, and bringing the distant imperial frontier to life in the empire’s

Imperial Theatrics 15 metropolitan political and cultural center (Ziter 2003: 1–6; MacKenzie 1986: 46; Altick 1978: 173–82). We can think of a wide array of shows and spectacles that together created a visually rich environment in which the Victorians not only learned about their empire but also assimilated an imperial perspective. 2 Imperial theatrics animated the empire and publicly disseminated its operational ideologies of racial difference, political domination, military conquest, cultural interventionism, and commercial opportunism. Though scholars traditionally draw sharp categorical distinctions among ethnological exhibits, museum displays, military reenactments, and theatre pieces, in practice all of these different genres reinforced one another by promising similarly objective, authentic representations of empire. 3 Zoological exhibits, ethnological shows, museum displays, and panoramas were sister sites for the viewing of the wider world, sharing a common set of visual techniques in their quest to reproduce the imperial periphery for the entertainment and instruction of metropolitan audiences.4 Timely and topical, these various types of shows presented pieces of empire to the London spectator; collectively, they created a comprehensive picture of the world and Britain’s place within it (Crinson 1996: 61; J. Richards 2001: 177–210). Throughout the nineteenth century, London’s theatrical venues brought imperial center and periphery together by recreating the empire for those who might never venture to Britain’s far-flung colonies and military outposts but were, nevertheless, the supposed rulers of this vast collection of territories and peoples. Consequently, we might extend Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, which she describes as the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” to include the theatrical stage. 5 In thus extending Pratt’s term, I propose that it was in the imperial capital’s theatrical venues that home-bound Britons imagined themselves in contact with the places and peoples of empire. Unlike travel writing, which serves as Pratt’s primary focus, plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access between themselves and the imperial periphery; separated from the scene by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. In defi ning the concept of the contact zone, Pratt poses a number of questions that are equally relevant to the study of the travelogue and the nineteenth-century imperial drama: How has travel and exploration writing produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory? How has it produced Europe’s differentiated conceptions of itself in relation to something it became possible to call ‘the rest of the world’? How do such signifying practices encode and legitimate the

16

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter aspirations of economic expansion and empire? How do they betray them? (1992: 5).

Any and all of these questions might be asked of the imperialist plays and spectacles treated in the present study. Its national identity defined in relation to a shifting imperial terrain, Britain’s sense of itself as a nation was curiously entangled in popular representations of empire, and it is for this reason that the present study situates itself at the nexus of popular culture and political consciousness. Though drama was a less obviously didactic genre than the exhibition or panorama, it was an active participant in the formation of an imperial consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain. Investigating the theatre’s role in the construction of public imperial character and consciousness in the metropole, John MacKenzie cites several early-century plays that “alternately fused and separated, destabilised and re-formed” the categories of Self and Other. In The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane, 1823), El Hyder (Royal Coburg, 1818), and other plays, MacKenzie argues, the central dramatic elements revolve around questions of cultural difference (1995: 186). And these differences, as Teresa Ploszajska (citing Homi Bhabha and Catherine Hall) argues, created a sense of a national culture, for people “often acquire their strongest sense of shared identity by contrasting themselves with the peoples of other nations” (1999: 106). Interracial relationships and contrasting legal and cultural practices in plays such as these serve to further defi ne their British audiences by illustrating the critical racial and social characteristics that distinguished them and, indeed, rendered them the rightful masters of an imperial domain (MacKenzie 1995: 185–87). In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson claims that a nation is necessarily imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lies the image of their communion. . . . Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (1983: 6) Anderson’s famous formulation is echoed by Steve Attridge’s analysis of nationalism as an imaginative project: “The nation is to a great extent what its members imagine it to be” (2003: 4). If the members of a small, geographically inscribed nation must rely on an imagined identification to reconcile national ideals and realities, citizens positioned at the metropolitan center of the rapidly expanding British Empire of the nineteenth century must also have struggled to come to terms with their place within a growing global community. For, as Thomas Richards so succinctly puts it, “An empire is partly a fiction,” its cohesion maintained not through the exercise of force but through the collection, organization, and display of

Imperial Theatrics 17 information (1993: 1–9). Empire was, in other words, an essentially visual concept, its reality invested in the displays of power that subjugated foreign peoples, in the spectacle of products derived from incorporated areas, and in images that gave form to imagined territorial and cultural ties. Exhibitions and spectacles assisted in the interlinked projects of nation- and empire-building by feeding the public imagination, recording, replicating, interpreting, and displaying—indeed creating—empire for a metropolitan public that was itself formed in the process.

HYBRID ENTERTAINMENTS At its heart, imperial theatrics is about power: the display of power and display as an exercise of power. Celebratory parades (both at home and abroad), public monuments to the nation’s heroes, and reenactments of British military victories all demonstrated the nation’s overseas successes, displaying the proofs of Britain’s imperial claims (Morris 1982; Gregory 1991). Exhibitions of colonial goods and peoples, and collections of foreign artifacts and animals, likewise functioned as testaments to the extent of imperial influence (Shelton 2000; T. Richards 1993; Greenhalgh 1988: 52–81; Karp and Kratz 2000: 195–99). Art objects and exhibitions of antiquities similarly bore witness to Britain’s imperial might, extending to spectators the opportunity for vicarious interaction with the imperial project, the imperial exhibitions of the nineteenth century enacting “a spectacular way of enframing the world as a collection of objects to be inspected, classified, and catalogued” (Mitchell, qtd. in Driver 2001: 149). Across a wide array of venues and through a variety of representational technologies, imperial theatrics appropriated and mobilized the visual as an essential component of empire-building. Describing theatrical productions as the visual equivalent of the travel narrative,6 William Archer begins his otherwise scathing review of Sims and Shirley’s The Star of India (Princess’s, 1896) by observing that although the play was a disaster, he could not say that the evening was a total waste, for “It is convenient to have a chance, now and then, of studying the theatrical tastes of the Gorgeous East without the trouble of actually going there” (1897: 82). Archer’s comment locates the stage within a larger visual culture and encourages the viewer to liken theatrical performance to the genre of imperial exhibition (and to privilege both forms of scopophilic consumption to actual travel). We can better understand this claim by situating the drama alongside the official vistors’ guides to Imre Kiralfy’s exhibitions—including Constantinople: The Revels of the East (1893), and the Empire of India (1896)—which include maps of the exhibition grounds that imply a comprehensive tour through exotic foreign locations. At the Stanley and African Exhibition, to take another example, the visitor adopted the persona of an explorer, his or her journey through

18 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter the carefully constructed displays reenacting Britain’s scientific and strategic survey of the African interior (Coombes 1994: 66–77; Driver 2001: 146–57). Felix Driver positions geographical exhibits such as the Stanley and African Exhibition within the “wider tradition of spectacular display through which the empire was consumed at home in a vast range of exhibitions, plays, pageants, dioramas and panoramas” (2001: 148). Like exhibitions, zoos organized and contained the chaos of the wider world, exhibiting the empire while also enacting a fairly sanitized notion of imperialism as a primarily organizational and educational endeavor (Shelton 2000: 179).7 As Harriet Ritvo has shown, zoological exhibits represented the scope and nature of Britain’s imperial reach: Few English citizens were likely ever to wield the kind of power represented by the animals’ captivity, but since that power was exercised by their countrymen over nature or the human inhabitants of distant lands, all could take vicarious pleasure in the evidence of its magnitude. (1987: 209) Ritvo’s description of the vicarious pleasures experienced by patrons of Britain’s menageries aligns zoological exhibits with the displays of material artifacts as evidence of the nation’s imperial successes and, more importantly, as sites at which the larger British public could engage with its empire (1987: 215–32).8 Most critically for my current discussion, empire in these cases is a primarily visual experience, assuming real meaning through displays of its material and animal trophies, a sentiment echoed in the opening song for The Zoo, a light musical comedy by Arthur Sullivan (St. James’s, 1887): And when the lion’s cage we seek, No fear shall blanch our British cheek, And, if the noble beast could speak— What would he say? He’d say—in well-known English staves— He’d say, “Britannia rules the waves, And Briton’s [sic] never will be slaves”— Hurray! Hurray! (1887: 3a–3b)

Animal exhibits took several forms, from the display of stuffed specimens, to the live collection at the zoo, and even to the animal extravaganzas of the theatre. Merging the drama with the zoological exhibition proved a most spectacular means of entertaining, instructing, and impressing upon audiences the theatre’s power to contain and to recreate the wonders of the wider world. Nineteenth-century playbills and theatrical notices frequently advertised the ingenious use of animal figures to excite public interest and to animate imperial scenes.9 When the Surrey Theatre, for example, staged Mungo Parke; or the Arab of the Niger! in 1840, it prefaced the play with an

Imperial Theatrics 19 exhibition of exotic cats, including lions, tigers, and leopards.10 Elephants, the largest of London’s animal performers, featured prominently in several theatrical extravaganzas, from the Adelphi Theatre’s Elephant of Siam and the Fire Fiend! (1829) to Astley’s The Wise Elephants of the East; or, the Magic Gong (1854).11 In some cases, the elephants serve a merely decorative function, pulling a royal car or marching in a triumphal procession.12 But they also occasionally fi lled “character” roles, playing critical parts in the plots of plays such as The Elephant of the Pagoda (Astley’s, 1846) and The Great Siam Elephant and the Fire Friend! (Adelphi, 1823), where they select and crown Asian kings, performing political intervention in foreign cultures—a key component of early British imperialism—as a form of metropolitan entertainment. The theatre’s taming and training of the world’s largest and most powerful land animal thus metaphorically reenacts Britain’s conquest and control of independent foreign states. Different forms of popular spectacle borrowed and adapted the technologies and representational strategies of other forms (MacKenzie 1995: 176–207). The second scene of William Thomas Moncrieff’s 1830 play Van Diemen’s Land (Surrey), for example, integrates landscape painting, geography, and dramatic movement with a “Panoramic Tour through Van Diemen’s Land; from Hobart Town, through romantic country to Squashmoor Village;— River Derwent, and Herdsman’s Cove Settlement;—Blue Hills;—Emu Bottoms by Moonlight; and Forest of Gum Trees” (1830: 20).13 The theatre directly engaged with the topics and techniques of the exhibition business, there being a generic hybridity inherent in imperial theatrics. Indeed, John MacKenzie has declared that because the theatre adopted the visual effects of other types of popular spectacles as a means of translating “military and naval news to the stage,” if we are to appreciate fully the “Orientalist aspects of the spectacular theatre,” we must fi rst “connect the spectacular theatre to other visual forms, notably the panorama, the diorama, and the cosmorama, all of which used the Orient as a major feature of their offerings” (MacKenzie 1995: 189).14 Just as the Stanley and African Exhibition was “a hybrid affair, part ethnographic show, part popular entertainment,” so too did many nineteenth-century stage plays exceed the narrow boundaries properly belonging to drama (Driver 2001: 155). Featuring a troupe of Arab dancers and musicians who “performed a whole sequence of dances and semi-rites against a backdrop of a temple, [and] a shrine,” the 1837 drama Hassan Pacha; or, the Arab’s Leap (Adelphi), is a good example of how spectacular Orientalist entertainments collapsed the representational practices and generic categories that traditionally separated the drama from the panorama and both from the ethnological exhibition (MacKenzie 1995: 193). The painted backdrop of the piece might be considered an early example of the pictorial arts of the sort which James R. Ryan (1997) has connected with the visual representation of Britain’s growing empire, while the dancers and musicians resemble the

20 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter ethnological performances so thoroughly analyzed in Bernth Lindfors, et al., Africans on Stage (1999).15 Many playbills and theatrical notices advertised surprising combinations of stage effects, indicating an easy alliance among what we might otherwise consider very different types of spectacles with utterly distinct purposes. Take, for example, the spectacle, Anaconda! (Adelphi, 1826), which featured “A piece of mechanism” representing “the surprising agility and almost incredible strength of the Terror of the East.” The Anaconda! playbill describes a spectacle of both zoological and technological interest as it announces the piece’s panoramic and ethnological content, including scenery depicting an Indian plantation, “with distant view of the city of Colombo, in the Island of Ceylon,” and “Indian Dance.” As with the Spectacle of the Desert (Drury Lane, 1847) which entertained audiences with panoramas, elaborate stage effects, dancers, music, and a host of animals, the Anaconda playbill reveals the very rich combinations of scenic effects that were familiar to nineteenthcentury theatrical audiences and which rendered the far corners of the earth not simply visible but absolutely spectacular. If playbills indicate the Victorian showman’s aptitude for exploiting the full range of representational practices available to him, theatrical reviews testify to the viewing public’s willing reception of such integrated spectacles. In his article on Caldecott’s 1853 exhibit of Zulu warriors, a reviewer for the Times described how the exhibition demonstrated “the whole drama of Caffre life” and noted how closely these “living pictures” resembled “real life.” He also called the Zulus “naturally good actors” and observed that “a performance more natural and less like acting is seldom if ever seen on any stage” (qtd. in Lindfors 1999: 66–7).16 The reviewer moves easily from one rhetorical register to another, alternately describing the Zulus as pictures, performers, and artists. This ethnological exhibit unites realism and theatricality, yielding an “authentic performance” that appeals to a public interested in information about a nation at war with its own. Caldecott’s Zulus and similar ethnological exhibits are vivid, if disturbing, proof of the interrelatedness of nineteenth-century theatrical practices. Arrayed in their native garb and performing activities drawn from daily life—from hunting to dancing—groups of indigenous peoples, most commonly from Africa, were displayed before painted backdrops depicting the physical environments of their respective countries.17 In the 1840s, for example, a group of African Bushmen were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. The Bushmen were displayed before a painted African landscape (a scaleddown panorama) and were surrounded by their tools and art objects (a museum display). Throughout the day, the Bushmen acted out native dances, hunting rituals, and mock battles (a series of miniature plays). There was even a period in which monkeys were brought in to share the stage with the Bushmen so that people could compare the two “species” (a horrific fusion of zoological and natural history exhibits) (Altick 1978: 179–81). In this one exhibition, we see a host of spectacular genres converging to provide

Imperial Theatrics 21 entertainment and education for an audience. Displays of objects are given meaning by the performance of cultural practices; the performance in turn is geographically and politically contextualized by the painted scene. The anthropological and ethnological subtext transforms a tawdry spectacle into an “educational” enterprise, as spectators encounter and observe this foreign culture within the safe confines of the Egyptian Hall.18 As this example also shows, generic boundaries are not always clear when it comes to popular culture, and any arbitrarily imposed genre distinctions necessarily limit our understanding of how spectacles mediated the encounter between spectator and empire. Since the Bushmen exhibit at the Egyptian Hall was simultaneously ethnological, material, panoramic, and theatrical, its study requires an interdisciplinary perspective that can account for the rich interplay among genres that made this spectacle and others like it such powerful tools of imperial ideology. While we may be inclined to consider this ethnological exhibition peculiar or anomalous, editorials, advertisements, and reviews in Victorian periodicals attest to the pervasiveness and popularity of such hybrid entertainments. The Theatrical Journal of 1853, for example, juxtaposes reviews of “legitimate” drama with descriptions of less easily categorized forms. On 20 April, the journal reported a visit to Two Lands of Gold at the Marionette Theatre. The evening’s “entertainment” included a lecture “descriptive of the perils and pleasures of an emigrant’s life in California and Australia” (co-written by Charles Carter and dramatist Shirley Brooks), “interspersed with songs and performances on various musical instruments.” The reviewer also noted that “The little stage is fitted up to represent an emigrant’s tent, with all the heterogeneous ‘properties’ which we may imagine would be there found collected” (1853: 123–4). Here is another example of an imperial spectacle that defies easy generic classification. It is simultaneously a lecture and musical review; it is a theatrical stage fitted up as a diorama of life at the gold fields; it is a collection of “authentic” objects that resembles both the museum artifact and the theatrical prop. And behind it all is “some very pretty panoramic scenery . . . from some sketches taken on the localities represented.” This fi nal comment underscores the “authenticity” of the piece, for its pictures were made “on the spot” and its three-dimensional “properties” very closely resemble those “which we may imagine would be . . . found” around the tent of a real Australian gold miner.19 These claims of authenticity reinforce the general tone of authority that frames this example of educational entertainment. We’ll take a closer look at the documentary impulses of Australian gold-rush plays in Chapter 7. By bringing together the worlds of entertainment and instruction, Victorian showmen secured their own commercial success as they established for their exhibits a claim to what Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz term “cultural authority.” Essentially, these didactic entertainments claimed for themselves the authority to represent whatever topics fell within their purview,

22

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

authorizing their own mediating role between metropolitan observers and peripheral scenes (2000: 207–8). Consider, for example, the elaborate ornamentation of Drury Lane’s public areas on the occasion of the 1885 production of Augustus Harris’s Human Nature: “Human Nature,” as our readers are aware, contains some stirring military scenes, the action being laid in Egypt, and it was a good idea then of Mr. Augustus Harris to decorate the handsome refreshment saloons of Drury Lane Theatre with a collection of Soudanese and Egyptian arms, relics, and accoutrements. . . . [T]here are certainly some interesting trophies and souvenirs of the Egyptian campaign. Here are banners bearing Arabic inscriptions, captured from the Mahdists, and the handsome suit of Soudanese chain armour presented to Lord Wolsely by the Khedive. Rosaries from the bodies of sheiks killed at Gubat, Mahdist uniforms from Abu Klea, and crocodile shields from the battlefield of Debeh next claim our attention, and a piece of Brussels carpet is strangely enough a relic of considerable interest, for it was brought from Gordon’s room in the dismantled Government House at Khartoum by one of Colonel Kitchener’s messengers as a proof of his having duly arrived there. Mr. Chas. Williams, the well-known special correspondent, who did such capital work during the war, also contributes some very interesting relics of the martyr of Khartoum, sending a Martini rifle from one of Gordon’s Nile steamers, one of his decorations, sword, spear, javelin, and Dongola knife. General Graham also exhibits a Soudanese kourbash, which was a parting gift from Gordon to himself, and a Koran found in Osman Gigna’s village. . . . [T]he visitors to the exhibition on the opening day seemed to take delight in a little Chamber of Horrors, where there is an exact reproduction of Arabi’s cell at Cairo, with the carpet, chair, and table, &c., actually used by him.20 Altogether, the saloon is very effectively and tastefully decorated, and it will no doubt be a favorite promenade and lounge between the acts of “Human Nature.” (Theatre, June–Dec. 1885: 334–35) This very detailed description of the decorative arrangements for the theatre is worth examination, for it reveals Harris’s conscious and calculated merging of entertainment with education. By filling the theatre with “authentic” relics of the recent campaign in the Sudan, Harris capitalized on public interest in current affairs while endowing his play with an exhibitionary authenticity. The objects on display in the theatre’s lobby are connected with specific people and events from the Sudan conflict: General Gordon’s rifle; the Khedive’s armor; the actual carpet, chair, and table from Arabi’s Cairo cell. Intriguingly, this lavish setting both frames and is framed by Harris’s play of Egyptian interest: the display of war relics authenticates the play while the play disengages the objects from their rarified status, reducing them to decorative objects. A dynamic interplay is established between the techniques of

Imperial Theatrics 23 the theatre and the museum, and a tension is created between the decorative and the monumental; amusement is tempered by documentary. 21 As the example of Harris’s 1885 production of Human Nature suggests, stage plays sometimes complemented other, more educational, types of imperial spectacles, together creating a dynamic interplay of imperial theatrics that celebrated British triumphs and placed the public within the scope of the action. Empire proved itself to be simply too big for genre, requiring a fusion of representational practices and an alliance among different theatrical venues. Exhibitions and plays had to work together to recreate the empire for the metropolitan masses. This confluence of theatre, spectacle, and exhibition is evident in any number of nineteenth-century stage productions but is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the following example, which illustrates how self-conscious some plays were about their participation in the imperial project, and how readily they appropriated the methods and materials of rival modes of visual entertainment.

ALL THE WORLD ON THE STAGE: BUCKSTONE’S VOYAGE IN LEICESTER SQUARE In 1854, a year after assuming management of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, theatre manager and popular comedic actor John Buckstone produced and starred in J.R. Planché’s play, Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square). 22 The title page of the playscript labels it a “new and original cosmographical, visionary extravaganza, and dramatic review.” This appellation is not mere hyperbole, for this short theatrical piece delivers almost exactly what its title promises. Mr. Buckstone does indeed take a trip around the world without ever really leaving Leicester Square. It is certainly a visual extravaganza, with mechanized sets, dissolving views, panoramic displays of the four continents, representatives of exotic cultures, and even performing elephants. If it is not precisely cosmographical, Planché’s extravaganza provides a surprisingly comprehensive look at the world and at its own rivals in the London show business. As the subtitle indicates, the piece crosses any number of boundaries, making it somewhat difficult to class. It’s a dramatic review, a panoramic display, a travelogue, a comic extravaganza, a documentary, and a play. Observing the astounding popularity of foreign exhibitions, Buckstone, the play’s title character, determines to put on a panoramic spectacle for the Haymarket’s Easter piece, singing, All round the world, like a new Robinson Crusoe; All round the world, I will travel on the stage; And if anybody asks me the reason why I do so, I’ll say it’s because geography’s becoming quite the rage. (Planché 1854: 6)

24

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

With a lilting lyric, actor becomes traveler; performance becomes adventure. In a reversal of Shakespeare’s famous formulation, the stage becomes all the world. It is a radical transformation motivated by the base coin of commercial opportunism, yet it elevates the spectacle by infusing it with scientific import. Geography sells, but it also educates, and when Buckstone the theatrical manager overlays his actor’s garb with the showman’s cloak, the play becomes a hybrid form, mixing elements of the drama, the panorama, and the exhibition. Moreover, Buckstone’s mention of Robinson Crusoe gestures to the popularity of Crusoe as a theatrical subject as it references the theatrical Robinsonade’s appropriation of panoramic technologies, issues I discuss in Chapter 3. This piece perfectly illustrates the overlapping categories of theatre, spectacle, and exhibition, and it does so quite self-consciously. The play begins with Buckstone’s visit to Wyld’s Globe in Leicester Square, a threedimensional representation of the world turned in on itself (fig 1.1). From a series of platforms within the spherical building, visitors could observe the relief map of the world that surrounded them and listen to a series of lectures about geography, geology, and history, as dramatist Tom Taylor explains in his history of the site: But it seemed as if the climax in the way of exhibition had been reached, when, in 1851, Mr. Wylde [sic], the geographer, conceived the idea of erecting in the garden of the square a great globe of 60 feet in diameter, occupying the central dome of a building which almost filled the whole enclosure, leaving four large rooms for other exhibitions. The world was figured in relief on the inside of the globe, and viewed from galleries, at different elevations; from hour to hour a descriptive lecture was delivered. The Great Globe stood for ten years, and during this time became the centre of a swarm of historical and more or less ethnographical exhibitions. There was a diorama of the gold-fields, with casts of monster nuggets, and collection of Australian gold and minerals . . . a diorama illustrative of the Indian Rebellion, showing the seat of war, in twenty-nine tableaux from Upper India, Lucknow, and Delhi. . . . a museum of people of the East, from Bulgaria to Affghanistan [sic]. . . . All this was accompanied with explanatory lectures. (1874: 471–73). As Buckstone observes and Taylor confirms, Wyld’s geographical exhibition offered residents of the city an alternative to actual foreign travel. For a fraction of the cost, anyone could see the world on display in Leicester Square. Wyld’s Globe claimed to contain the whole world, but Planché’s extravaganza ingeniously appropriates that claim for itself by presenting its own audience with a miniature version of the Globe. The Haymarket’s version is just as educational as the original but infi nitely more entertaining, or so the piece would have us believe. Soon after arriving at Wyld’s Globe, Buckstone fi nds himself bored by the lecture that accompanies the panorama. So

Imperial Theatrics 25

Figure 1.1. Representing the World: The Interior of Wyld’s Globe. Illustrated London News (7 June 1851). Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library.

bored is he, in fact, that he falls asleep, generating a dream sequence that transforms the set into a series of panoramas featuring locations around the world and including scenes inspired by current events. Plot is of secondary importance in this visual extravaganza, the primary purpose being, as one reviewer noted, “the personification of the most remarkable events of the season, with a passing commentary upon the facts and fallacies that have attracted public attention during the year” (Theatrical Journal, 26 April 1854: 130). As he travels, Buckstone comments on how thoroughly London’s assorted theatrical venues have represented the world. In Africa, he observes a number of possible subjects for a show, noting in each case where they had already been seen in London. The Brough brothers had staged a play around the Sphynx, the Nile had been showcased in a panorama in Piccadilly, the zoo’s hippopotamus had outlived the public’s interest in it, and the Zulus had recently terrified Londoners at a show attended and denounced by Dickens. Asia had been showcased at the Great Exhibition, and even the North American Esquimaux had recently made an appearance at the Adelaide Gallery (Planché 1854: 21). Planché’s play presents a number of London’s most popular amusements, turning the theatre into the ultimate exhibitionary venue. The play testifies to the superiority of the theatre in its

26

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

ability to reproduce all of the most popular of London’s imperial spectacles, including every conceivable subject and mode of display: Following his steps by the overland route, we find ourselves in Asia, where we are entertained by a grand oriental spectacle, and a dance of Bayaderes, by the corps de ballet; the Wise Elephant of the East, as he appeared, standing on his head at Astley’s; and the Chinese magicians of Drury Lane, who go through their wonderful performances, including the thrilling feat of “the impalement.” In Africa, we obtain glimpses of the Zulu Kaffi rs, Bosjesmans [sic], Earthmen, and other unnatural curiosities, recently imported from the home of the Ethiopian minstrels, and exhibited in the British metropolis. From Africa, we cross the line with Mr. Buckstone, and on the American shores, have an interview with the Esquimaux Indians of the Adelaide Gallery, and a view of the native genius of America, exemplified by Madame Celeste on “the Sea of Ice” in The Struggle for Gold. (Theatrical Journal, 26 April 1854: 130) In this review we can see how the theatre aims to exceed its exhibitionary rivals by incorporating all of them into a seamless whole, offering not glimpses of novelties but a comprehensive tour of the world. Essentially, Planché’s extravaganza folds all the world into the empire, all the empire into London, and finally all of London onto the stage. The stage not only references but contains and even surpasses other popular forms of spectacle. Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe renders the empire accessible, as a collection of scenes, objects, and images, reducing the vastness of empire to a handful of curiosities that are easily transported and readily exhibited. At the same time, it quiets concern about recent military action in the Crimea by making the scene of war just one more interesting moment in our global voyage, as entertaining as the Crystal Palace but no more dangerous than a caged hippo. The extravaganza reduces the world to a series of images and objects, producing a panoramic journey through Britain’s empire, a dynamic similar to that of Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in 80 Days, which follows Phileas Fogg’s rapid progress across a global landscape rendered somewhat blurry and flattened by the speed of modern travel. That novel’s dramatization (Princess’s, 1875) also exhibits an emphasis on the spectacle of foreign places and peoples: A Square at Suez–To the L. a Café, with tables and curtains in the Turkish style. To the R. the Offices of MUSTAPHA PASHA, Governor of the town. At the back is the quay of the Suez Canal, used as a landing place. At the back the Canal curves obliquely. Ships at anchor, barks, dredging machines, &c. At the extreme back, the plains of Arabia, closed up by mountains. Europeans and Fellahs walk up and down on the quay, and in the square. (D’Ennery and Verne 1875: 15)23

Imperial Theatrics 27 In these scene directions for the fi rst act, we can hear the echoes of Burford’s Grand Cairo panorama, which combined the representational impulses of landscape painting, ethnography, and travel writing. To this extent, the theatrical adaptation of Verne’s novel echoes the exhibitionary impulses of Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage. But while Buckstone the showman contents himself with displaying the world, Fogg the traveler engages with the people and places he meets, stopping a sati in India, for example, or saving two women from the Pawnee on the American frontier. In this dramatization of a novel, the chief actor is not merely an observer of the imperial spectacle; he is a participant in the scenes he views. He is, in short, an idealized British imperialist, mastering the global landscape while at all times heeding the call of the nation’s “civilizing mission.” Round the World in 80 Days thus acts as more than a visual representation of imperial terrain; it is an exemplary performance of the British imperialist’s role. Visual effects thus serve as the backdrop for the drama of character. In the next chapter, we will see a similarly active imperial hero whose evolution from page to stage reveals some of the inner workings and ultimate aims of imperial theatrics. For there is a reason Buckstone likens himself to Robinson Crusoe, who was not only the literary prototype of the colonist but a popular staple of the Victorian stage, the star of a theatrical tradition that spanned the nineteenth century and that generated a few hundred plays that investigated— with a comic and occasionally cynical eye—the colonizing impulse and the rhetoric of the “civilizing mission.”

Part I

Recasting The Castaway The Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Robinsonade

Figure 1.2. Ambassador of Civilization: Lydia Thompson as Robinson Crusoe (c. 1870).1 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Introduction to Part I [S]uch a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years . . . and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice—Robinson Crusoe. In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. —Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

In 1844, the figure of the “author,” whose search for a story for a new pantomime opens the anonymous Puck’s Pantomime; or, Harlequin and Robinson Crusoe, could with some confidence claim that the story of Robinson Crusoe would make a fresh subject for his Christmas play. But if Robinson Crusoe was somewhat of a theatrical novelty in 1844, the next half-century would see Defoe’s castaway become an increasingly familiar face on the London stage, taking his place next to Bluebeard and Sinbad on the roll of perennial stage favorites. 2 This is not to say that the character had never before appeared on the boards. Indeed, John McVeagh (1990) identifies Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe of 1781 as his theatrical debut. However, Crusoe did not become a staple of the stage until the middle of the nineteenth century, when he began to replace some of the characters David Mayer (1969) identifi es as the pantomime’s earliest celebrities. From pantomime to parody, adaptation to allusion, Victorian playwrights repeatedly turned to Defoe’s novel for inspiration.3 The Lord Chamberlain’s Catalogue records some sort of theatrical Robinsonade almost every year during the latter half of the century. By my own count, the card catalogue of the Lord Chamberlain’s plays in the British Library contains one hundred nineteen plays whose titles begin with the words “Robinson Crusoe.”4 Of course, not all Robinsonades are so readily identifiable by their titles, and so this count doubtlessly represents only a portion of the total number of plays inspired by Defoe’s novel. Although we may not be able to determine the precise number of Robinsonades licensed and performed over the course of the nineteenth century, the available evidence quite clearly indicates that Crusoe was one of the century’s most popular and familiar theatrical stars, and that his popularity as dramatic subject grew as the century wore on. The next three chapters will examine how this early-Victorian theatrical novelty became such a beloved mainstay of the late-Victorian stage.

32

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

Louis James notes that Crusoe has so saturated the modern lexicon that even those who have never read Defoe’s novel recognize the essential features of the castaway’s tale (1996: 1). Transcending not only his eponymous textual bounds but the very confi nes of the literary, Crusoe has taken root in the cultural landscape, becoming one of the myths of modernity. Like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Ebenezer Scrooge, Robinson Crusoe has evolved into a familiar figure, a household name, a readily recognizable brand. Like James, Richard Phillips (1997) and Susan Maher (1985) have discussed at some length the Victorian fascination with Robinson Crusoe and the enormous popularity narrative Robinsonades enjoyed in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Their work on narrative adaptations and appropriations of the Crusoe myth, though it does not reference theatrical Robinsonades, reveals the centrality of Robinson Crusoe within the Victorian cultural imagination. In her dissertation, Order in Paradise: An Examination of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Robinsonades (U of Wisconsin, Madison, 1985), Maher provides a thorough study of Crusoe’s novelistic progeny, but her research stops at the theatre’s doors. Similarly, Richard Phillips’s Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (1997) devotes a chapter to the myriad narrative versions of Robinson Crusoe that came into existence during the nineteenth century but does not include a discussion of theatrical Robinsonades. Although David Mayer’s Harlequin in His Element (1969) traces the early development of the English harlequinade, his study ends in 1836, a full decade before Crusoe rose to pantomime fame. My own study of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade is indebted to the work of all four of these scholars even as it extends their fi ndings into new extra-textual territories. Describing the primacy of Crusoe among missionary and beachcomber accounts of experiences in the South Seas, Vanessa Smith identifies Defoe’s novel as the origin for the English novel, the invocation of which authorized even its own unauthorized imitators. But even this prototypical fiction was itself generated and authorized by a primordial nonfiction, the true story of Alexander Selkirk (1996: 62–3). Frequently adapted to both page and stage, Robinson Crusoe is itself an adaptation, the fictionalization of a factual account. For the Victorians, Robinson Crusoe offered a model of the imperial encounter. A tale of adventure, the story is invested with spiritual references and a serious sense of purpose. Robinson Crusoe traces the efforts of its hero to recreate western civilization from recovered flotsam. The novel is a testament to the human spirit and to English ingenuity: Crusoe is as industrious as he is inventive, and he imposes an English sense of domestic order on a savage wilderness. In his encounters with the local cannibal “savages,” Crusoe exercises military readiness yet also extends the hand that brings Friday under the civilizing yoke. With Christian ideals, natural cleverness, and fi rm leadership, Crusoe transforms the island of his sojourn into a model outpost of English civilization. Defoe’s novel fi rmly grounds

Introduction to Part I

33

colonization within the civilizing mission. Engaging with some of the primary myths informing British empire-building efforts throughout the nineteenth century, the Crusoe legend was a readily recognizable and accessible touchstone for popular representations of empire. Given widespread audience familiarity with the Crusoe story and considering the castaway’s presence in so many plays across the nineteenth century, I begin my study of imperial theatrics with the theatrical Robinsonade, a dramatic genre that not only offered imaginative representation of imperial space but also articulated an evolving justification for imperial expansion as it explored the relationship between metropole and colony, a cultural and spatial delineation that framed the plays’ performance of Englishness as it was expressed in the colonial encounter. In very significant ways, the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade was distinct from both Defoe’s original text and the novelistic Robinsonades so popular with young Victorian readers. My aim is, in part, to reveal the inadequacies of current scholarship on the Crusoe tradition in English literature, which has hitherto focused almost exclusively on narrative Robinsonades, to the near exclusion of their theatrical counterparts. But as Jack Robinson of William Thomas Moncrieff’s wildly popular Robinsonade The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane, 1823) learns, when it comes to building an empire and extending British cultural norms into new territories, the novel is simply not enough. Given the popularity of Moncrieff’s play and its critique of the fetishization of Defoe’s novel, The Cataract of the Ganges is perhaps the best place to begin our discussion. Like the theatrical Robinsonades that followed in its wake, The Cataract of the Ganges invokes Crusoe as a means of representing in a familiar visual rhetoric the relationship between Britain and its empire as it explores the manner, methods, and aims of Britain’s engagement with its cultural Other.

2

The Novel Is Not Enough Text and Performance in The Cataract of the Ganges JACK ROBINSON. What the devil should I do . . . my namesake never killed a Bramin [sic]. —W.T. Moncrieff, The Cataract of the Ganges (1823)

MOKARRA. These English talk and think—they’re dangerous to a despotic sway. —W.T. Moncrieff, The Cataract of the Ganges (1823)

For more than half a century, stages throughout the British Isles offered audiences the lavish costumes, elaborate battle pieces, and stunning scenery of William Thomas Moncrieff’s Indian spectacle The Cataract of the Ganges; or, the Rajah’s Daughter. Among the earliest of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonades, The Cataract of the Ganges was perhaps the most successful, enjoying regular and popular revivals. The play premiered at Drury Lane in 1823, opening at New York’s Park Theatre and at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh the following year (Nicholl 1959; Bordman and Hishack 2004).1 At the 1826 production in Glasgow, a poorly trained group of fourteen horses made such a mess of the stage that a rival theatre was inspired to mount its own burlesque featuring fourteen donkeys, but not even this equestrian disaster could undermine the popularity of Moncrieff’s play, which continued to be performed within Britain and abroad over the next five decades (Macintosh 1866: 119). John Spring (1977) lists five advertisements for the play in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper in the 1860s; the French’s Standard Drama edition (1856) of The Cataract of the Ganges lists four performances, three of them in America, between 1850 and 1856; and in his record of London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (1925), diarist Erroll Sherson describes a production he attended at Drury Lane in 1873, exactly fi fty years after its premiere on that very same stage. That revival, according to the Illustrated London News, included “all the original effects, not omitting, of course, the rocky precipices of the great cataract, up which a rider dashes on horseback, while the water is falling in full volume.”2 1873 also saw dramatist/actor/manager John Brougham in a successful revival of the play in New York (Bordman and Hishack 2004). In terms of production history, The Cataract of the Ganges would appear to be one of the most popular plays of the nineteenth century.

The Novel Is Not Enough 35 From its opening scene of military triumph to its concluding arrangement of horses, gunfi re, and trees aflame, Moncrieff’s play brought India to spectacular life on the nineteenth-century stage. With characters adorned in “richly embroidered” clothes, troupes of dancing girls, and ceremonial processions, The Cataract of the Ganges presents India in fullest splendor. Though originally conceived as an opportunity to exhibit “a cataract and live horses” on the stage, the play’s spectacular scenery and costuming are not merely decorative, as they document the sights of Britain’s Indian empire. Competing with contemporary panoramas and magic lantern shows by appropriating their pictorial effects, Cataract’s lavish “reproduction” of India confi rms the British theatre’s function as an institution of empire, ideally suited to the task of illustrating the distant imperial periphery for the metropolitan masses. Cataract’s intricate oriental plot and thrilling action were embellished with stunning stage pictures of the sort one might see in illustrated newspapers or panoramas; these scenic effects eroded the boundaries separating different modes of illustrating empire, making Cataract an important example of the multigeneric mechanics of imperial theatrics, as I discuss in Chapter 1. Among the “oriental spectacles” Michael Booth identifies in the play are “a Rajah’s palace, a Pavilion of Pleasures, a procession of Brahmin priests, a grand procession of the Rajah’s army, and the interior of the great Brahmin temple fi lled with golden images,” large enough for the actors to climb on (Booth 1981: 62). Other scenes include “the rocks on the borders of the Arabian Sea, with distant view of Scindia,” a second “Hindu Temple, on the Mount of Cambay . . . [with] a view of the Gulf of Cambay below,” and “the terrific Cataract of Gangotri, supposed to form the source of the Ganges” (Moncrieff 1823: 19, 22, 41). In addition to these set pieces, the play features a number of processions and large-scale military engagements. The Emperor is always accompanied by cavalry troops, dancing girls, singers, and military band. Mokarra, the play’s villain, travels from the palace to the temple “in a magnificent Car, drawn by six horses, three abreast, attended by guards, slaves, etc.” (Moncrieff 1823: 23). Showcasing large numbers of people representing a whole range of Indian social types, these processions and elaborate interiors transform a simple play into an exhibition of India. While it confirms the stage’s power of imperial representation, Moncrieff’s imperial spectacle surprisingly associates theatrical practices with Indian superstition and oriental despotism (Bolton 2006: 486). Though at times the play seems to endorse its own cultural rival, the English novel, as the most effective counter to the dangers of eastern theatricality, ultimately it advances English eloquence, a hybrid of text and performance, as the most powerful tool in the nation’s imperial arsenal.

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAY W.T. Moncrieff was an important figure in early nineteenth-century popular culture. One measure of his cumulative contribution to the stage is

36

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

provided by the sheer number of plays he produced in his lifetime, some two to three hundred scripts being attributed to his pen. Apart from Tom and Jerry, his popular adaptation of Pierce Egan’s Life in London, the vast bulk of this dramatic output has been forgotten. Moncrieff is perhaps as well known to us through his contentious relationship with Charles Dickens. When Moncrieff pirated The Pickwick Papers in order to produce Sam Weller; or the Pickwickians in July 1837—three months before the novel ended its serial run—he caught the novelist’s attention. Though Moncrieff insisted that he deserved praise for rendering so successful a drama from a “wholly undramatic” text, Dickens sought revenge (Pemberton 1888: 137–42). And thus today we know W.T. Moncrieff indirectly, through his satirical shadow, Mr. Crummles of Nicholas Nickleby (Fitz-Gerald 1910: 119–26). More to the point, this rivalry between stage and page forms a central motif in many of the nineteenth-century dramatizations of Robinson Crusoe, including The Cataract of the Ganges. The Cataract of the Ganges opens on a field of battle: “wounded, dead and dying Mohamedan and Hindu soldiers, offi cers, and horses stretched confusedly on the earth. . . . [T]he cold blue light of the moon glitters on . . . cannon, arms, and accoutrements. . . . The burning ruins of the city are seen smouldering in the distance” (Moncrieff 1823: 9). Iran, an Indian warrior, rises from the field and encounters Jam Saheb, the Rajah of Guzerat, who laments the loss of so many brave men but rejoices for his triumph over Emperor Ackbar of Delhi. Worried that the Emperor will return with additional troops, the Rajah sets off for Scindia, in search of additional forces, while Mordaunt, an English officer, is sent to ask the Mahrattas for aid. Though Iran disapproves, the Rajah authorizes Mokarra, a Bramin [sic], to act as steward in his absence. Distrusting Mokarra, Iran worries about the safety of Prince Zamine, at that moment under the protection of Jack Robinson, an Englishman who sees himself and the world through the lens of Daniel Defoe’s proto-imperial text, Robinson Crusoe. While Jack keeps an eye on Zamine, Ubra, another of the Prince’s attendants, has her eye on Jack. Leaving the battlefield, Iran makes his way to Jack Robinson’s cottage, where he informs the Prince of his father’s victory, interrupting Robinson’s tirade about the horrors of such Indian customs as widow burning and female infanticide. After giving Robinson an opportunity to explain his true calling—to follow in the footsteps of his hero and namesake, traveling the globe in search of adventure and danger—Iran, Robinson, Prince Zamine, and a host of retainers remove to the palace, where they find Mokarra, the king’s new assistant, in charge. Hearing of the Emperor Ackbar’s proposal to marry his own daughter to Prince Zamine as a way of ending the feud and uniting Delhi and Guzerat, the ambitious Mokarra sees the marriage as an opportunity to attain for himself a position of privilege within Ackbar’s growing empire. When Zamine arrives at the palace, Mokarra informs the young prince

The Novel Is Not Enough 37 of the marriage treaty, which Zamine refuses to accept. By setting fi re to his own cottage, Jack Robinson signals for the Rajah to return, which he does just in time to interrupt the marriage ceremony. Facing the threat of further war with the Emperor, the Rajah has no choice but to admit that Zamine is not his son but his daughter, saved from the “barbaric” practice of female infanticide by assuming a masculine identity. In thus saving his infant daughter, the Rajah broke the law and forfeited both their lives, but Mokarra agrees to allow them both to live if the Rajah gives his throne to the Emperor and allows his daughter to be dedicated to the service of Brahma. Mokarra takes Zamine to the holy temple of Jaggernaut [sic]. There, his proposal to marry Zamine, now dressed as a beautiful young woman, is refused. In retaliation, Mokarra orders her execution. Aided by his trusty novel, Robinson attempts—but fails—to rescue Zamine from the temple in which she is imprisoned before being immolated. Just as she is placed on the pyre, Iran, the Rajah, and Colonel Mordaunt enter with their allied forces and, in a spectacular scene of gunfi re, galloping horses, and rushing water, subdue Mokarra’s forces and rush Zamine to safety: Zamine rushes into Iran’s arms—the burning trees fall on all sides . . . the Emperor and the Bramin’s troops appear, pouring down the rocky heights around the cataract in every direction . . . Zamine mounts the courser of Iran, and while he keeps the foe at bay, dashes safely up the cataract, amidst a volley of musketry from the enemy on the heights . . . the contest becomes general; horse and foot are engaged in all parts . . . Mokarra is killed by a pistol shot from Robinson . . . and the Curtain falls on the shouts of the conquerors. (1823: 41)

THE ANTI-ROBINSONADE The Cataract of the Ganges casts a critical eye over the mythic text of empire. The play sets out to supersede Defoe’s novel by exposing the inadequacies of text in mediating the cross-cultural colonial encounter. What makes the English a force with which to reckon is not that they read but that they “talk and think.” It is speech and gesture that save the day. Though Robinson Crusoe is Cataract’s inspiration, Moncrieff’s play resists dismissive categorization as a slave to its own originary text. If Jack Robinson is the comical image of excessive commitment to textual fidelity, Colonel Mordaunt dramatically animates the novel’s spirit. Cataract is thus a model for adaptation, demonstrating respect for its textual origins while maintaining its own separate and unique identity, an independence that allows for the celebration of generic distinctions. What is remarkable about the very active presence of Robinson Crusoe within Moncrieff’s play is the degree to which the play seemingly valorizes

38 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter the novel while indicting its own theatrical modality, only to indirectly champion the latter through the gentle mockery of the former. By itself, Defoe’s novel—which is a constant reminder of Britain’s imperial enterprise, both to the audience watching the play and to those acting on stage— is a mere prop, an element of costume; it requires a character to give it voice, movement, and real stage presence. That job falls to Jack Robinson, who carries the novel from one scene to the next and gives the text voice by reading from it aloud. We may initially be inclined to see this material incarnation of Robinson Crusoe as the play’s endorsement of imperialist fiction, but then we recall that Jack, the novel’s disciple and spokesman, is a comic character, a lovable buffoon. Described by one reviewer as a figure who “supplied the humorous element in abundance,” Jack seems an unlikely candidate for imperial hero (Illustrated London News, 8 March 1873). Nor does he have a clear relationship with any official institution of empire. He is simply a man living and working in India without direction from Queen or Company: like his namesake hero, he is just a man with a book and a thirst for adventure. Can this unaffi liated and overeager reader be an emblem of empire? Is Moncrieff’s play undermining its own theatrical modality by celebrating literary fiction as the authorization of and as a blueprint for Britain’s imperial enterprise? To understand the role of Robinson Crusoe within The Cataract of the Ganges, we might consider Moncrieff’s play alongside two of its successor texts which utilize similar strategies for de-authorizing Defoe’s novel as the blueprint for imperial engagement: Puck’s Pantomime (an 1844 play), and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (a novel published in 1868). Though representing very different modes—stage spectacle, pantomime, and narrative fiction—The Cataract of the Ganges, Puck’s Pantomime, and The Moonstone employ kindred tactics as they seek to usurp the position occupied by Defoe in Britain’s mythology of imperial adventure. Licensed for production at Drury Lane in December, 1844, twenty years after Cataract’s premiere on the same stage, Puck’s Pantomime dramatizes Crusoe’s release from the pages of Defoe’s novel in a scene that validates theatrical adaptation and confi rms the authority of the stage to put Robinson Crusoe to theatrical use. Puck’s Pantomime—which I discuss at some length in Chapter 3—resolves the tensions between text and performance that preoccupy The Cataract of the Ganges, symbolically enacting the fi nal release of the theatrical Robinsonade from originary textual tyranny. Though Defoe’s novel retained something of its primacy of place in the literature of empire, by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become a softer target for those who saw its lessening relevance in a new age of empire. “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” Lillian Nayder explains, “is one of [Wilkie] Collins’s primary targets. In The Moonstone, Collins subtly reworks Defoe’s novel in order to challenge the authority of this text—to loosen the hold its imperial ideal had on Victorian readers” (1992: 215). Ironically,

The Novel Is Not Enough 39 Betteredge—the servant—identifies more with Crusoe than with Friday, a privileging of racist presumptions over class affiliations. By thus rendering Robinson Crusoe’s ardent disciple comic and narratively ineffective, Collins’s novel exposes the inadequacies of the Crusoe model of imperial engagement, with its celebration of the solitary adventurer; its portrayal of the noble savage and its expressions of confidence in the beneficence of the civilizing mission; its unabashedly masculine, bourgeois, and capitalist ideology; and its rendering of the colonial space as a temporary location from which the colonizer readily returns once the work of empire, broadly idealized, has been accomplished (Nayder 1992: 220–24; Pionke 2000: 127–28; Dawson 1994: 58–60; R. Phillips 1997: 33–6; T. Smith 1996: 63). While it has become commonplace to describe Gabriel Betteredge’s reading of Robinson Crusoe as a sort of superstitious fortune-telling, a closer look at the way in which Betteredge employs Defoe’s novel within The Moonstone shows that this characterization is not quite accurate. Betteredge claims that passages in Robinson Crusoe foretell the future, but the novel’s “predictions” are only apparent in hindsight or even in the realm of imaginative invention. It is not until an event happens that Betteredge is able to remember from his earlier reading of the novel a suggestion of that event, a retrospective recall that often involves the imposition of creative textual interpretation. For the most part, Betteredge turns to Robinson Crusoe not as a crystal ball but as an opiate, a way of calming his anxieties and fi nding comfort in the face of the unknown—all this in a novel that links opiates to theft, murder, and domestic mayhem. Reading Robinson Crusoe, like the partaking of tobacco, is a way for Betteredge to relax even when circumstances threaten to overwhelm him (Duncan 1994: 309–10). Unable to decipher the plots surrounding the mysterious diamond, Betteredge fi nds solace in narrative and reassurance in Crusoe’s insistence on the guiding hand of Providence: the novel offers colonialist certainty in the face of imperial mystery. But as The Moonstone reveals, Defoe’s tale of solitary adventure and colony-building is insufficient to the task of protecting England from foreign invasion, for it is in the construction of new narratives—not in the perusal of existing ones—that plots are woven and discovered (Dawson 1994: 63–74). Within The Moonstone, the emerging narrative methods of law and science replace classic literary fiction as the model for intervention in domestic protection and the ordering of empire (Wills 1997; Gruner 1993). Given the persistent presence of Cataract on the London stage, it is likely that Moncrieff’s Jack Robinson inspired Collins’s characterization of Gabriel Betteredge.3 Like Betteredge, Robinson fi nds reassurance within the pages of Robinson Crusoe, though in a far more secular way, for Jack’s recitations from the novel omit all references to God and Providence. Longing for adventures of his own, Jack is inspired by Crusoe’s resourcefulness and ingenuity. Defoe’s novel does more than help him solve immediate problems; it is his chief motivating force, his blueprint for life:

40 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter ROB. Why when I was a boy in school, I fell in love with the adventures of my half name-sake, Robinson Crusoe. So like him I ran away from home, and sailed all over the world, in hopes of being cast away on some uninhabited Island, and fi nding a Man Friday. (Moncrieff 1823: 12) Crusoe, of course, does not set out to become shipwrecked on an island, and he is only too happy, at the end of the novel, to leave his solitary island life and return to civilization. Jack Robinson, his “half name-sake” only half-understands the story he has adopted as his own. Believing it to be “delightful to live all alone by one-self, and have to make everything one wants,” he even counts himself “unlucky” that he has had [N]othing but fair weather all the way—no such thing as a storm to be had for love or money—hadn’t even the satisfaction of being wrecked and made a slave by the Algerines—no want of provisions—no sailing three leagues with a shoulder of mutton sail! No—all most vexatiously calm, and provokingly comfortable! (Moncrieff 1823: 12) Jack has not merely internalized Crusoe’s story; he has idealized it. Forgetting that Crusoe struggles with loneliness and despair and daily fights for his survival, Jack’s childlike imagination thinks of shipwreck as a grand amusement. He also fails to realize that Crusoe’s adventure, like that of all colonists, is pervaded by a tension between a wandering inclination (which leads to new lands) and a settled condition (in which the adventurous spirit is abandoned and settlement ensues). Crusoe changes from an enthusiastic to a reluctant adventurer, from a wanderer to a settler. . . . Ultimately he fashions a world in which adventure is no longer necessary. . . . Through its narrative of colonization and transformation on and of an island, Robinson Crusoe represents, promotes and legitimates a form of colonialism. (R. Phillips 1997: 34) Reading his fictional hero as adventurer rather than colonist, Jack focuses on the wrong objectives, spurning Ubra’s romantic overtures and even destroying his own cottage as he seeks sensation rather than settlement. Though he sees that the world has not delivered the opportunities for adventure that he had sought, he fails to see this as evidence that the eighteenth century’s paradigmatic fictional model of colonization is irrelevant to the nineteenth century’s imperial mission, rooted in domestic order and humanitarianism. So immersed is he in Defoe’s novel that his own muddled, myopic, monocular vision of proper imperial adventure allows for no variation, even when it derives from a misreading of his fictional prototype. Consider,

The Novel Is Not Enough 41 for example, Jack’s insistence on an appropriately raced Friday: “If ever I have a Man Friday, he must be a black one, and somebody must just be going to eat him” (Moncrieff 1823: 12); “my man of all work, Saturday, that I engaged last Monday to serve as a sort of Friday;—he’s not quite black enough, certainly, but he’s the blackest I could get” (1823: 18); “what a pity it is that you an’t black, and that you hav’n’t got thick lips, and woolly hair, and a humpty dumpty nose” (1823: 32). Objectionably racist rhetoric aside, Jack’s obsession with the “blackness” of his companion highlights the inadequacy of the Crusoe model within the context of Britain’s Indian empire. As Betsy Bolton points out, Jack Robinson “is seeking a ‘neger,’ an African, where no African ought to be. . . . insist[ing], inappropriately, on reading the colonial East Indies through a previous century’s musings on colonialism in the West Indies” (2006: 484). No longer relevant, Robinson Crusoe has been rendered obsolete in the evolution of empire, as Britain’s imperial gaze shifted from West to East; Jack’s obsessive fidelity to a text that he misreads and that is situationally irrelevant effectively delegitimizes Robinson Crusoe, the prototypical text of empire. By thus mocking the originary fiction of empire, Cataract de-authorizes the novel, freeing the stage from slavish fidelity to an outdated text and, in the process, creates on stage a space for the reimagination of empire in a theatrical mode. Unlike the static fi xity of text, the drama is dynamic and evolving. Though it is inspired by its fictional antecedent, the play is not bound by it. And yet, so entrenched is the figure of Crusoe within the empire of the popular imagination that he could not be completely banished from the stage. Instead, the figure was reconstructed within a distinct theatrical tradition. In the plays that followed Cataract we can see evidence of Moncrieff’s success in severing the drama of empire from its narrative progenitor. James Kenney’s The Illustrious Stranger, for example, followed in Cataract’s footsteps, appearing on the Drury Lane stage in 1827, just four years after Moncrieff’s play premiered, there. The Illustrious Stranger adopts Robinson Crusoe’s model of the shipwrecked Englishman cast ashore in a savage land, but it departs from Crusoe by offering a second shipwrecked survivor, who joins the fi rst in hatching a clever plan to save the widowed princess from being buried alive, as dictated by local custom.4 Though the play is clearly rooted in the tradition of the Robinsonade, it makes no direct reference to Defoe’s novel and is, indeed, more closely connected to The Cataract of the Ganges, its more immediate theatrical predecessor. If Cataract inspired The Illustrious Stranger, displacing Crusoe as the operative model of the theatrical Robinsonade, Kenney’s play in its turn inspired R. Reece’s 1869 burlesque, Brown and the Brahmins (Globe), which similarly follows a shipwrecked Englishman as he saves the princess and, in the process, inspires the king to abolish the barbaric custom that requires the self-sacrifice of widows.5 Both plays are Robinsonades, but neither acknowledges its debt to Defoe, nor needs to: having de-authorized the

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novel, The Cataract of the Ganges made Crusoe the property of the stage, a fictional hero with an illustrious theatrical career.6

RECLAIMING THEATRICALITY At fi rst glance, The Cataract of the Ganges surprisingly appears to endorse the primacy of text while indicting its own theatrical mode. Most obviously associated with Mokarra—the scheming, ambitious Brahmin—theatricality is linked to deception, religious hypocrisy, and oriental despotism. Jack highlights Mokarra’s dangerous theatrical nature when he describes Mokarra as “a Will Atkins in disguise” (Moncrieff 1823: 17). Concealing his ambition, the Brahmin promises to act in accordance with the Rajah’s wishes, all the while plotting to take over Guzerat. His authority in matters of religion is itself both part of his disguise and a tool for the exercise of his power. As it cloaks his political ambition, his Brahminical authority assures the loyalty of others: “The Jahrejas by hope and fear are bound already to me—they dread, yet cling to me. Oh, superstition! thou mightiest lever of the human mind” (1823: 15). On stage, theatricality is most obviously associated with the religious superstitions and spectacles of power that maintain India’s inhumane practices, particularly female infanticide. Indeed, successful performance is linked to political power and even survival. To protect his daughter from a law that requires her execution, the Rajah chooses not to challenge or to change the law but to disguise his daughter in the hope that she can escape detection. The girl’s fate is ultimately decided by Mokarra, who uses religion to mask his excessive political ambition. His authority in matters of religion secures the loyalty of the people even as he plots the destruction of their king and state. Manipulative, ambitious, and treacherous, Mokarra represents the dangers of a theatricality that seems inseparable from eastern political and religious institutions. Indeed, Jack Robinson, seeing the golden Hindu idol for the first time, recognizes the theatrical nature of the Brahmin’s power: “What’s this?—an idol—gold, too. —Ah! these Bramins [sic] are cunning ones—they know a thing or two. If you want an Idol, to be worshipped, only make it of gold, and all the world will bow to it” (1823: 33). Attempting to rescue Zamine from Jaggernaut [sic], Jack is tempted to steal one of the idol’s enormous, golden toes, but he remembers Robinson Crusoe’s statement about the pieces-of-eight: riches are useless to a dead man. Though he doesn’t have time to consult the novel, he remembers the gist of Crusoe’s self-admonition, which is enough to prevent Jack from stealing the toe. Here again, a comparison with The Moonstone helps to illuminate this moment in Moncrieff’s play. Unlike John Herncastle, who indulges his thieving impulses and steals the eye from the Hindu idol, Jack stops himself and chooses to leave the idol untouched. Robinson Crusoe

The Novel Is Not Enough 43 intervenes to subdue the sort of imperialist greed that spawns so much trouble in Collins’s later novel. From this scene we may be tempted to conclude that The Cataract of the Ganges endorses its own cultural rival—imperialist fiction—as the antidote to its own theatrical mode, which appears inseparable from deception and eastern despotism. In such a reading, Cataract’s spectacular scenery and costuming represent the eastern answer to the western novel: where the Englishmen have text, the Brahmin has spectacle; the English novel instructs while the Indian spectacle deceives; the western text suppresses greed while the eastern theatrical display makes personal gain its goal. Against the dazzling jewels and impressive procession deployed to awe the local population into submission, it would seem, are pitted the worn pages of an English novel. But while it may appear to set up a tension between East and West that is figured through the opposition of spectacle to text, under closer investigation we can see that Cataract does not settle for such a simple binary of western textuality and eastern theatricality. To the extent that Jack Robinson relies on the English novel as the ultimate source of wisdom and instruction, the play endorses textual authority. This endorsement, however, is limited. Manipulating spectacle as a means of exercising power, Mokarra is the very emblem of theatrical deceit; but Jack, as we have seen, is a comic character whose instruction manual is insufficient to the task of saving Zamine (Bolton 2006: 483). Text provides the basis of the comic business of the theatrical spectacle, but it is inadequate to the serious business of the dramatic plot, which is also the moral imperative of the empire’s civilizing mission. While it wants to align England with textuality and the virtues thereof, and to indict insincere, deceptive eastern theatricality (and thereby maintain the traditional cultural distinctions), as a play it cannot fully disparage its own theatrical mode, which it must work to differentiate from eastern theatricality. Where Robinson is ineffective, Mordaunt embodies sincerity and eloquence and ultimately arises as hero of both play and empire. Destabilizing the conventional binary that assumes an inherent and necessary antithesis between theatricality and authenticity, Lynn Voskuil has argued for an understanding of Victorian England as “authentically theatrical,” a culture in which performance was key to self-understanding (2004: 4–17). According to Voskuil, “natural acting,” the actor’s cultivation of spontaneity, was critical to the formation of “a shared experience of feeling” within the theatrical space. Sensation drama was particularly wellsuited to this task, as it promoted the sympathetic attachments that transcended boundaries of gender, race, and class (2004: 28, 89–91). Rooted in authentic feeling and performed with sincerity, theatricality could encourage the affective associations that brought audiences together as a single community. And that theatrical community, Voskuil concludes, was the foundation for a national community, grounded in shared sentiment and

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common feeling. Moncrieff’s play counters despotic and mystical eastern spectacle with such a brand of theatricality immersed in authenticity and affective substance, extending to the imperial frontier the very theatricality that lay at the heart of British national consciousness. Moncrieff’s play represents many traditional Orientalist assumptions about India, which it depicts as a place of widow burning and female infanticide. In a play centrally concerned with the problem of female offspring in Indian societies, it is the British who must step in and change local law in order to save Indian womanhood. Incapable of rational and decisive action, the Rajah—a slave to tradition—requires the help of outsiders if he is to save his daughter from his own laws. Described by Mokarra as people who “talk and think,” the English are people of words and of action, a combination that makes them the natural rulers of less civilized peoples.7 British duty and confidence are at the heart of this play, united in Jack Robinson’s declaration that “it is enough . . . as an Englishman, to know that things are going on wrong—to set about righting them” (1823: 19). Ever alert for opportunities to improve Indian society, the play’s British representatives are quite capable of accomplishing whatever they set out to do, whether that be defeating despotism or abolishing barbaric cultural traditions. The Cataract of the Ganges illustrates nineteenth-century Orientalism at work. Though the de-authorization of Robinson Crusoe gives the play an anti-literary trajectory, the repeated demonstration of the moral influence of English rhetoric confirms Gauri Viswanathan’s characterization of language and literature as tools of imperial conquest, the linguistic arm of western imperialism deployed as a means of “improving” the colonized by freeing the Oriental mind from a presumed state of degradation (1989: 130–41). Aligning the English language with moral right and humanitarian duty, Cataract repeatedly demonstrates for its audience the transformative power of English speech and its effectiveness in cultural conversion in a colonial context. In her analysis of islands as spaces of transformation, Margaret-Anne Hutton observes that literary castaways have two alternatives: they can either “transform the alien environment until it resembles the familiar continent, or allow the new world to effect changes in them.” One or the other, island or castaway, must be transformed in a scenario that ultimately implicates the reader (1994: 121). Using its own would-be castaway, Moncrieff’s play demonstrates the fi rst alternative, the transformation of the alien into the familiar. When Ubra explains that access to the Sanctuary of Brama—in which Zamine is imprisoned—is restricted, Robinson declares that the sanctuary is, then, “quite an uninhabited island to the world in general, and ‘tis my business to get in there and root out the savages as soon as possible” (Moncrieff 1823: 32). The rhetorical move here is striking: Robinson declares the scared space to be “uninhabited” because access to its interior is restricted by law, rendering it not only unknown but also unknowable as a result of the rules that prevent

The Novel Is Not Enough 45 communication between those inside and those outside the walls of the structure. Furthermore, if this space is “uninhabited,” then there cannot be any source for the articulation of law, which must in turn mean that there is no law to prevent Robinson from entering the sanctuary to enact a rescue. Moreover, Jack’s declaration allows him to fit a new situation to an existing and familiar literary model. This arresting moment testifies to the power of utterance, as India’s sacred spaces are transformed through simple English declaration. Anticipating Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” which hails English as “preeminent even among the languages of the West,” the language of “ethical and political instruction,” “morals, government, [and] jurisprudence,” Jack Robinson proclaims the moral power of English eloquence (Macaulay 1835: 231). Confronted by a hostile army loyal to Mokarra, Robinson tells Mordaunt to “convert” them to allies through eloquent speech: “I’ve known English eloquence effect far greater wonders than that—only you speak from your heart (and what Englishman would not, when the topic is humanity?) and hang me if you won’t soon fi nd your way to theirs” (Moncrieff 1823: 39). Mordaunt takes this advice and addresses Mokarra’s men: MORDAUNT. Hold!—one word of parley:—Jahrejahs, husbands, fathers, men—what is’t you do? You stand in arms against your lawful Sovereign—and why? Because, unswayed by lustful priestcraft, he, as a husband, cherished the fond pledge of love a faithful wife presented—because he, as a father, did not destroy the helpless innocent, that smilingly looked in his face for safety and affection—and, as a man, redeems your forfeit claim to that proud title, by rooting this fell crime for ever from you. For this, you throw off your allegiance. Murderers of children, you have not hearts to combat with true men! Lay down your arms! and join our cause—or, bold in guilt, here feel how surely virtue’s arm can strike, and take the wages of your vices—death! [emphasis added] (Moncrieff 1823: 40) Mordaunt’s speech discursively redefi nes his audience, co-opting Mokarra’s forces as allies by reminding them of their higher duty as men, husbands, and fathers, primary identities that supersede religious, ethnic, and political affiliations. The speech is so elegantly delivered and so compelling in its moral message that the Jahrejahs immediately lay down their arms and join the Rajah’s forces, prompting Mordaunt to declare that “They still are men . . . Nature fights for us!” [emphasis added] (Moncrieff 1823: 40). This closing proclamation confi rms that the Englishman’s appeal is rooted in the rhetoric of universal human rights and, furthermore, suggests that Mordaunt’s moving vocal performance—though theatrical in delivery—is natural, thus sincere and authentic. English rhetoric triumphs

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over unnatural Indian custom because it is rooted in what is real, natural, universal, and eternal: masculine duty and human affections. If Mordaunt succeeds in “converting” Mokarra’s followers, it is because English imperial theatrics—embodied in Mordaunt’s performance—are grounded in authentic feeling and thus capable of creating an affective community across racial and cultural boundaries. Macaulay depicts language as operating from within the colonized culture, transforming the object of imperial administration into a subject culture that learns to see itself as a part of the empire: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect (1835: 237). Mordaunt’s speech works in exactly this way, using language to unite center and periphery by creating a myth of cultural sameness that naturalizes the imperial order. The Cataract of the Ganges vividly illustrates how theatricality was an integral, if contested, cog in the imperial machine, serving a dual role as Britain’s cultural antithesis and a privileged mode of imperial representation and moral expression.

CRUSOE, CATARACT, AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION As the stated aims of empire shifted in response to changing economic needs and social concerns, Robinson Crusoe’s brand of colonial adventure became less reflective of the public perception of the objectives and limits of Britain’s imperial mandate. In the early nineteenth century, as Mary Louise Pratt has noted, “Euroimperialism faced a legitimation crisis. The histories of broken treaties, genocides, mass displacements and enslavements became less and less acceptable as rationalist and humanitarian ideologies took hold” (1992: 74). Within this changing ideological landscape, Robinson Crusoe represented an outmoded image of colonial encounter, and yet it somehow retained its primacy of place within the cultural imagination. The Crusoe myth demonstrated a remarkable degree of transferability to meet the cultural needs of evolving imperialist paradigms, as Richard Phillips has commented: The island and adventurer represented Britain and British colonialism—including British land grabs and colonial violence—in the best possible light, conservatively legitimating, powerfully mapping. To the reader in nineteenth-century Britain, Crusoe’s island became an image of Britain and the British Empire, not as they had been when Defoe wrote, but as they had become by the nineteenth century. (1997: 35) Reflecting the shift in the nature of the imperial mandate, Cataract privileges the image of empire as a primarily humanitarian form of cultural intervention.

The Novel Is Not Enough 47 In “Crusoe, Cannibalism, and Empire,” Markman Ellis tries to situate Crusoe’s descriptions of cannibalistic activity and his own responses to such activity within eighteenth-century discussions of cannibalism, savagery, and imperial expansion, arguing that the application of the term “cannibal” to a group of people “is an ideological and rhetorical device to establish moral superiority over them” (1996: 46). Although Crusoe takes a culturally-relativist perspective that considers the legitimacy of cannibalism according to local law and custom, suspending moral judgment, he reserves for himself the right to take decisive action should he fi nd his own life threatened. By claiming the right of self-defense, Ellis argues, Crusoe legitimates whatever brutalities might be employed in “the ‘pacification’ of indigenous peoples” (1996: 48). In other words, the cannibal label authorizes imperialist violence on the grounds of personal security rather than the suppression of “immoral” activity. The Cataract of the Ganges follows Crusoe’s pattern of intervention, delineating at least two separate spheres in which the empire’s representatives should take action in local affairs. In Crusoe’s case, these moments occur when he rescues Friday and the Spaniards from the cannibals and when he helps the English captain quell the mutiny onboard his ship. This series of rescues reveals the limits of Crusoe’s cultural relativism, being moments in which compelling circumstances push him to action, either (1) to safeguard the lives of others, or (2) to preserve the structures of authority and the rule of law. These actionable conditions are also present in Cataract. Jack’s initial move to save Zamine occurs when Zamine, disguised as a prince, refuses to marry Princess Dessa. Unable to explain the refusal, Zamine and her attendant Matali can only express their opposition to the wedding and bewail their helplessness in the situation. Jack responds not to Zamine’s despair but to Mokarra’s apparent usurpation of authority: “I see this fellow wishes to take advantage of the Commander’s absence, and make himself Chief; I must be on the alert here. Spirit of my namesake, inspire me!” (Moncrieff 1823: 18). Just as Crusoe intervenes to suppress a mutiny, Jack Robinson springs into action when he sees legitimate authority usurped. Jack’s insistence on protecting Zamine’s right to refuse marriage to Mokarra finds further grounding in Crusoe. Opening the novel to the appropriate passage, Jack reads: “‘Long as I had remained single, I determined not to marry one I did not wholly approve’” (Moncrieff 1823: 19). Introducing a justification for interference in local customs, Jack extends to Zamine the same right of self-determination that his novelistic namesake reserves for himself and other Christians. This is a remarkable moment in the play, realigning imperialist discourse with the discourse of human rights. Taking a hard line against religion as a tool of the despot, an institutionalized manipulation of the masses, Cataract advances universal morality and justice grounded in natural law:

48 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter MORDAUNT. Bramin, you triumph now, but ‘twill not be for long— the mighty army for just principles is on its march to sweep off bigotry and superstition for ever from the earth. Britain is foremost in the righteous band;—nature and reason have but too long slumbered; but they awake to deal an ample retribution. (1823: 26) Guided by Mordaunt’s stirring words and supported by allies who promise to “pursue the ruffian Priest—dispel the mists of bigotry—give new triumph to humanity, and yield the Hindoo a new source of joy,” Rajah Jam Saheb moves to save his daughter and secure liberty for all India: JAM SAHEB. Generous Allies—This prompt assistance in the hour of danger, for ever binds me to your interests. The bigot Despot, who, against the law of nations and of nature, hath come into my lands to bribe my factious subjects to rebellion, alike, in turn, would trammel you and yours. (1823: 27) Ventriloquizing Mordaunt, the Rajah advances a westernized vision of India politically united and culturally reformed. Jam Saheb adopts the British hero’s verbal eloquence and uses it to forge from disparate polities a community dedicated to a single moral cause. While the play’s opening scene offers a vivid portrayal of the aftermath of a military engagement, the spectacle of battlefield horror quickly gives way to a cultural conflict involving India’s religious and social traditions. The Cataract of the Ganges is not a play about British conquest of savages or of imperial administration over distant lands. It is a representation of empire as the spread of enlightened ideas about human freedom and the rule of law: JAM SAHEB. Generous Britons—greatest of mortal conquerors, your battle ever is on Virtue’s side—your aim is charity—your victory peace. —You spread your sway o’er your opponents’ hearts, and carry the Christian spirit of your race through every clime to civilize and bless!—Long, long may you extend that sway, which conquers but to bestow, and combats but to save! MORDAUNT. Our England, Rajah, is an equal parent. Her swarthy children of the east, alike partake of her regard, with her more favoured offspring of the west. (1823: 28) Though Betsy Bolton—one of the few critics to address Cataract of the Ganges—rather snarkily deconstructs such speeches—injecting along the way an anachronistic jab towards contemporary American politics—this scene proclaims the ideology that drove the engines of England’s empire (Bolton 2006: 485–86).8 Regardless of how we may feel about such rhetoric now, we cannot overlook the stirring patriotism of the moment and its

The Novel Is Not Enough 49 power to unite the play’s audience as a single community, bound by a commitment to empire as a moral duty. Indeed, the play pushes the bounds of affect even further, as it encourages its audience to feel itself a part not of the English nation or the British Empire but as a part of a greater human family, united by a universal recognition of natural law and human rights. The most important thing Mordaunt and Jack achieve is the reestablishment of the rightful Rajah, now happily converted to western notions of natural rights, under whom the Indian state of Guzerat can prosper. Mordaunt himself instructs the Rajah to name his daughter as his heir, thereby protecting the throne from British seizure under the Doctrine of Lapse. The Rajah’s proclamation, in other words, preserves Guzerat’s independence at a time when England was actively incorporating native states into its Indian empire (Washbrook 1999: 416; Ward 1996: 59). Moreover, Moncrieff’s play captures the humanitarian impulses that would come to defi ne the imperial mandate in the nineteenth-century literary imagination, an ideological framework that accompanied even Phileas Fogg on his journey Around the World in 80 Days. With no time to see the sights, much less set up a colonial homestead, Fogg nevertheless manages to save Aouda, an Indian widow, from the pyre, an “emancipatory [act] discharged under the Englishman’s categorical imperative, ‘duty’” (Sinnema 2003: 140–41). Though one would be hard-pressed to place Verne’s novel (and its subsequent stage adaptation) within the tradition of the Robinsonade, it is easy to imagine Fogg as a descendant of Colonel Mordaunt, saving Indian womanhood from the flames of superstition.9 In this way, Cataract may represent an unexpected link between Defoe and Verne, for in breaking with Crusoe, Moncrieff helped to establish a new breed of imperial hero, one who advanced the horizon of western civilization beneath the banner of moral justice.

3

Adapting a Nation to Empire The Evolution of the Crusoe Pantomime The pantomime of Robinson Crusoe, written by E.L. Blanchard, and produced on Boxing-Night at Drury Lane by Mr. Augustus Harris, is probably the biggest and most successful thing of its kind that has been seen on the boards of our national theatre. Scenery of surprising splendour, magnificent costumes, and an unrivalled company of actors and actresses were united in giving the triumph of the season. The outlay upon the production before it was seen by the public was stated to have been more than ten thousand pounds; but this heavy expenditure was soon recouped by the enormous audiences drawn to witness this capital pantomime. —Unsigned Review, Dramatic Notes (1881)

As an example of its genre, The Cataract of the Ganges vividly demonstrates how deeply invested the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade was in Britain’s imperial project, the foreign landscapes of which formed the geographical backdrop for these dramas of the discovery and domestication of foreign spaces. The frequent deployment of Crusoe in mid-Victorian pantomimes is evidence of the suitability of Defoe’s tale not only for appropriation by emerging political interests but also for assimilation into innovative cultural forms. Writing in 1882, W. Davenport Adams commented that Robinson Crusoe was the second-most-popular subject for pantomime, just after Dick Whittington (1882: 87). Some theatrical seasons saw more than one Crusoe pantomime competing for public attention; in each of the years 1876, 1877, 1882, and 1886, for example, there were no fewer than seven such plays in production, while in 1897 the Lord Chamberlain reviewed a total of ten new Crusoe pantomimes. In recognition of the tight interweaving of the imperial impulse with the transformative fantasy of pantomime and the domestic heroism of Robinson Crusoe, the following pages trace the evolution of the Crusoe pantomime over the course of the century, identifying important changes in character, plot, and setting that indicate the genre’s response to shifting cultural and political conditions. In its gradual development, the theatrical Robinsonade reveals shifts both in the theatre’s preoccupation with Defoe’s hero and with the nation’s changing imperial interests, for the British theatre’s ubiquitous imperial hero evolved in response to shifts in the nation’s commitment to empire, recording and commenting upon changes in public attitude and government policies. As the British Empire adapted to changing global conditions, the

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theatrical Robinsonade played a key role in helping the Victorians themselves adapt to these changes in their nation’s imperial situation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, four concurrent developments conspired to produce a theatrical Robinsonade that not only passively reflected but also helped to actively forge Britain’s imperial agenda. Advances in the scenic arts, the incorporation of social critique within pantomime, a renewed interest in the Crusoe story, and a fresh commitment to imperial expansion combined to rewrite the script of the nation’s prototypical colonist. The pantomime’s generic associations with character transformation and the triumph of virtue lent themselves to the theatre’s project of updating the Crusoe myth to reflect Britain’s evolving overseas interests. At the same time, theatres produced increasingly elaborate spectacles, as the stage became a window through which metropolitan audiences could glimpse their nation’s expanding imperial terrain.1 Visual innovation combined with documentary interest to make the Victorian pantomime a premier site for Britons’ encounters with the larger world. Always on the lookout to expand its representational techniques, the theatre quickly appropriated the new visual technologies of the popular panoramas of imperial scenes that began to appear in venues across London in the fi rst quarter of the nineteenth century (Meisel 1983: 29–51). By the 1820s, the comic business of the pantomime’s closing harlequinade had learned to accommodate such scenic embellishments as dioramas and panoramas depicting sights in England, on the Continent, or from the Middle East (Altick 1978: 198–206). Complementing the harlequinade’s traditional elements, these elaborate moving pictures enhanced the pedagogical potential of the pantomimic spectacle: Although mostly a matter of scenic embellishment, the diorama tended less to awe and impress than to educate, to bring to Londoners the sights that they might otherwise enjoy only by arduous travel. . . . That the diorama was a means of entertaining cannot be overlooked, but even at the moments audiences were being amused they were also being instructed, sometimes to the extent that comedy was suppressed. (Mayer 1969: 69) In his study of the early development of the genre, David Mayer further argues that “the pantomime was a highly topical form of dramatic art offering audiences immediate and specific comment on the issues, major and minor, of the day” and sees the pantomimes of the Regency Period as an important chronicle of the times, recording and responding to the people, events, and innovations of the age (1969: 2, 7). New scenic technologies advanced the pantomime’s pursuit of a social agenda, incorporating issues of public interest from fashion to Poor Law reform. Ever-attentive to changes in public sentiment and government policies, the harlequinade thus adopted new conventions in response to changes in its social and political milieu.2

52 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter The pantomime’s increasingly active engagement with contemporary social events coincided with the beginnings of what historian Ronald Hyam (2002) terms “Britain’s imperial century.” Hyam dates the beginning of the second incarnation of the British empire to 1815, a year that saw the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the extinguishing of Britain’s only real continental rival for overseas markets and territories, creating a relative power vacuum that would last until the 1860s, when the British would once again be faced with serious competition abroad.3 Like Hyam, Timothy Parsons identifies 1815 as the dawn of Britain’s “imperial century,” as Britain radically increased its rate of overseas territorial acquisition and as the “old imperialism” that had created the settler colonies in North America began to give way to a “new imperialism” based on trade and informal influence rather than direct rule of overseas territories (T. Parsons 1999: 4–5; Hyam 2002: 21–2).4 Nineteenth-century dramatizations of Robinson Crusoe reflect this historical shift in Britain’s imperial preoccupations. While the earliest theatrical adaptations align Crusoe with colonization and the creation of a distinctly English domestic space in an alien landscape, later plays de-emphasize Crusoe’s efforts to create a European settler society and instead highlight Crusoe’s brief but culturally transformative encounter with indigenous peoples. As Britain began to embrace a new imperial mode, theatrical Robinsonades began to offer audiences a reappraisal of the Crusoe story, exchanging a vision of permanent colonial settlement for that of geographic discovery and the reform of savage societies. A genre popular with audiences across the economic spectrum, the pantomime offers an interesting case study, as continuities in performance across different types of theatrical venues highlight those elements of the Robinsonade that exceeded the narrow bounds of class interest, speaking to larger, more generally pervasive cultural and political concerns. Written in the eighteenth century, Defoe’s novel helped lay the textual foundation of the fi rst British Empire. Richard Phillips argues that Robinson Crusoe served as a model for white colonial settlement, celebrating the expansion of European society into new, and geographically removed, areas. Crusoe lands on an island, alone, and with the help of a few tools salvaged from his ship and the spiritual companionship of his Bible, transforms the New World into an imitation of the Old: “Through its narrative of colonization and transformation on and of an island, Robinson Crusoe represents, promotes and legitimates a form of colonialism. When, after twenty-eight years, Crusoe fi nally leaves the island . . . he leaves behind him an idealized British colony” (R. Phillips 1997: 26, 34–5). Many nineteenth-century novels in the Robinsonade tradition were centered on this vision of Crusoe as empire-builder, portraying the castaway’s survival and his “transformation of the wilderness into an orderly settlement” that resembles England. Like their theatrical counterparts, these novels leave little or no room for the personal and spiritual development that occupies so much of Defoe’s text. Where Defoe’s novel offers an inward-looking

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model of psychological exploration, its nineteenth-century imitators reach out into the world as “how-to” books for building new colonies (Maher 1988: 169–71; Blewett 1995: 123–45; R. Phillips 1997: 35–44). Although Victorian Robinsonades of both stage and page shared a disinterest in the psychological and spiritual elements of Defoe’s novel, the two forms differed in their identification of what made Crusoe the paradigmatic imperialist. The obsessive delight the narrative Robinsonade takes in celebrating Crusoe’s mechanical ingenuity and success at creating a colonial imitation of all the comforts of an English home contrasts sharply with the theatrical Robinsonade’s steadily decreasing interest in Crusoe as colonial settler. Uncannily sensitive to the most minor shifts in the socio-political landscape, nineteenth-century playwrights altered the Crusoe story to reflect subtle changes in the nation’s imperial profile, creating a stage Crusoe who spends less and less time alone on his island, travels with an entourage, and is far more interested in curing the island’s native inhabitants of their taste for human flesh and suppressing the criminal mischief of the mutinous British sailors than in constructing a home or laying the foundation of a new settler society.5 Although these alterations to the Crusoe story may seem puzzling departures from the colonial essence of Defoe’s novel, this rescripting of the Crusoe story reflected the new imperial order of the mid- to late nineteenth century, which replaced the earlier pioneer model of large-scale white emigration and settlement with an administrative mission whose heroes were bureaucrats, soldiers, and merchants. Play scripts and theatre reviews testify to this radical rewriting of the Crusoe story. Some reviewers found these changes, if not entertaining, then at least innocuous: I may at once say that very little of Defoe’s original story appears. The uninhabited island on which the runaway was thrown is there, but is inhabited by very exquisitely dressed and charming characters, who sing and dance and make merry. And the hut which it cost poor Robinson so much trouble to build is made a very comfortable place replete with all the “evidences of civilization.” (Dramatic Notes 1886: 120) Writing for Dramatic Notes in 1886, this anonymous reviewer of Robert Reece’s Robinson Crusoe (Avenue) briefly notes the play’s departure from Defoe’s familiar story yet goes on to praise the play and the achievements of its cast. Such reconciliatory treatment of the play contrasts sharply with the review of Fred Locke’s Robinson Crusoe (Princess’s [Glasgow], 1885)6 that had appeared in Quiz, a Scottish theatrical journal, in the previous year: Now, on the ground of the story, I put myself in the place of a child— for child and pantomime is synonymous—who’s two or three years short of its teens. Its little brain is full of the old school story. . . . Now, what humour will a child get from seeing its hero not thrown on an

54

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter island by himself at all; no reference made to the raft, and nothing which in any way reminds him of Mr. Defoe. In place of the solitary inhabitant cast on the solitary uninhabited, unknown island, I—in fancy still a child—fi nd myself associated with a drunken woman, who is cast ashore with Crusoe, who spoils the exquisitely delicate tints of the scene by applying her lips on every occasion to a case bottle which she carries in her pocket. (Quiz, 25 December 1885: 158).

Though we might imagine various rationales for compressing representation of Crusoe’s time alone on the island—that is, if we assume solitude to be particularly undramatic and think of the soliloquy as a limited form of theatrical speech—clearly the play’s audience had expected, even hoped for, much lengthier treatment of Crusoe’s solitary period. Believing that the affective— if not dramatic—center of the Crusoe tale is this initial period of lone reflection, productive labor, and clever problem-solving, the audience represented by this review was disappointed by the playwright’s abandonment of the novel’s defining elements. Not only does the play eliminate the isolationism of the original tale, but it also adds a coarse sexuality. This disgruntled critic found even less merit in the play’s contemporary political allusions, which likewise stood out as unwelcome additions to Defoe’s story. Writing for the journal Theatre in 1882, W. Davenport Adams added his own protest against contemporary developments in the theatrical Robinsonade: Such stories as those of Dick Whittington and Aladdin are usually followed with some respect for the original; but let a pantomime-writer get hold of “Robinson Crusoe,” for example, and what a hash he too frequently contrives of it! It is bad enough that such familiar tales should be modified by librettists as they so often are; it is worse when a tale is incorporated with others, and when the result is so thoroughly mixed up that the juvenile intellect cannot make head nor tail of it. (Adams 1882: 88) Adams echoes the Quiz’s condemnation of playwrights’ cavalier rewriting of Robinson Crusoe and notes a similar concern for its reception by a juvenile audience, which may be confused by the play’s radical departure from the familiar Crusoe story. Whether they praised or denounced the changes they noted, theatre critics recorded a persistent pattern of theatrical alterations to the Crusoe story. By the end of the century, that pattern of revision had created an entirely unique theatrical Robinsonade quite distinct from its narrative counterpart. Before we can trace this development across the long nineteenth century, we must fi rst consider the origins of the theatrical Robinsonade, and for this we need to look at two plays: Richard Sheridan’s pantomime of 1781 and I. Pocock’s romantic drama, Robinson Crusoe: The Bold Buccaniers of 1817.7 Different in form and separated from one another by three

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decades, these two dramatizations of Defoe’s novel nevertheless exhibit a number of similarities and reveal how the old imperialism that was passing away in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century left its imprint on the popular imagination. To understand how the theatrical Robinsonade embraced the new imperial order, we will fi rst consider its engagement with the old.

FROM FOOTPRINT TO FOOTLIGHT: CRUSOE’S THEATRICAL DEBUT In a discussion of “Three Famous Pantomimes,” W. J. Lawrence hails the Sheridan pantomime of 1781 “as the fi rst stage treatment of the narrative” and notes that it initially “enjoyed a pleasant run of thirty-eight nights.” He goes on to describe the play’s popularity and eventual demise: “Popular favour maintained the Drury Lane pantomime on the boards until Easter, 1816,” when the great success at Covent Garden of Pocock’s melodrama on the same subject consigned it to limbo (1887).8 If Lawrence is right, Sheridan’s Robinsonade enjoyed more than three decades’ success, losing favor with audiences only when it was superseded by a fresh adaptation of the same source narrative. In reconstructing their engagement with Britain’s imperial enterprise, we cannot overlook the historical timeliness of the plays’ premieres. Sheridan’s pantomime appeared the same year Britain lost half its North American colonies with its army’s final defeat at Yorktown; in the aftermath of imperial loss, Sheridan offered British audiences an inspiring reminder of the national myth of imperial adventure. The timing of Pocock’s 1817 drama is also notable, being just two years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the birth of the Second British Empire.9 Pocock’s play extends the national celebration of victory onto the stage, embracing empire as the national mission. The historical positioning of these two plays suggests a calculated response to the changing shape of empire in the theatre’s reanimation of the classic emblem of Britain’s imperial myth. More than merely reviving Defoe’s castaway in these two critical historical moments, the theatre reconstructed both Crusoe and his story so as to make both more immediately relevant to Britain’s evolving imperial mission. In this updated image of colonial adventure, the serenity of established domestic order replaces the trauma of shipwreck, abandonment, and loss. Eliminating direct representation of the wreck, the opening scenes of the Sheridan and Pocock plays gloss over the castaway’s early days on the island and focus on his comfortable domestic situation and daily routine: Sheridan’s Crusoe marks his calendar before heading off to work on his boat and farm; Pocock’s island hero makes his first appearance as he returns home from work at the end of the day. Both plays exhibit Crusoe’s industriousness and ingenuity by focusing the audience’s attention on the fruits of his labors (McVeagh 1990: 138).

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It is here that The Bold Buccaniers (1817) begins to depart from both its theatrical predecessor and its narrative progenitor. Pocock’s Crusoe is not a self-sufficient pioneer; the action of Bold Buccaniers begins after Crusoe has already saved and domesticated Friday. The play eliminates the scene of Friday’s rescue from the cannibals, an omission that is unique among nineteenth-century theatrical Robinsonades, which generally begin with the rescue of Friday from the pot. Even with this difference, Pocock’s play shares with its successors a trio of characteristics that distinguish the theatrical Robinsonade from its parallel narrative tradition: the reduction (or complete elimination) of the shipwreck and scenes of Crusoe’s early days alone on the island, an elaboration of Crusoe’s confl ict with the mutineers, and the addition of a motivating romantic interest. The Bold Buccaniers established many of the core elements that would come to defi ne the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade and distinguish it from the narrative Robinsonade tradition. Pocock’s Friday is not a mere laboring body. His voice, too, is appropriated to the colonial enterprise. Through Friday, Crusoe communicates with the rest of the island’s indigenous population and forges an alliance against the mutineers who arrive later in the play. In fulfilling his triple role of willing servant, domesticated Other, and cultural intermediary, Friday stands as the paradigmatic nonwhite “native” enrolled in the service of empire. On the one hand, the “domestication” of Friday highlights the success of the civilizing efforts undertaken by the new missionary societies of the early nineteenth century, while on the other hand, this employment of a local intermediary between white colonist and nonwhite indigenous group is consistent with early-century efforts to create an informal empire of sympathetic identifications rather than direct territorial control (Hyam 2002: 83–116; Fulford 1998: 35; Fakrul 1987: 116–8). Either way, Friday willingly embraces his role in the island’s freshly imported imperial order, giving the audience an opportunity to applaud the assimilability of non-European peoples. In thus rescripting Friday’s role, Pocock recasts Crusoe’s colonial adventure as one of cross-cultural contact rather than of self-sufficiency. This updated version of the imperial adventurer is successful not because he works hard but because he effectively manages the local population. Having already tamed both the wilderness and the local population, Crusoe is ready to take on the real challenge of The Bold Buccaniers: the defeat of the mutineers (highlighted in the play’s title) and the rescue of his wife and son. Here, too, Pocock’s play departs in significant ways from its narrative origin and dramatic predecessor, establishing new traditions that will shape all subsequent dramatizations of the Crusoe story. To identify these changes and understand their significance, we will need to revisit Sheridan’s adaptation of 1781. We must, in other words, revisit the past in order to understand Pocock’s break with it. It is in the representation of Crusoe’s contact with Europeans that these two plays demonstrate the changing geo-political landscape of the early-

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nineteenth century. Like his narrative progenitor, Sheridan’s 1781 Crusoe encounters two separate groups of Europeans: fi rst, he rescues several Spaniards from the cannibals, and then he confronts the mutinous crew of an English ship. Sheridan’s play ends with the return of the fi rst group to Spain, where the play launches a satire of Spanish culture. Though the Spaniards are, in part, artifacts imported directly from Defoe’s novel, the satirical tone of their treatment in the play is more directly connected to contemporary historical developments and official political agendas, the closing comic scenes being a response to recent territorial squabbles between England and Spain (McVeagh 1990: 142–3). Pointedly political rather than slavishly imitative, Sheridan’s deployment of Spanish characters was a not-so-subtle reminder of Spain’s notoriously corrupt and fallen empire that highlighted by way of implied contrast the more enlightened, benevolent brand of imperialism England claimed for itself (Fulford 1998: 36–8). The play’s closing celebration of Britain’s global achievement is not merely accompanied by but articulated through this biting cultural critique of an old Continental rival. Thirty years later, in Pocock’s Bold Buccaniers, Crusoe encounters only the mutinous crew on his island; the Spanish prisoners have disappeared, never to return to the British theatrical Robinsonade. The only remaining reference to Spain in the play is engraved in the names of Crusoe’s wife and son: Ines and Diego. Aside from the unelaborated ethnicity suggested by these two names, the play’s European characters all appear to be English, a systematic removal of Continental figures that reminds us that at the time of the play’s production in 1817, the British navy sailed the seas unchallenged: Spain was no longer a serious competitor, and the French had been soundly defeated (Hyam 2002: 15–21; Lloyd 2001: 64). This apparently minor elimination of characters reveals not only the vitality of the theatrical Robinsonade’s political agenda but also the genre’s topical responsiveness. As Britain’s European rivals retreated from the world stage, they were duly retired from the theatrical Robinsonade, which replaced them with more immediately relevant figures: the mutinous crew of The Bold Buccaniers expressing popular anxieties about internal threats to domestic order, sedition, and French-style revolution.

ROBINSON’S RESCRIPTING: TEXTUAL AUTHORITY AND THEATRICAL TRANSCENDENCE The Bold Buccaniers is somewhat atypical in that it belongs to a very small group of theatrical Robinsonades outside the pantomime tradition, a collection of dramas, extravaganzas, and burlesques that represents a small fraction of the total number of Robinsonades licensed for theatrical performance across the nineteenth century. By and large, Robinson Crusoe was the property of the pantomime in the Victorian theatre. Although it lies

58

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outside the pantomime’s generic boundaries, as one of the fi rst dramatizations of Defoe’s novel it helped to establish the contours of the Robinsonade and is thus an important progenitor of the Crusoe pantomime. Its status as one of the few “dramas” to feature Crusoe further highlights the particular suitability of pantomimic conventions—comedy, visual spectacle, transformation—for staging the Crusoe story. One fi nal peculiarity of Pocock’s burlesque should be noted, since it indicates something of the theatre’s own evolution as a cultural institution and highlights the conscious disconnect of the theatrical Robinsonade from its textual origins. In act two, Crusoe, having rescued his wife and son from the mutineers, takes them on a tour of his home. He demonstrates various items and their use as he recounts to his wife his history on the island. But for his son Crusoe has saved a special gift: the journal of his adventure, which Crusoe calls “a treasure far more useful to my fellow creatures than that splendid dross—it tells them never to despair, —it teaches them to place their trust in that power, who can befriend the wretched outcast, when the whole world abandons him.” Crusoe gives the journal to Diego as his “legacy,” but his words indicate that he thinks of it as a gift to a much larger reading public (Pocock 1817: 9; R. Phillips 1997: 35–50). The Bold Buccaniers thus endorses Crusoe’s written record over its own visual representation of his adventure: it is not enough merely to have seen the stage pictures of Crusoe’s colonial success; what is needed most is the textual record Crusoe bequeaths not only to his son but to an unspecified audience of readers. Notably, Crusoe’s journal rewrites his story of colonial settlement as a lesson in religious faith. Though this spiritual education is perfectly in keeping with the religious preoccupations of Defoe’s novel, it would be one of the fi rst elements to disappear from later theatrical Robinsonades, as popular support for missionary activity abroad began to wane and the theatre increasingly embraced a vision of the empire as the stage for spectacular adventure rather than personal spiritual development.10 In eliminating Crusoe’s journal, which is both metaphorically and rhetorically aligned with the Bible, the Robinsonade reflected the demise of the civilizing mission as the dominant myth of empire. I have called attention to Crusoe’s journal to make one final point about Pocock’s play and the origins of a distinctly theatrical Robinsonade tradition in the nineteenth century: this is one of the last allusions to Crusoe’s origins in a narrative, textual tradition, and the disappearance of the book from the stage represents the theatre’s complete appropriation of the Crusoe story through the severance of the link between Crusoe the character and Crusoe the novel.11 The disappearance of references to bound texts in the nineteenthcentury Robinsonade is an essential component in the development of the genre, and both the form and significance of this development are apparent when we consider Pocock’s play alongside two other nineteenth-century Robinsonades that make significant use of bound texts. One of these two

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plays is The Cataract of the Ganges (Drury Lane, 1823) which, as I have discussed in Chapter 2, explores the limits of textual authority as it seeks to assert the superior power of theatrical performance. Pocock’s play precedes Moncrieff’s by only six years, and it seems fairly obvious that in both cases the playwrights are struggling with the narrative roots of the Crusoe tradition, emblematized by the bound texts their heroes treasure. In The Cataract of the Ganges, the novel is physically carried through nearly every scene so that the tension between text and performance becomes the play’s central obsession. However, in placing the textual record in the hands of an utterly comic figure, Moncrieff effectively demotes the text to comic prop and thus leaves open the possibility for theatrical transcendence over the static representational mode of its own originary narrative. Pocock pursues a different strategy, awkwardly ending his play with a hasty reassertion of the primacy of the textual record over the preceding theatrical performance, a gesture which may confer literary and cultural legitimacy on the dramatic production, though such a gesture would simultaneously signal the illegitimacy of the play’s own performative mode, which would appear to be merely imitative of a pre-existing literary pattern. This tension between text and performance is ultimately resolved in 1844 in an unsigned play entitled Puck’s Pantomime (Drury Lane), which foregrounds the novel in order to stage Crusoe’s fi nal release from its pages as he discovers on the stage a new realm for his adventures. Released from his captivity between the boards, Crusoe fi nds room for expression and expansion on the boards, as narrative stasis gives way to the mutability of the stage. In Puck’s Pantomime, the novel physically dominates the playing space in the form of a giant book from whose pages a struggling playwright hopes to draw out a brilliant subject for a new pantomime. One by one, classic literary heroes emerge from the book, only to be rejected as unsuitable candidates for the playwright’s project. Alone among an all-star cast of literary figures, Crusoe is deemed worthy of theatrical production; the book is shut, and the play proper commences. While the opening scene pretends to authorize the play by rooting performance in the solidity of fabula firma, the young playwright on the stage gestures towards the play’s real agenda: the validation of the theatre’s appropriation of Crusoe as a member of its own cast of characters. If the book produces Crusoe, it is only because the playwright calls him forth from its pages. The playwright is the only author here; Defoe is nowhere in sight. And it is the playwright who authorizes Crusoe’s release from narrative stasis. While physically the book dominates the stage, the performance enacts the freeing of Crusoe from the bounds of Defoe’s text. As Crusoe is given a new stage for adventure, the theatrical triumphs over the textual. Having thus usurped the authority of the text, the Victorian Robinsonade dispensed with Defoe once and for all. Later Robinsonades would look not to the novel but to earlier stage adaptations for inspiration and direction. What we see in the development of the genre is successive adaptations of an

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adaptation, a sequence of replication and revision that would ultimately yield a theatrical Robinsonade markedly different from its narrative source.

HOMO DOMESTICUS THEATRICALIS: A MORE SOCIAL CRUSOE IN A NEW METROPOLITAN HABITAT At the same time they freed themselves from slavish imitation of Defoe’s text, British playwrights eliminated representations of Crusoe’s spiritual struggle by replacing that inner psychological crisis with interpersonal confl icts involving the island’s greatly expanded social communities. Where Defoe’s hero tackles despair, loneliness, and spiritual doubt, the Victorian stage Crusoe engages with various combinations of the following figures: Will Atkins the pirate and romantic rival, one or both of his own parents, a variety of supernatural forces, and the indigenous population of the island. Much of the action of the mid- to late-century theatrical Robinsonade foregrounds Crusoe’s relationships with other Britons, exchanging the traditional opening scene on Crusoe’s island for an initial sequence set in England. Between 1844 and 1865, this new metropolitan introductory scene became the standard for the Crusoe pantomime, replacing the earlier practice of beginning the drama on the deserted island. This alteration in setting is important for three reasons. First, it allows for customization of the play to make Crusoe a local as well as a national hero. The site of Crusoe’s departure was often adapted to the site of performance, so that audiences in London were treated to a panoramic trip down the Thames while audiences in Glasgow saw the hero at work in the Clyde shipyards.12 In addition, the new metropolitan setting connected Crusoe with a number of personal associates who would ultimately accompany him on his voyage out. Crusoe’s relationship to different communities, fi rst at home and then abroad, is highlighted in his pre-departure introduction. Finally, by prefacing Crusoe’s island adventure with one or more scenes in England, the pantomimes discussed below connect imperial adventure and global conquest more directly to Britain’s domestic concerns. Rather than a foreign geography entirely separated from England, the island in such plays is integral to the maintenance of British society: it is a space to which young men like Crusoe can go to work through, rather than escape from, fi nancial, familial, and romantic troubles that plague them at home. Circular movement from metropole to periphery and back again is the defi ning characteristic of the Victorian Robinsonade, highlighting England’s position at the center of expanding global networks and replacing the original novel’s exploration of solitude with an almost obsessive focus on communal interactions. This change in the structure and topical interests of the theatrical Robinsonade occurred during a period of shifting motivations for imperial expansion. The humanitarian impulses that had carried the British fl ag

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into new territories for the purposes of protecting and improving colonized peoples began to wane during the 1840s, as the British government found itself less willing to bankroll moral crusades and to support the rights of indigenous peoples at the expense of alienating white settlers. At the same time, the nation’s growing industrial economy was in need of new markets for manufactured goods and new sources of raw materials to feed production lines, transforming the empire into an extension of Britain, an essential asset to the health of the national economy (Hyam 2002: 83–7). Recognizing an integral bond between nation and empire, the theatre restructured the Robinsonade so as to highlight the close connections between bustling metropole and (not-so-) deserted island, representing the latter as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, metropolitan culture and society. Structurally, the Victorian Robinsonade emphasizes the return to, rather than the creation of, a domestic refuge. Unlike their narrative namesake, stage Crusoes turn to travel not simply for the sake of adventure and profit but for the retrieval of whatever is necessary for the realization of their romantic interests or the resolution of interpersonal confl icts. What motivates the stage Crusoe is not money but domestic harmony, which he hopes to secure by going abroad for a time. Crusoe’s quiet, methodical settlement of the desert island provides both an alternative to and a utopian model for a disordered or dysfunctional metropolitan domesticity. This prescription of the sea as an escape from domestic distress is a common theme in late-Victorian theatrical Robinsonades, though the exact nature of these domestic necessities varies widely from one play to another. In Henry Byron’s 1868 pantomime (Covent Garden) for example, a married Crusoe sets sail to escape the verbal abuse of his wife and the demands of fatherhood: ELF. You’re miserable at home. Your wife’s a tarter. You could not find more hardships on the warter. Come, go to sea. (Byron 1868: 7) George Conquest’s Robinson Crusoe, the Lad Rather Loose O’, and the Black Man Called Friday, Who Kept His House Tidy (Surrey, 1885), casts Crusoe’s father as a drunken profligate, as does Geoffrey Thorn’s Robinson Crusoe: A Christmas Story of a Good Friday; or, Pretty Polly Perkins and the Cruise of the “Saucy Sarah” (Grand, 1886):13 MRS. CRUSOE. He’s broken up the home. I knew he would, the brute. . . . He’s a sponge; don’t treat his wife as he oughter; As he will sup gin, of course he can’t sup porter. Nice model for his sons—I’m glad I have no daughters; The landlord’s put in this morning for their quarters. My poor boy Robinson must go away to sea,

62 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Driven from his poor home, his rabbit hutch, and me. (Thorn 1886: 10) In this example, Crusoe is driven from England by an unfortunate combination of poverty and domestic abuse. Nestled among Mrs. Crusoe’s criticism of her husband is the suggestion that young Robinson’s future role as husband and father will be tainted by his father’s example. The voyage abroad thus saves Crusoe from abuse but also provides him with an opportunity to develop an adult domestic identity that will not merely replicate his paternal model. Overseas adventure will render young Robinson fit for his future roles as husband and father. This conjunction of familial and fiscal pressures is a common element in the theatrical Robinsonade, defi ning the ideological interests of the genre while also distinguishing it from Defoe’s narrative. For, as Ian Watt observes in his classic discussion of Robinson Crusoe, the novel took as its subject homo economicus, the fully independent man whose actions were motivated not by family ties or romantic interests but by a commitment to personal fi nancial gain (1957: 63–70). Victorian playwrights, in contrast, recast Crusoe as homo domesticus, a character driven by parental pressures and romantic entanglements. Any fi nancial concerns Crusoe may have are closely linked to his domestic designs. It is ultimately domesticity, not economy, that propels Crusoe from England, and it is this same force that ultimately beckons his return. While turmoil within their own family circle prompts several stage Crusoes to seek refuge abroad, a larger number go to sea in order to satisfy the demands of the parents of their betrothed. In Augustus Harris’s 1893 pantomime (Drury Lane), for example, Crusoe becomes a sailor to please the mother of Polly, the girl he wants to marry: SAILORS. Then why not go to sea? And you may claim this beauty; A sailor you will be, If you’ll only do your duty; You’ll reign o’er ocean blue, Then return and claim your beauty. If you’ll be sober, she’ll be true, And as wife will do her duty. (1893: 11) Set to the tune of the opening chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, this jaunty song explicitly connects imperial service with British domesticity. On stage, at least, the point of Crusoe’s adventure is not the creation of a proper British household on some uninhabited island but the return of the imperial adventurer to domestic comforts in England. The scenes of Crusoe at work building his hut and tending his farm that feature so prominently in the plays of Sheridan and Pocock are absent in these

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later pantomimes, which instead promote the promise of the home Crusoe will create in England upon his speedy return. Structurally, these mid- to late-century plays, performed at theatres whose audiences spanned the full range from socially privileged to economically distressed, emphasize the out-and-back movement of Crusoe, whose adventures properly begin in England, shift temporarily to the island, where all problems are resolved, and then return Crusoe to his English home, where he can begin his new life as loving husband. This plot structure, incidentally, is shared by Charles Reade’s stage adaptation of It Is Never Too Late to Mend (Theatre Royal [Leeds]; Princess’s, 1865), and together with Reade’s appropriation of the name Robinson for one of his characters, fairly fi rmly situates that play within the tradition of the theatrical Robinsonade.14

TO STRIVE, AND SEEK, AND FIND, BUT NOT TO BUILD: THE DRAMATIZATION OF DISCOVERY Unlike Defoe’s novel, which foregrounds “the imaginative importance of tools and techniques . . . the exploration and dramatization of work . . . [and] role of religion,” the Victorian stage Robinsonade rarely presents the mundane trials and accomplishments of ingenuity that characterize Crusoe’s solitary island life (Green 1979: 67–8). By the 1860s, Victorian pantomimes altogether stopped showing Crusoe building his hut, fashioning domestic comforts from rude materials, and working on the lands he wrested from the wilderness. To some extent, this exclusion of the darker scenes of Crusoe’s solitude reflects mid-century trends in illustrations of the novel, as even nineteenth-century illustrated editions of Robinson Crusoe omit visual representations of Crusoe’s time alone on the island (Blewett 1995: 87–98, 123–45). David Blewett attributes this practice to the illustrators’ efforts to highlight the book’s latent imperial themes by depicting scenes of physical action, violence, and confl ict. As in many of the popular illustrated editions of the novel, the theatrical scenes leap abruptly from the sensational moment of the shipwreck to a much later date, when Crusoe appears in his homemade clothes, having already been on the island for an unspecified period of time. In order to fi ll this temporal gap, most pantomimes replace direct representation of Crusoe’s solitary island life with a brief soliloquy in which Crusoe explains how long he has been on the island and how lonely he is. This short speech, generally consisting of around a dozen lines, is invariably followed by the discovery of the footprint in the sand, as in John Nie’s Robinson Crusoe; or, the Good Friday that Came Before Saturday (Elephant and Castle, 1892): CRUSOE. Fool like, I thought, in living here alone, ‘Twas grand to have a country all one’s own. No bakers, butchers, tailor’s bills to pay,

64 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter No rates or taxes, and no quarter day. I’m living truly, but what’s that to me. Life has no object—what’s that I see? (Nie 1892: 15) Such condensing of the action de-emphasizes Crusoe’s self-sufficiency and mechanical ingenuity, issues that are so prominently showcased in Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play and which Susan Maher identifies as the most fundamental components of the Crusoe myth (1985: 3). By beginning the island action with the sighting of the footprint, the Crusoe pantomimes instead foreground the discovery of indigenous peoples and thus suggest that the real drama of the Crusoe story is not his struggle to survive alone on a desert island but his encounter with a group of savages and his subsequent efforts to subdue them. The stage Crusoe, in other words, is unlike his narrative namesake in that he primarily struggles not against himself or the forces of nature but against England’s cultural Other. Accompanying The Old Drury Lane Christmas Annual’s review of E. L. Blanchard’s 1881 Robinson Crusoe (Drury Lane) is an illustration that expresses visually the centrality of discovery in the theatrical Robinsonade (fig. 3.1). In this image, Crusoe’s discovery of the footprint is given center stage, the moment literally framed by the text of the review and renderings of Will Atkins, Crusoe’s Mother, and Friday. These other characters and the adventures they represent surround Crusoe but are pushed to the periphery, where they, like the illustration’s viewer and the play’s audience, witness the discovery of the footprint, which becomes the focal point. Graphically highlighted in this 1881 image, the primacy of discovery within Britain’s imperial project is inscribed within the plot of W.M. Ackhurst’s 1876 dramatic blending of the eighteenth-century stories of Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver. In Ackhurst’s play, created for Sanger’s Theatre (formerly Astley’s), a popular venue for spectacle on the south side of the Thames, scientific progress and imperial endeavors converge, as the modern marvel electricity repeatedly comes to the aid of Crusoe. Electric Spark, identified as a “good fairy,” brings Crusoe to the island in the fi rst place and keeps him isolated there for a time, all in the name of improving Crusoe’s life and making him a hero (Ackhurst 1876: 8, 11, 29). Science is thus mythologized and placed in the service of the imperial adventurer. The play’s conclusion further connects the worlds of science and empire by shifting the scene of action from Crusoe’s island to the Polar Sea, where the crews of the ships Alert and Discovery spend Christmas away from home in the interest of an exploration that is both scientific and imperial, serving simultaneously the interests of geography and the English nation. This represents a further refi nement of the dramatization of discovery that is the central, defi ning moment of the nineteenth-century theatrical Robinsonade. Fantasies of polar exploration aside, the most significant discovery of the Victorian stage Robinsonade is, of course, Crusoe’s realization that he is

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Figure 3.1. The Robinsonade’s Defining Moment: Illustration from The Old Drury Lane Christmas Annual’s review of E.L. Blanchard’s Robinson Crusoe (Drury Lane, 1881). Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

66 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter not alone on his island. Crusoe’s encounter with the cannibals, structurally centered in these plays, forms both the basis for the dramatic action and the plays’ ideological focus, for if the real drama of the island begins with the discovery of the island native’s footprint, it ends with cultural conquest and the imposition of some version of imperial administration over the indigenous population. Whatever Crusoe’s motive for going to sea—fl ight from domestic abuse, romantic attachment, the desire for adventure—his voyage inevitably merges with Britain’s mission to expand the boundaries of empire.

SAVAGE OR CIVILIZED?: QUESTIONING THE IMPERIAL MISSION IN THE LATE-CENTURY ROBINSONADE Public perception of other races and commitments to cultural intervention underwent profound change at mid-century, making Crusoe’s efforts to reform the island’s “savages” and elevate their cultural standards less reflective of the popular image of empire (Brantlinger 2003: 130–8). Many saw the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 as evidence of the irrepressibility of savage tendencies, and the publication of Origin of Species just two years later popularized a scientific racism convinced that as the result of thousands of years of biological development, savagery was unlikely to be eradicated by western humanitarian interventions. In light of this ideological shift, the expansion of the empire took on a more aggressively militaristic and acquisitive tone, lands being seized for their strategic importance rather than for the benevolent improvement of the people who lived there (Hyam 2002: 141–163, T. Parsons 1999: 24–6).15 As British perception of other races moved from sympathy to suspicion, the theatrical Robinsonade altered characters and situations to reflect the changes in racial attitudes and the new motives for imperial expansion. The paradigmatic colonial Crusoe in the narrative tradition was replaced by an imperialist adventurer who has no time to construct or to expand his settlement. Having shed his colonizing impulses, Crusoe began to take less interest in cultural reform and instead uses his time on the island to subdue a hostile native force and establish British political hegemony over the territory. This may seem a minor shift in emphasis, but the change is really quite significant. If the late-century Crusoe succeeds in realizing cultural reform of the local population, he does so not as an expression of humanitarian benevolence but as a means of subduing the island’s native inhabitants and rendering them suitable for imperial assimilation. These changes in the shape of the theatrical Robinsonade did not coincide perfectly with the changes in Britain’s relationship with its empire. In Henry Byron’s 1868 Robinson Crusoe; or, Friday and the Fairies! (Covent Garden), Crusoe still appears confident in his ability to enact large-scale cultural reforms within native society. Yet even his mid-century reformist

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impulses reveal some of the changes in the political climate that I outlined above. Rather than launching a direct attack on the cannibalistic tendencies of the island’s King, Crusoe here supports the native feminist movement by helping the cannibal Queen lead her Amazon warriors to victory over King Hokypokywankyfum. Citing John Stuart Mill, the Queen establishes a new society based on gender equality:16 SQUAW. You’re no longer King, We mean to rise, and all that sort of thing. Behold my amazons, as each one fights, You’d better mind their lefts as well as rights. And as we mean to fight—you’ll fi nd we will— Our most appropriate war cry shall be Mill! (Byron 1868: 15) In just twenty years, Crusoe has gone from saving one savage from the pot to helping establish an entirely new social order based on the latest political theories, yet this radical social reform does not necessarily translate to cultural enlightenment. Though we may be tempted to see Friday and the Fairies! as promoting an image of empire as culturally interventionist, the very moment that it confi rms Britain’s ability to effect social change, Byron’s play betrays uncertainty about this power. On the one hand, the play depicts the overthrow of a savage monarch whose pleasures included eating his own subjects and attacking British travelers, but on the other hand, the feminist coup that he assists does not bring an end to cannibalism, for the Queen orders her husband, the deposed King, to be boiled in a pot (Byron 1868: 15–18). The island’s indigenous inhabitants may have restructured their country’s politics according to modern western philosophies, but they remain, at heart, savages. The fi nal scene, in fact, reinscribes the patriarchal order which would otherwise appear to be under attack in the text: Crusoe’s wife takes him back even though he deserted her; the King, who somehow escaped the pot, warns his wife to stop fl irting with other (white) men; and the Sedate Fairy, whose feminist tirade against men initiated Crusoe’s stay on the island, announces that she has learned her lesson and is ready to fi nd a husband. The social reforms Crusoe helped to bring about are undermined by their similarity to savagery and the heteronormative reconciliation that brings the action of the play to a close (Byron 1868: 18–19). Just as the waning confidence in Britain’s civilizing mission informs Byron’s 1868 pantomime (Covent Garden), the growing aggressiveness of Britain’s territorial acquisition was increasingly incorporated into late-century theatrical Robinsonades, which frequently replace cultural intervention with conquest as the only legitimate aim of empire. In the territorial scramble of the late nineteenth century, the exploration of unknown geographies, the construction of colonial settlements, and the conversion of savages to the enlightened ways of western civilization were no longer the

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primary ends of empire. Consequently, Crusoe, the paradigmatic imperial adventurer, would have to adapt to a new, territorially acquisitive and administrative, role. The transmutation of Crusoe from colonist to conquistador can be seen in any number of late-century Robinsonades. Geoffrey Thorn’s 1886 pantomime (Grand), for example, ends with the formal annexation of the island to the British Empire, complete with the raising of the Union Jack and the granting of a pension to the cannibal king (Thorn 1886: 42–4).17 Eight years later, Fred Locke’s Robinson Crusoe: A Christmas Story of a Good Friday has the cannibal king submit to annexation by the British as a means of avoiding conquest by an unidentifi ed “foreign enemy” (1894: 33–4). The king’s request that the island be made a British protectorate reminds us of how the increased tensions among European imperial powers in this period pressured Britain to extend its political influence over areas that might be in danger of falling into the sphere of an expanding rival. There are many other echoes of real-world politics within late-century theatrical Robinsonades. Augustus Harris’s 1893 Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday and Pretty Polly Perkins (Drury Lane), for example, ends with the removal of King Coo-Mo-Hoo-Carribi-Carreboo to England and the installment of Will Atkins—the pirate—as the new cannibal chief. In this case, Crusoe’s adventure results in the imperial administration of the island under the direction of an Englishman. This elevation of Atkins—a criminal—to the post of colonial governor took place at the very moment the six Australian colonies, most of which were fi rst settled by convicts, were exploring the possibility of federation and the beginning of responsible self-government (Lloyd 2001: 121–2). Atkins’s promotion thus indirectly points to Australia and its very complicated association of colonization and criminality, exploring the disquieting possibility that a country settled by criminals might achieve sovereignty. While the plot might present the inevitability of British annexation, many late-century theatrical Robinsonades dialogically deconstruct an otherwise unabashedly jingoistic conclusion. Such is the case in Ackhurst’s 1876 Gulliver on His Travels; or, Harlequin Robinson Crusoe, which portrays imperial incorporation as equivalent to theft. Seeing his island placed under the protectorship of Will Atkins, Winkyfum, the deposed cannibal king, reflects upon the injustice inherent in imperial administration: What would he say if I Were to squat down on English ground, And seize all that came by? He in my states himself locates, And all he sees he sacks; In vain I waits for rent or rates— He never pays a tax. (Ackhurst 1876: 40)

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Winkyfum rightfully objects to Atkins’s claim to authority over the cannibals, but more than that, he doubts that imperial administration under the British flag is a recipe for cultural improvement. Atkins actually sells a group of women to the cannibals, who intend to cook and eat them; but even this example of western British complicity in barbaric practices is not the worst of the play’s critique, as Winkyfum, having seen England fi rsthand, exposes the false dichotomy of civilized and savage that informs popular notions of western cultural superiority and national honor: Having seen all—in preference give me my land, That right little—tight little cannibal island. And, by the way, although the people here At our “peculiar institution” sneer; Threatening to civilize and educate us, They don’e [sic], I find, disdain to imitate us. For instance, now, in many a thoroughfare, You see announced “dealer in human hair.” Then you hear almost everywhere you roam, Of men being eaten out of house and home. (Ackhurst 1876: 22)

Whether it be fashion trends or fiscal practices, England here appears no more civilized than the cannibal society to which the king longs to return. But thanks to the long arm of imperialism, Winkyfum can never escape the grasp of British savagery. Crusoe takes Winkyfum back to England with him, and announces a plan to create an ethnological exhibition starring the deposed cannibal king (Ackhurst 1876: 44–5). In transforming the emblematic imperial adventurer into a cheap showman, Gulliver on His Travels equates empire with exhibition, imperial administration with fi nancial opportunism, the British flag with Atkins’s pirate banner, and further calls attention to the intersection of different forms of spectacle I outline in Chapter 1. Gulliver on His Travels is a good example of the ways in which the theatrical Robinsonade cast an increasingly critical eye on domestic social ills and imperial projects at a time of growing public doubt about the nation’s imperial mission (Hyam 2002: 189). While Crusoe himself remained—for the most part—the hero of empire, Atkins and the cannibal king became its most insightful critics, a reassignment of roles that indicates the extent to which the genre began to question the hegemonic cultural discourses its central hero embodied. By the 1890s, the theatrical Robinsonade’s criticisms of the nation’s imperial project had become quite scathing. Geoffrey Thorn’s 1894 Rollicking Robinson Crusoe (Grand), for example, portrays imperialism as fundamentally greedy and genocidal. When, at the end of the play, an English gunboat arrives and simply declares the island a part of the British Empire, Crusoe casually insists upon the tribe’s removal, if not extermination: “It’s the usual thing, you know. The Government

70 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter undertakes to take your land; you undertake to let us take it; we undertake to take you to England, and take you about a bit; and then you undertake to take yourself off” (Thorn 1894: 59, 65). As in Gulliver on His Travels, Rollicking Robinson Crusoe characterizes the British civilizing mission as a form of savagery, explicitly connecting “civilization” with rum, guns, and sexual immorality:18 KOLLIWOBBLES. I’ve been swivelised. Tanks to Massa Crusoe, I’ve been taught de terror od my ways. I’m not goin’ to eat any more people, I’m going to take on rum instead. De kind white man goin’ to take my land from me and do me a lot ob good. Dey’re goin’ to send me more missionaries, and sell me guns to shoot ‘em with. Dat’s swivelisation, it’ll make such a jolly big row here someday. (Thorn 1894: 65)19 Though couched in humor and placed in the mouth of a “savage,” this picture of the future of the “civilized” native, with its rum-soaked cycle of religious conversion and reactionary violence, haunts the play’s closing scenes. The play’s romantic arc ends appropriately in marriage, but that comic resolution is counterbalanced by Kolliwobbles’s exaggerated indictment of British civilization. His lands seized, Kolliwobbles is abandoned to the various impulses of drunkenness, missionary zeal, and aggression. Thorn’s Rollicking Robinson Crusoe, from which the speech above is taken, played at London’s Grand Theatre (Islington) at Christmas 1894, a year before the highly visible metropolitan visit of three South African kings drew public attention to the problems associated with commercially motivated colonial expansion (N. Parsons 1998).20 Punch, that ubiquitous ironic commentator on contemporary culture, took great interest in this visit, printing poems and cartoons that echoed (and were, perhaps, inspired by) Kolliwobbles’s speech, equating “civilization” with the devastating introduction of rum and guns. In “The Ballad of Bechuana,” for example, Punch (1895) mourns the exchange of land for drink, while it visually expressed the corruption of indigenous African cultures in a cartoon entitled “A New Race in Africa!” (fig. 3.2). Multiply suggestive, the picture’s title refers to the European “race” for territories in central Africa— popularly known as the “scramble for Africa”—as well as to the culturally (d)evolutionary effect of colonial expansion. At the back, four helmeted British soldiers stand guard over the newly created Uganda Protectorate. Just below and to their right, a train—introduced into Uganda in the same year—rushes into the scene, carrying not only people but the products of “civilization,” most notably the crates of guns, ammunition, and explosives piled in the lower left corner. In the midst of this heap, a group of Africans lie in a drunken stupor. Visually, the cartoon captures Kolliwobbles’s prediction of his people’s own future: “protected” by the British, they embrace the worst elements of progress and civilization.

Figure 3.2. The Blessings of Civilization: “A New Race in Africa!” Punch (28 Sept. 1895): 154. Courtesy of Punch Ltd., http://www.punch.co.uk.

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72 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Nor is Thorn’s Rollicking Robinson Crusoe the only pantomime in which the islanders’ interaction with Crusoe ends in their destruction. In Augustus Harris’s 1893 Robinson Crusoe, for example, the title character gives the natives alcohol in order to subdue them. Where earlier plays have Crusoe defeating the island’s aboriginal inhabitants with a combination of arms and ingenuity, Harris’s play juxtaposes the failure of the gun with the success of rum: “See if the bottle / Won’t win the battle.” Following the “Indian Ballet of Intoxication”—the details of which we can only imagine—the cannibal king invites himself to return with Crusoe and Polly to England: “In future always getting drunk I mean to pass my days; / Raw spirits, and not bodies cooked, are now my sole delight” (Harris 1893: 20–22). The play’s commentary is clear: no longer committed to saving souls, the “civilizing mission” can do little more than exchange one form of degradation for another. And it is Crusoe who carries the nation’s new banner of drunkenness, debasement, and despair. The plays I have discussed in this chapter do more than simply demonstrate imperialism in action; they reveal Britain’s changing engagement with “savage” societies and offer critical commentary on the effects of imperial rule on native peoples. If the pantomime as a genre is fantastic, spectacular, and lighthearted, it is also critically charged (Mayer 1969: 7–8). Individually, and as a group, the Crusoe pantomimes go beyond the simple recreation of tropical scenes or the performance of native rituals for a metropolitan audience. Robinson Crusoe, the stereotypical colonialist, defines the changing face of empire-builder, providing British audiences with a not always flattering image of British foreign policy and domestic culture. For while these plays exhibit the peoples and places of empire, they also cast a critical eye over the ideological underpinnings and administrative framework of that empire, offering a critique of Britain’s involvement in overseas empire-building projects that kept pace with shifts in British foreign policy and public sentiment. While it would be overly simplistic to insist upon an immediate and absolute causal relationship between developments in British foreign policy and theatrical representation, the theatrical archive indicates a strong impulse towards currency and real-world relevance in the dramas of empire. Such impulses are seen not only in the military recreations I discuss in Part III or the plays of timely topicality I discuss in Chapter 7, but also in the theatrical Robinsonade, which maintained its popularity and its relevance by tracking significant shifts in the popular images and official rhetorics of empire. Crusoe thus remained, throughout the century, a current and contemporary embodiment of British imperialism.

4

In Crusoe’s Clothes Performing Authority in The Admirable Crichton Even though we softened to him he would not be a hero in these clothes of servitude; and he loves his clothes. How to get him out of them? It would require a cataclysm. –J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton (1902 [1928])1

In the preceding chapter, I traced the evolutionary trajectory of the liveliest and most popular form of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade: the Crusoe pantomime. I showed how the essential plot details, cast of characters, and even tone and thematic interest of the Crusoe pantomimes changed over time to produce a theatrical Robinsonade significantly different in both intent and effect from its fictional forefather. Although a staggering number of Crusoe pantomimes were licensed and produced in the nineteenth century, the pantomime did not have exclusive rights to the Crusoe concept. The Cataract of the Ganges, as we saw in Chapter 2, was a wildly popular Robinsonade, as was Charles Reade’s far more sober drama, It Is Never Too Late to Mend (Princess’s, 1865). The Crusoe story, in short, was adaptable to a wide variety of theatrical modes. In this chapter I turn to another notable theatrical Robinsonade outside the pantomime tradition, J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. 2 Barrie’s play clearly inherited the Crusoe story as revised by Victorian playwrights, and stands as a colorful portrait of what the theatrical Robinsonade had become after nearly a century of revision. 3 First performed in 1902,4 The Admirable Crichton is not, from a strictly chronological perspective, “Victorian,” but its appearance in the year following the end of Victoria’s life (and reign) and its close engagement with many of the traditions explored in Chapters 2 and 3 urge a consideration of Barrie’s play as the culminating example of the Victorian Robinsonade. The play more closely resembles its nineteenth-century theatrical forebears than it does its eighteenth-century narrative progenitor: there are multiple castaways on the island; mechanical inventiveness, where in evidence, is harnessed to issues of power and dominance; the island serves as a proving ground for British social norms; and the construction of a hierarchical society rather than the exploration of solitude constitutes the primary interest of the scenes on the island. Yet even as The Admirable Crichton inherits many of the late-century developments of the theatrical Robinsonade, it

74 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter reaches back in time to its earliest generic ancestors, adopting their interest in the intersections of text and performance. Barrie’s play thus reintroduces into the evolutionary narrative I have been tracing the early Robinsonade’s explorations of the connections between theatricality and textuality, of the differential power of action and language, of the proper hierarchical relations of gesture and word. And so we conclude our developmental tracing of the genre with a play which ingeniously reconnects the two ends of the genre’s evolutionary chain, a play that combines the discursive concerns of The Cataract of the Ganges with the late-nineteenth-century Robinsonade’s impulse towards metropolitan social critique. The Admirable Crichton is thus both the culmination of the genre’s mature Victorian flowering as well as a return to its earliest roots. A complete understanding of The Admirable Crichton requires reference to the play’s Victorian heritage, just as a complete picture of the evolution of the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade requires a consideration of The Admirable Crichton. Lost in the shadows cast by the more familiar Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton has been oddly overlooked by modern critics.5 With its clever dialogue, absurd situations, and exaggerated characterizations, The Admirable Crichton exhibits many of the qualities that defi ne the work of Barrie’s contemporary playwrights, uniting epigrammatic wit with serious social satire (T. Young 2005: 47; Geduld 1971: 118–19). While we might quite profitably begin the critical discussion of The Admirable Crichton by comparing it to the more exhaustively explored productions of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, the discussion that follows will pursue a different vector, considering the play not in terms of its stylistic resonances with the dramas of Barrie’s contemporaries but in terms of its genealogical connections with the Victorian theatrical Robinsonade.6 My approach, in other words, takes a historically vertical rather than historically horizontal look at The Admirable Crichton, linking the play to its theatrical predecessors rather than its temporal adjoiners. In doing so, I seek not to divorce Barrie’s play from the particularities of its cultural moment, but to consider how his play adapts to that moment an existing—and rich—generic tradition.7 Structurally, Barrie’s play foregrounds the out-and-back movement that characterizes the late-Victorian theatrical Robinsonade. In the titular character’s circular journey from London to island and back again, Crichton reinscribes the theatrical Robinsonade’s preoccupation with metropolitan concerns. Barrie’s play uses this movement as a means of destabilizing— even deconstructing—normative metropolitan identities such as gender and class. Where its nineteenth-century predecessors utilized this trajectory of return as a way of resolving Crusoe’s domestic problems, spatial movement in The Admirable Crichton exposes and exaggerates pre-existing domestic conflicts. The blank space of empire—the deserted island—is pressed into service as the neutral ground which demonstrates the “naturalness” of “artificial” social roles and relationships (Geduld 1971: 114, 118). Transplanted back to England, the subjects of this social experiment are forced

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to readapt to the metropolitan environment, revealing in the process the inequalities and differences that are both inherent within and essential to contemporary English society.8 In getting Crichton out of his clothes— and back into them again—the play exposes what really lurks beneath the polished veneer of turn-of-the-century high society. Gender roles, class boundaries, social distinctions, and familial relations (Lord Loam becomes everyone’s “Daddy”) are all brought under scrutiny. Even “Englishness”— the nationalist normative identity overriding all others—is destabilized in the play, which nominally demotes England to “The Other Island” in the last act, thereby “Othering” England both rhetorically and conceptually.9 So what, ultimately, is Barrie’s play about? What has the theatrical Robinsonade become since Crusoe fi rst planted his foot on the stage in 1781? In that time, and through the successive manipulations of a host of playwrights, actors, and theatre managers, the castaway’s island has become a temporary place of exile, a space in which metropolitan social norms are exposed, investigated, and critiqued (Walbrook 1922: 69–73; Maher 1985: 4).10 By the end of the nineteenth century, the theatrical Robinsonade had replaced Defoe’s original focus on the adventurer and his adventures with an emphasis on the cycle, and site, of his embarkation and return. Through its evolutionary development, in other words, the theatrical Robinsonade became less interested in empire and imperial adventure than in England and Englishness, or more precisely, the theatrical Robinsonade came to present empire as the necessary adjunct to England, a playing space in which metropolitan identities are (re)formed and articulated.11 The Admirable Crichton exhibits quite clearly this generic deployment of empire in the exploration of metropolitan identities and social norms (Cottom 1981: 271–73). The play opens in the London home of Lord Loam, “a radical peer, dedicated to the promotion of equality and to the breakdown of class barriers” (Geduld 1971: 114). On this day, as once a month, Lord Loam orders his servants and children to socialize as equals. His purpose is to expose the artificiality of class distinctions and social inequalities. Of course, Lord Loam does not understand that those conventions cannot be overturned from within the normative hierarchy of authority, for in trying to mandate his reluctant dependants’ participation in a carnivalesque festival, Loam relies upon—and thus reasserts—the authoritarian ethos of the official feast (Bakhtin 1965: 10). The social interrogation—and integration—that he desires cannot take place within England; it can only take place abroad, in the unarticulated and unexplored spaces of empire (Hunter 1980: 69). And that is where the play takes us in the second and third acts, returning to the Loams’ Mayfair home only after it has demonstrated conclusively that the social distinctions Lord Loam believes to be artificial are, in fact, natural (Cottom 1981: 271–72). In moving from metropole to colony and back again, The Admirable Crichton authenticates prevailing metropolitan structures of difference and their concomitant hierarchies of power.

76 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Though it is most obviously preoccupied with social class, The Admirable Crichton exhibits a significant interest in the differential dynamics of authority and gender, each of which is represented within the play through its respective symbolic substantiation. Within this scheme, text serves as the primary means by which power is authorized and exercised, while costume functions as the site at which gender norms are negotiated. In the discussion that follows, I take up each of these concept/property pairings in turn as I investigate the role of the island in the expression of metropolitan anxieties over the nature and necessity of social difference.

TEXTUAL GESTURES IN/AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POWER My reader will, I hope, forgive me if I pause here to explain the slash in the section heading, for it captures the duality of this fi rst part of my argument and thus carries a considerable critical weight. The slash indicates that the heading can be read in two ways, a syntactic doubling that encodes the layered signification of The Admirable Crichton. On the one hand, my discussion outlines the play’s demonstration of how the possession and display of text is an essential component in the performance of power: text both confers and conveys authority and is thus a fundamental tool in its expression. However, at the same time that the play enlists text in the service of performance, it reasserts the fundamental tension that has traditionally set the two forms of expression at odds, making the solidity of text the antithesis of the ephemerality of performance. In other words, Barrie demonstrates how textuality can function in the service of theatricality even as he recognizes the oppositional polarity that keeps the two phenomena in perpetual contraposition. The Admirable Crichton, like The Cataract of the Ganges, exhibits a sustained interest in the intersections and divergences of text and performance, in the expressive dynamics of word and gesture. Despite this fundamental preoccupation, the “degree to which The Admirable Crichton is a play about language and literature has not been adequately recognized” by modern critics (Jack 1991: 114). These issues are, however, highlighted by the structure of my current study, which situates The Admirable Crichton within a larger generic tradition, the origin of which is located at the intersection of narrative fiction and theatre, or of language and performance. Considering Barrie’s play within the developmental trajectory of the theatrical Robinsonade, in other words, forces us to address the topical concerns that the play’s critics have traditionally overlooked. By thinking in terms of theatricality, we can better appreciate the play’s interest in language and literature as they relate to issues of gesture, costume, and performance. As in The Cataract of the Ganges, the presence of the book on stage invokes the play’s narrative heritage, reminding the audience of its allegiance

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to Defoe’s originary fiction and placing the play firmly within the tradition of Crusoe adaptations. And yet both plays deflect this textual authority either by making it the center of comedy (as in Cataract) or by redirecting it in the service of theatricality (as in Crichton), thereby making it just one small part of the dramatic display of hegemonic authority. Moncrieff’s play (as I argue in Chapter 2) enacts a reduction in textual authority, conferring real power not to the one who reads, but to the one who acts. Barrie extends this theatrical assault on textual hegemony by subsuming the latter within the former, making the possession, production, and display of text the key element in the performance of power. Though it cannot entirely disown its own narrative antecedents, The Admirable Crichton liberates the theatrical Robinsonade from the bonds of slavish imitation by exhibiting the fealty of the textual to the theatrical. From the very beginning of the play, textual and linguistic mastery function as key components in the performance of authority and social privilege. We can see this dynamic quite clearly in the expository description of Lord Loam: He takes in all the weightiest monthly reviews, and prefers those that are uncut, because he perhaps never looks better than when cutting them; but he does not read them, and save for the cutting, it would suit him as well merely to take in the covers. He writes letters to the papers, which are printed in a type to scale with himself, and he is very jealous of those other correspondents who get his type. Let laws and learning, art and commerce die, but leave the big type to an intellectual aristocracy. (Barrie 1999: 8)12 This passage makes clear some of the ways in which social privilege is figured through text. The newspapers to which Lord Loam writes very carefully preserve social distinctions through the use of emblematic textual embodiment, printing the words of peers in a typeface that reflects their privileged social position. Consequently, one need only compare the size of type to determine the relative ranks of different correspondents. While the use of differential type might be more accurately described as the inscription of authority than the performance thereof, the passage points to an unmistakably theatrical manifestation of textuality in Lord Loam’s studied cutting of the pages of the journals he receives. If his production of text (his letters to the newspaper) embodies his social significance, his reception of text (his opening of the journals) enacts it. Cutting those pages is a purely decorative act, a dramatic gesture of his superior intellect, refi ned taste, and ample means. The journals remain unread, their significance being invested entirely in their outward appearance and—most importantly—in Loam’s possession and handling of them. Here is an instance of text as theatrical prop, a powerful—perhaps indispensable—tool for the performance of social privilege.

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Loam’s position of authority is in other ways expressed as a function of linguistic command. He tells Ernest to prepare a few “bright and sparkling words” for the party, and he threatens his daughters with “recitation” should they assume a condescending air with their servants (Barrie 1999: 9–10). In both cases, Loam’s domestic authority is expressed through his power to control and command the utterances of others. From page cutting to verbal production, Loam’s theatre of authority relies on gestures of linguistic command. This, indeed, is one of the primary dynamics at work in the tea party: the event is designed to create an environment that will allow Loam’s servants to speak as equals to their social betters. The party, however, reinscribes the very social distinctions it is designed to erase, and it does so because it cannot escape being an arena for the exercise of Loam’s linguistic command. If domestic authority is expressed as the power to make one’s social inferiors and dependants speak, then an event in which the content and tone of conversation are strictly mandated is a fundamentally authoritarian display: LORD LOAM. And remember this, Crichton, for the time being you are my equal. (Testily) I shall soon show you whether you are not my equal. Do as you are told. (Barrie 1999: 9) Despite his egalitarian aims, Loam cannot surrender his position of authority. As a result, he orchestrates an event that undermines his idyllic social vision by showcasing the full nature and extent of his domestic control: he requires his menials to behave as his equals, an order that reinforces the social inequality he says he wishes to see overturned. The party thus becomes not the dissolution of authoritarian order but the performative inscription thereof. The party’s centerpiece is Lord Loam’s speech on the unnaturalness of class distinctions. Although Loam delivers the speech from an elevated platform, and despite the fact that Crichton quietly directs his domestic audience’s response, the declaiming Lord Loam ultimately falls into trouble: LORD LOAM. In this connection I remember a proverb, which has had a great effect on my own life. I fi rst heard it many years ago. I have never forgotten it. It constantly cheers and guides me. That proverb is—that proverb was—the proverb I speak of—(He grows pale and taps his forehead) LADY MARY. Oh dear, I believe he has forgotten it. LORD LOAM. (desperately) The proverb—that proverb to which I refer—(Alas, it is gone. The distress is general. He has not even the sense to sit down. He gropes for the proverb in the air. They try applause, but it is no help). (Barrie 1999: 15)

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Here, Loam’s performance of authority is threatened when he forgets his favorite proverb: he nearly loses control over his household because he loses control of his speech. When his command of words fails, so does his position in the domestic hierarchy. Crichton saves him not by providing him with the words he so desperately seeks but by quietly dismantling Lord Loam’s audience of domestic underlings (Jack 1991: 113–14, 124). Though he does not regain his control of language, Lord Loam retains his position of domestic command through the timely dissolution of the rhetorical situation. Indeed, as the stage directions reassure us, even as Lord Loam makes his muttering, incoherent exit from the room, he “continues, owing to Crichton’s treatment, to look every inch a peer” (Barrie 1999: 15). Properly speaking, the pattern I have traced in the last few pages pertains not to text but to language as a tool for the performance of power. It remains, however, a part of the play’s system of signification, in which authority is figured as the control over the possession and production of words. If Barrie portrays authority as being inherently theatrical—present only in its own performance—he insists upon the textual foundations of that theatricality. Just as Barrie’s Robinsonade is ultimately authorized by its unarticulated yet unmistakable attachment to its own textual antecedent—Robinson Crusoe—the play’s performances of authority all rely upon some form of textual apparatus. A minor stage direction at the end of the fi rst act highlights the correlation between the possession of text and the exercise of authority. To set the scene: Crichton has just explained to Lady Mary his heretical theory that “circumstances might alter cases” (Barrie 1999: 21). As the act closes, the sisters ponder Crichton’s cryptic words. But Lady Mary—and here is the critical direction—“does not wonder very much. She would wonder more if she knew what were coming. Her book slips unregarded to the floor” (Barrie 1999: 22). This easily overlooked yet highly symbolic gesture predicts the hierarchical disruption about to take place. Lady Mary loses hold of the book as she is about to lose hold of her position of authority. As the direction indicates, the act of dropping the book is a symbolic, though unconscious, act of surrender. This closing gesture echoes an earlier moment, in which Lady Mary receives her maid Fisher’s notice to quit: FISHER. (rapping it out) If you please, my lady, I wish to give notice. (Catherine and Agatha gleam, but Lady Mary is made of sterner stuff) LADY MARY. (taking up a book) Oh, certainly—you may go. FISHER. I could not undertake, my lady, to wait upon three. We don’t do it. (in an indignant outburst to Lady Mary) Oh, my lady, to think that this affront—

80 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter LADY MARY. (looking up) I thought I told you to go, Fisher (Fisher stands for a moment irresolute; then goes. As soon as she has gone Lady Mary puts her book down and weeps). (Barrie 1999: 17) Note that Lady Mary seizes the book as she assumes an authoritative pose with the intention of putting her maid in her place. But as soon as the contest is over, Lady Mary relinquishes the book and begins to weep, the book being not just a prop but a disguise of disinterest that veils her heightened emotional state. Here we see how possession of the book confers upon Lady Mary an air of control: the text is an integral part of the performance of authority. Indeed, Lady Mary’s authoritative moment is entirely dependent upon her possession of the unnamed volume. Her descent into emotional frailty is not merely accompanied by but is signaled through the laying down of the book: in relinquishing the totemic text, Lady Mary acknowledges the inadequacies of her own domestic authority and surrenders herself to emotional forces beyond her control. When she lays her book down again at the end of the fi rst act, the symbolic surrender of textual possession signals Lady Mary’s final act of submission. When next we see Lady Mary, her situation has changed quite dramatically. As she stands on the beach with her sisters, Lady Mary’s hastily assembled dress and bare feet attest to the loss of her pampered London life. Lady Mary has arrived on the island without her talismans of authority—her books—and is therefore reduced to the status of spectator as a new struggle for authority unfolds. Along with the play’s audience, Lady Mary watches as Ernest and Crichton vie for command of the party. True to the pattern already established in the fi rst act, this contest of wills centers on the command of language and the production and possession of text. At the opening of the second act, Ernest declares himself to be in charge of the group, a grand rhetorical gesture given real weight by its inscription into text (Barrie 1999: 25). Ernest appears to understand the relationship between textual production and authority, wasting no time in recording his position of command in a letter meant to be delivered by the tide. But while Ernest’s presumptuous declaration is properly invested in an authoritative textuality, this textual gesture is bracketed by two key facts that nullify the force of the declaration. Ernest announces the fi rst impediment as he closes the letter, remarking, “This is written on a leaf taken out of a book of poems that Crichton found in his pocket” (Barrie 1999: 25). Although Ernest has penned the text that attests to his position of command, the surface that bears this inscription belongs to Crichton. This may seem an incidental point of fact, until we consider that the play’s first act has already established the connection between the power of command and the physical possession of text. While Ernest may have lifted a page out of Crichton’s book, the book itself remains in Crichton’s possession. Ernest has, in effect, borrowed from Crichton’s totem of authority, and though his words may declare him to be the leader of the castaways, Ernest lacks ownership of

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that fundamental signifier of authority: the bound volume of poems residing in Crichton’s pocket. Ernest’s assumption of authority is further undermined by his failure to post the letter in which it is inscribed. The text cannot proclaim Ernest’s position of command because it fails to circulate, and it fails to circulate because Ernest is preoccupied by his companions’ poor reception of “his most characteristic [epigram] . . . ‘The tide is going out, we mustn’t miss the post’” (Barrie 1999: 25). Not even Crichton appreciates this nugget of witty wisdom, leaving Ernest somewhat deflated. This is a significant rhetorical failure, and it serves to undermine Ernest’s ambitions to authority by highlighting his dependence on those he imagines to be his followers. As with Lord Loam’s speech in act one, Crichton maintains control of the rhetorical moment, though this time he allows his “social better” to undergo a humbling deflation of his aims. This is but the fi rst step towards Crichton’s assumption of authority on the island. The second step on that road also involves the rhetorical disciplining of Ernest and comes in the form of a proposal to cure Ernest of his epigramania: CRICHTON. Since we landed on the island, my lord, it seems to me that Mr. Ernest’s epigrams have been particularly brilliant. ERNEST. (gratifi ed) Thank you, Crichton. CRICHTON. But I fi nd—I seem to fi nd it growing wild, my lord, in the woods, that such sayings which would be justly admired in England are not much use on an island. I would therefore propose that henceforth every time Mr. Ernest favours us with an epigram his head should be immersed in a bucket of cold spring water. (Barrie 1999: 33) Just as Lord Loam’s metropolitan domestic authority was expressed—in the fi rst act—through gestures of linguistic command, the initial indicator of Crichton’s claims to authority on the island manifests as an expression of control over the utterances of others. Crichton’s plan involves the retraining of Ernest through selective silencing, a disciplinary gesture designed to eradicate Ernest’s epigrammatic impulses and to establish a more “natural” standard of behavior, one more appropriate to the island environment. In keeping with the pattern of signification established in the fi rst act, Crichton’s authoritarian metamorphosis occurs linguistically, the control of language and the possession of text being the two indispensable items in the performance of power. Though Barrie makes no direct reference to either Defoe or Crusoe within his script, he manages to keep in play the issues of narrative fiction and textual authority that inherently adhere to any adaptation by strategically deploying two key texts: the book of poems that Crichton brings to the island and the book of fictitious nonfiction that Ernest brings back from the island (the memoir in which he records, albeit fancifully, the group’s

82 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter island adventures). The fi rst of these books—Henley’s poems—corroborates Crichton’s initial claims to authority. This book, a key component in Crichton’s costume, carries a symbolic, totemic significance. It retains its power because it is the only book on the island, for as we discover in act three, “Gov” Crichton does not create a printing press (Barrie 1999: 48). While the circulation of printed texts might inspire revolutionary ideas and thus sow the seeds of insurrection, the “Gov’s” notable refusal to create the mechanism for book production may also indicate his very keen awareness of the source of his authority: the mere existence of other texts would reduce the symbolic import and totemic power of the single book in his possession. His book conveys authority because it is the only book on the island, just as Tweeny’s skirt is so sought-after because it is the only skirt they possess (Barrie 1999: 47). But the book is not the only signal of command available to Crichton, who fully embraces the awesome power of spectacle and performance. Paradoxically, his is the authoritative presence of absence—he drapes himself in an aura of mystery and authority by physically removing himself from view. His disembodied voice comes to the group through an ingenious electric device that flashes commands and repressive observations: “Dogs delight to bark and bite” (Barrie 1999: 47). Notably in this instance, the performance of authority relies on the language of command and utilizes the command of language: the “Gov” commands obedience because he is the one who issues orders, and he is able to issue orders because he commands the device that translates his desires into transmittable text. In lieu of a printing press, which may have democratized the island through the free production and wider circulation of books, “Gov” Crichton has created a controlled device for the unilateral movement of words. It is, moreover, his uncontested possession of this site of textual production that enacts his position of authority, power being not only invested in but performed through text. Crichton’s power, as we have seen, is exercised largely through his absence, his power residing in the spectacle of disembodiment that he has carefully orchestrated (Jack 1991: 116). Outside of mealtime, he is present only as a disembodied voice that awes the others into submission with a whir and a click. As signs of his authority, Crichton’s texts form an essential part of his “Gov” costume, functioning very much in the way of his robe, as markers of his elevated position. There is, in other words, an essential element of the theatrical manifest within the textual. Having witnessed its force fi rsthand, the Loams rely on text to reassert their positions of privilege upon their return to England (Jack 1991: 123). They look to Ernest’s book to overturn the uncomfortable reality of their island performances. Ernest effectively de-authorizes Crichton by repositioning him within the text he writes: in Ernest’s memoir, Crichton is given “a glowing tribute in a footnote,” a disempowering rescripting of Crichton’s role on the island. But Ernest’s book is a lie, and everyone— both on stage and in the audience—knows it. Lady Brockelhurst is all

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too aware of the theatrical possibilities of text, declaring that Ernest’s book “is as engrossing . . . as if it were a fiction” (Barrie 1999: 67). The family’s deception is maintained only through the help of Crichton, who speaks the truth but omits the lurid details that would confi rm Lady Brockelhurst’s suspicions (Lamacchia 1970: 412–1; Jack 1991: 114). In his fi nal act of service to the Loams, Crichton gives his notice, thus removing from the household the biggest threat to the fictionalized accounts of what happened on the island. With Crichton no longer present, the Loams can fully embrace the version of events recorded in Ernest’s book. In performing this fi nal act of self-sacrifice, Crichton in effect authorizes Ernest’s text, a fi nal gesture that affi rms the complicity of the theatrical and the textual.

NATURE AND/OF COSTUME As in the preceding section, I want to call attention to my use of the slash in the subtitle above, for here—as there—it is not merely a decorative mark. I have employed the slash to indicate Barrie’s incisive intertwining of these two terms: nature, costume. The Admirable Crichton, as we have seen, explores the nature of authority and its reliance on textual gestures. But the play also casts an investigative eye on the nature of costume. As a signifier of class position and gender identification, costume plays a vital function in the theatre of social relations, a nonverbal cue indispensable to social interaction. In highlighting the theatrical nature of costume, the play further comments upon the relationship between nature and costume, revealing the constructedness of essential categories of difference. This exploration in turn sheds light on metropolitan social norms, as the play “others” England through the invocation of colonial space. Much of what happens on the island concerns the intersection of the axes of gender and civility, as the play interrogates the normative core of English civil society. In its quest to distinguish what is natural from what is artificial—and by extension what is “right” from what is not—The Admirable Crichton puts its castaways into a tropical crucible that separates behaviors that are cultivated from those that are congenital. Through this behavioral distillation, the play exposes the theatrical underpinnings of metropolitan society, revealing the fundamentally performative essence of the normative conduct attached to various categories of difference and axes of identity. As is typical of late-Victorian theatrical Robinsonades, the movement of characters from metropole to colony cleverly calls attention to metropolitan social issues: England is the real island of interest, and it is the play’s Robinsonian site shift that “others” the island of England, thereby exposing it to the investigative (lime)light. Though critics have lavished most of their attention on the play’s engagement with issues of class, there are a number of other significant items on Crichton’s ideological agenda. The remainder

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of this chapter will focus on one of these concerns, gender, as it speaks to the foundational issues of domesticity and, ultimately, of national identity. Evidence of the play’s interrogation of familiar gender categories can be found in the dispensation of the castaways in the fi rst scene of the second act, shown in figure 4.1. In this still from a 1914 performance, the eight castaways are grouped around the fi re that Crichton has kindled (T. Young 2005: 46). To the left stand Lord Loam’s three daughters, Tweeny, and Ernest. Ernest, “clothed neatly in the garments of day and night,” exhibits a “brightness . . . due less to a manly desire to succour the helpless than to his having been lately in the throes of composition” (Barrie 1999: 24). Ernest’s removal from the sphere of masculine labor is visually reinforced by his placement to the far left of the scene, a position that allows him to gaze upon—but not engage in—the work performed by Crichton and Treherne, who occupy the space to the right. While his clothing marks Ernest as a civilized, refi ned, and cultivated gentleman, his failure to attend to masculine duties further aligns him with the four women who stand alongside him, to the left of the fi re. This grouping visually communicates a correlative relationship between civility and femininity, neither of which qualities would appear to be well-suited to the demands of survival on a deserted island: CRICHTON. And until a ship comes we are three men who are going to do our best for you ladies. LADY MARY. (with a curl of her lip) Mr. Ernest does no work. CRICHTON. (cheerily) But he will, my lady. LADY MARY. I doubt it. CRICHTON. (confidently, but perhaps thoughtlessly) No work—no dinner—will make a great change in Mr. Ernest. LADY MARY. No work—no dinner. When did you invent that rule, Crichton? CRICHTON. (loaded with bamboo) I didn’t invent it, my lady. I seem to see it growing all over the island. (Barrie 1999: 27) The highly civilized man (Ernest) is too refi ned, the women too passive, to engage in the rugged, masculine work that this moment, this place, requires. Building a colony requires physical exertions and common sense observations that are foreign to the effete and decoratively clever Ernest. Neither Ernest nor the Loam daughters possess the masculine physical and mental attributes needed for the construction—and administration—of a new society. To the right of this group, we see Crichton and Treherne cutting fuel for the fi re, their work interrupted by the entrance of Lord Loam, who crawls out of the jungle on his hands and knees. If Ernest’s physical disposition reveals a condition of cultivated civility, Lord Loam’s indicates a debased, bestial state of existence. A “disheveled peer wondrously attired

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Figure 4.1. Social Divisions among the Castaways: The Admirable Crichton, Act Two, Scene One (1914). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. J. M. Barrie Collection.

in rags,” Lord Loam is Ernest’s antithesis: while Ernest has managed to retain his cultured appearance, Lord Loam has quickly degenerated to the point that he is initially mistaken for “a tiger-cat” (Barrie 1999: 29). Despite this differential civility, Lord Loam and Ernest share a state of exile from the site of masculine labor, occupied in this scene by Treherne and Crichton. By the third act, Crichton has become the unchallenged premier occupant of the island’s masculine sphere. Being the biological father of three of the island’s four female inhabitants, Lord Loam has limited sexual opportunities. His nickname, “Daddy,” attests to his desexualized presence, as Tweeny kindly reminds him: “Daddy, you’re of little use, but you’re a bright, cheerful creature to have about the house” (Barrie 1999: 41). Though she seems sentimentally fond of “Daddy,” Tweeny, as Ernest discovers, is not particularly interested in sharing her house with any male creature, no matter how cheerful. Though Ernest offers to be Tweeny’s special Crusoe, building her a house and furnishing it with chairs, tables, knives, forks, and sideboard, his offer is refused because Tweeny prefers

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not to have a man about. Treherne’s reasons for remaining single are less explicitly expressed. He tells Ernest that all of the women have proposed to him at some point, though he does not explain why he refused those offers. His sexual abstinence may be due to his clerical status: the “Gov” has insisted that no one forget that Treherne is a clergyman (1999: 43). Whatever the reason, Treherne, like Lord Loam and Ernest, fi nds himself strangely emasculated, rendered sexually neutral in this closed society. The removal of Lord Loam, Ernest, and Treherne from the ranks clears the way for Crichton to emerge as the masculine center of the island’s society. Crichton is not related by blood to any of the island’s female inhabitants, and is thus free to cavort with the woman of his choosing. Each of the women wishes that he will choose her, and they vie with one another for opportunities to serve him and thus stand seductively in his presence (1999: 46–53). From the female perspective, Crichton is the sole focus of the island’s sexual contest, the winner of which, ironically, proves to be the most masculine of the four women. The stage directions quite clearly describe “Polly’s” trousers as “manly attire” (1999: 46), and when Lady Mary fi rst appears in this act, she is hailed as a handsome young man: (A stalwart youth appears at the window, so handsome and tingling with vitality that, glad to depose Crichton, we cry thankfully, ‘The hero at last.’ But it is not the hero; it is the heroine. This splendid boy, clad in skins, is what Nature has done for Lady Mary. She carries bow and arrows, and a blow-pipe, and over her shoulder is a fat buck, which she drops with a cry of triumph. Forgetting to enter demurely, she leaps through the window). (1999: 45) Every element in this description announces the masculinization of Lady Mary. The figure initially appears to be a young man, a “splendid boy,” a “handsome” youth who leaps boyishly through windows and carries phallic totems: arrows and a blow-pipe. With these penile projectiles, she has felled not just a deer but a buck: a triumph not merely of human over animal but of manly behavior over biological maleness (MacKenzie 1988: 32–33). Lady Mary has, in short, been masculinized during her stay on the island, leaping effortlessly across the landscape in her trousers, chasing down (and killing) a stag. Recognizing the phallic implications of the hunt, the “Gov” uses his position of authority to reinforce conventional English gender norms, forbidding “Polly” to undertake such an adventure again. He further expresses a preference for “Polly” dressed in the skirt, saying he is “rather old fashioned in these matters” (Barrie 1999: 49–50). Just as Crichton’s book represents the full force of culture and knowledge, so that it becomes the only conduit to those dual wellsprings of power, the skirt not only represents but hegemonically embodies femininity, to the extent that it becomes the only means by which any of the women on the island

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can lay claim to being feminine. Why is Tweeny—a lowly kitchen maid in England—so sought-after on the island? Because through the skirt she has become the only true representative of womanhood. Imported emblems of civilization, Crichton’s book of poems and Tweeny’s skirt endow their possessors with two distinct yet equally crucial forms of identity, through which privilege is obtained. As artifacts of English society, these two objects acquire a new significance as elemental markers of gender and authority. In the “Gov’s” preference for a skirted woman we hear the latent homophobia of modern English society asserting itself: though survival on the island requires a rugged, masculinized femininity, such gender-bending interferes with the requirements of a traditional English marital union. Crichton’s “natural” island sensibility recognizes the practicality of Polly’s trousers, but his more “civilized” English notions of social and sexual propriety object to the image of masculinized womanhood. That Crichton’s objection is borne of social prohibitions against homosexual desire is revealed by his choice of verbs: the “Gov” asks “Polly” not to “marry” him but to “mate” with him, highlighting the sexual, reproductive function of their proposed union. While the two discuss the inequities in their social positions as the primary obstacle to their union—Polly worries that the “Gov” will “imperil” his dignity by marrying beneath him—underlying this discourse of social class there is an unspoken, visceral rejection of same-sex desire (Lane 1995: 101–19). Consequently, the pairing of Crichton and Lady Mary presents the audience with a complicated spectacle of homoerotic desire, diffused, in the fi nal moment, by the arrival of rescue and the return to metropolitan civilization. We can understand the play’s hasty retreat from the consummation of this relationship if we consider Christopher Lane’s assessment of homosexuality as an unnaturally egalitarian form of desire, the sexual counterpart to Lord Loam’s social ideal (Lane 1995: 4–6). On the one hand, the masculinization of Lady Mary highlights the socially constructed, performative nature of metropolitan gender norms, thereby destabilizing one of the core ideologies that form the bedrock of English civilization. At the same time, the play’s expression of the desire for—and dismissal of—same-sex union reinforces the verdict against Loam’s egalitarian dreams, advancing difference as the primary domestic dynamic. From the heterosexual to the heterosocial, The Admirable Crichton celebrates the distinctions, differentials, and disparities that give shape, substance, and order to English civil society. In act four, Lady Mary forgets herself and, “despite her garments,” conducts “a manly entrance” (Barrie 1999: 60) into the drawing room. The room, we are told, is decorated with trophies from the island, including the skins of animals “Shot by Lord Loam” and “Hon. Ernest Woolley’s Blowpipe” (1999: 58). These labels, of course, inscribe fictions, assigning possession of these masculine items to the men who had nothing at all to do with them on the island. Lady Mary is, ironically, the most honestly,

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genuinely masculine thing in this room. But as the play draws to its close, she must make an effort to suppress her natural masculine energies and to cultivate the passive, feminine demeanor of a woman of privilege. She must undergo this metamorphosis in order to make herself a suitable match for Lord Brockelhurst. This fi nal act of surrender highlights the effeminacy and falsity of the English aristocracy, but the play’s Robinsonian trajectory suggests a larger social statement as well, exposing the unstable theatricality at the heart of metropolitan structures of authority and domesticity.

CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE CIRCLE In the decades that separated Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe (1781) from It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1865) and it, in turn, from The Admirable Crichton (1902), the theatrical Robinsonade transformed Crusoe’s island from a site of solitary adventure into a space for the display and resolution of social issues. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had become conventional for the theatrical Robinsonade to place the imperial periphery at the service of metropolitan society, casting the island as a microcosmic extension of England. Having replaced Defoe’s lone castaway with a community of exiles, the late-Victorian (and early-Edwardian) theatrical Robinsonade explored and exposed England’s social ills and shortcomings: the colonial frontier being no longer the site of metropolitan replication but of its alteration. Defoe’s Crusoe may have been the emblematic colonial creator, but his later incarnations eventually abandoned hut-building for ever-larger projects of social deconstruction (Louis James 1996). In keeping with this generic development, Barrie’s play uses the castaways’ island experience to reveal the tenuousness of the threads holding together the fabric of England’s polite society (Jack 1991: 108; Hunter 1980: 69). While the island of the castaways’ sojourn is domesticated and transformed into a “Happy Home” during the break separating the second and third acts, England is both rhetorically and conceptually “Othered” by the fourth act of the play. Though Crichton refuses, at the conclusion, to speak against English society, the cumulative action of the play speaks far more loudly than his concluding words ever could.13 As Crichton marches proudly off stage, members of the audience are left—like Lady Mary—with the uncomfortable apparition of themselves as artificial inhabitants of an artificial world. They are, in effect, cast in the role of castaway, removed from all reassuring certainties and set adrift in a sea of doubts. In the decade following its stage debut, Barrie refi ned the script for The Admirable Crichton, introducing short comments and descriptive passages that, depending on one’s critical perspective, either elaborate on the performance of the play or exert narrative pressure on its essential theatricality (Hollindale 1999: xxvi–xxviii). Whether or not we agree with Grace Lamacchia’s assessment of the “reading version” as the most interpretively

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satisfactory rendering of the play, containing the only stable and indisputably authorized version of the play’s frequently revised ending, the internal consistency, editorial fi nality, and widespread availability of this more readerly rendering of the script make it the preeminent incarnation of the drama insofar as modern audiences and critics are concerned (Lamacchia 1970: 418). By publishing the play, Barrie—like other dramatists of the New Drama movement—aspired to bestow upon his work the status of “literature,” so that his theatrical Robinsonade might share its originary narrative’s elevated cultural status. Furthermore, the elaboration of the stage directions in the printed version offered a stability in representation and interpretation that the protean dynamics of performance could not guarantee. If the play’s action and dialogue pit performative authenticity against textual unreliability, its publication ironically privileges the textual over the theatrical, or at least renders the former essential to the achievement of the latter, thus confi rming the play’s message about the possibilities for using the textual in service to the theatrical. In any event, the revision history of The Admirable Crichton brings full circle one vector of the evolutionary trajectory of the theatrical Robinsonade, reconnecting the dramatic with the narrative. Barrie’s play thus represents an appropriate conclusion to the developmental arc I have been tracing. The evolutionary narrative of the theatrical Robinsonade does, of course, continue past the point of Crichton’s return, giving rise to a diverse array of latter-day Crusoes and their islands of exile: Gilligan’s Island (1964–67), Survivor (1997–), Cast Away (2000), The Life of Pi (2003), and Lost (2004– 10), to name but a few. But that portion of the thread is left for another to weave; in attending to Barrie, I have already extended the bounds of my study beyond the Victorian, and I must be content to stop here, in the company of that most admirable of Crusoe’s successors. In the next section, I turn to another recurring figure on the Victorian stage and his very different version of the exile’s return. Though different from Crusoe in significant ways, the nabob’s figurative foot left an oddly similar imprint on the Victorian stage; for, like Crusoe, the nabob was an eighteenth-century figure—though historical rather than literary—revived and adapted to suit the needs of nineteenth-century dramatists, becoming, like Crusoe, a familiar embodiment of empire for Victorian theatre audiences. Where the Robinsonade cast its sights on the distant geographical spaces of empire, the nabob play utilized a British background, emphasizing the domestic side of the imperial equation. The move from one figure to another does not, however, represent a complete topical rupture, for the theatrical nabob, like his Robinsonian cousin, calls into question normative British identities and behaviors by bringing the imperial metropole into contact with its physically distant (but performatively proximate) periphery. If Crusoe enacted the out-and-back movement of the colonist, the nabob play highlighted the issues attending that return, calling attention to the potentially dangerous domestication of the cultural and racial Otherness that constituted the other half of empire.

Part II

Theatrical Nabobery Imperial Wealth, Masculinity, and Metropolitan Identities

Figure 5.1. The Nabob at Home: Cover of Dick’s Standard Plays Edition of The Bengal Tiger (1837). © The British Library Board.

Introduction to Part II Joseph Sedley was . . . in the East India Company’s Civil Service, and his name appeared, at the period of which we write, in the Bengal division of the East India Register, as collector of Boggley Wollah, an honourable and lucrative post, as everybody knows. . . . Before he went to India he was too young to partake of the delightful pleasures of a man about town, and plunged into them, on his return, with considerable assiduity. He drove his horses in the Park; he dined at the fashionable taverns (for the Oriental Club was not yet invented); he frequented the theatres, as the mode was in those days, or made his appearance at the opera, laboriously attired in tights and a cocked hat. . . . He was lazy, peevish, and a bon-vivant; the appearance of a lady frightened him beyond measure. . . . His bulk caused Joseph much anxious thought and alarm; now and then he would make a desperate attempt to get rid of his superabundant fat; but his indolence and love of good living speedily got the better of these endeavours at reform, and he found himself again at his three meals a day. He never was well dressed; but he took the hugest pains to adorn his big person, and passed many hours daily in that occupation. His valet made a fortune out of his wardrobe: his toilet-table was covered with as many pomatums and essences as ever were employed by an old beauty: he had tried, in order to give himself a waist, every girth, stay and waistband then invented. Like most fat men, he would have his clothes made too tight, and took care they should be of the most brilliant colours and youthful cut. . . . He was as vain as a girl; and perhaps his extreme shyness was one of the results of his extreme vanity. —William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

The Major being by this time in a state of repletion, with essence of savoury pie oozing out at the corners of his eyes, and devilled grill and kidneys tightening his cravat: and the time moreover approaching for the departure of the railway train to Birmingham, by which they were to leave town: the Native got him into his great-coat with immense difficulty, and buttoned him up until his face looked staring and gasping, over the top of that garment, as if he were in a barrel. The Native then handed him separately, and with a decent interval between each supply, his wash-leather gloves, his thick stick, and his hat; which latter article the Major wore with a rakish air on one side of his head, by way of toning down his remarkable visage. The Native had previously packed, in all possible and impossible parts of Mr. Dombey’s chariot, which was in waiting, an unusual quantity of carpet-bags and small portmanteaus, no less apoplectic in appearance than the Major himself: and having fi lled his own pockets with Seltzer water, East India

94 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter sherry, sandwiches, shawls, telescopes, maps, and newspapers, any or all of which light baggage the Major might require at any instant of the journey, he announced that everything was ready. —Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848)

To open a discussion with one extended epigraph might appear indulgent; to begin with two must certainly be excessive. But this is, of course, the point, for the very excessiveness and indulgence of these two epigraphs render them not only appropriate but essential to the task at hand. Though flagrantly violating conservative scholarly conventions, the physical expansiveness of these selections—their arrogant refusal to observe the narrow bounds of epigraphic etiquette, their intemperate exposition—makes them a fitting introductory device, for the scale of their imprint embodies their discursive subject: the nabob. Thackeray’s Jos Sedley is obese, ostentatious, and self-obsessed; Dickens’s Bagstock, also corporeally expansive, is overladen with baggage and over-reliant on his native servant. Addicted to ornament and extravagance, both men embody a consumption that is conspicuous, indulgent, and grotesque. Creatures of excess, they are not so unlike the epigraphs above, taking up more than their fair share of physical space, demanding the reader’s attention, and pointing beyond themselves to controversial colonial subtexts. Immediately legible to the Victorian reader, Sedley and Bagstock represent a colonial type that, while animate in the novel, had already been consigned to the pages of history. A byproduct of the East India Company’s administration of Indian territories, the nabob rose and fell with the Company’s fortunes. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Parliament demanded more governmental oversight of Company activity, the nabob’s power began to wane. By the mid-nineteenth century, when Thackeray and Dickens were drafting their own nabobs, the figure had vanished from the scene of real-world affairs. Yet their readers readily recognized Sedley and Bagstock as belonging to that breed of men long since vanished from colonial service. This continued cultural invocation of the nabob long after his historical demise testifies to the lasting legibility of the figure’s social and political associations, raising a series of questions of the essential what, why, and how variety: what ideological issues or broad cultural concerns were embodied in the nabob? Why did the nabob continue to be available for the expression of these social anxieties? How was the figure realized through public discourses? As early as the 1760s, concerns for the social and political consequences of Britain’s investment in an Indian empire were consolidated in the figure of the nabob, who symbolized imperial desire (both sexual and economic) and colonial contagion (both physical and cultural), as Bridget Orr explains:

Introduction to Part II 95 At the same time, however, the comedy recorded and processed the often disturbing rise of new men (and a few new women), perceived to be making their fortunes and reputations at the expense of landed proprietors, through military service and colonial trade. The occasional depiction of planters, or persons long resident in the Indies, confi rmed suspicions that the new wealth generated by colonial trade and settlement was tainted, having savagified or crazed its possessors, and threatening to infect the metropolis itself. (2001: 250) While desire for new markets and increased profits certainly motivated entities such as the East India Company to expand their overseas presence, the empire’s critics were wary of the allure of other cultures. Consequently, nabobs came to symbolize political corruption, personal vice, and cultural contagion, their troubling—even disgraceful—conduct, both in India and in Britain, violating traditional British ideals of honesty, integrity, and restraint. In the realm of popular literature, the nabob was a grotesque exaggeration of colonial capitalism and commodity consumption (Lawrence James 1997: 47–9; Norton 1993: 126). Ironically, real-world nabobs were seen as somewhat menacing, yet novelists and playwrights—from Charles Dickens to George Dance—routinely invoked them as comic figures of excess. On stage, the nabob carried a double signification, representing both the material wealth associated with Britain’s economically exploitative policies and practices in India and the culturally contaminating effects of contact with the imperial periphery. The figure was thus located at the intersection of the promises and problems of imperialism. In mobilizing the nabob, the Victorian theatre not only enacted social anxieties about empire, but also ultimately imagined a recuperative effort to reclaim imperial energies in support of metropolitan bourgeois domesticity. Why was the nabob such a menacing figure in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination? What larger social concerns were associated with this persistent character? And what sort of cultural work was performed through the nabob plays? Far from being culturally incidental, the theatrical nabob played a key role in Britain’s social imagination, where he illuminated and challenged notions of middle-class British masculinity. This was, indeed, a valuable service to the British nation, which in the nineteenth century struggled to defi ne itself, its members, and its relationship to an increasingly complicated imperial system that exposed western cultural vulnerabilities at the same time it offered Britain new opportunities for fi nancial and social expansion (Stoler 2000: 87–92). Embodying both the energies that powered the engines of empire and the cultural contamination that threatened Britain at its imperial margins, the nabob was ideally suited to the theatre’s socially disciplinary functions. In exhibiting the nabob, the Victorian theatre laid bare the economic and cultural problems of empire; in taming these rogue colonials and reintegrating their wealth, if not their

96 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter persons, into polite bourgeois society, the theatre reaffi rmed the cultural supremacy of middle-class masculinity. The nabob was closely associated with indolence, narcissism, and selfindulgence. In England he was seen as a social upstart, in India, a rapacious participant in imperial exploitation. In either place, he was popularly conceived as a cultural, if not racial, hybrid, his body a troubling integration of East and West, as Sudipta Sen explains: The story of the lotus-eaters in Greek mythology here shares something with the infamous English nabob engulfed by India. . . . [T]he influence of the peculiarly depraved and ostentatious life in India was feared as being capable of generating profl igacy beyond the normative, domestic economy, a condition that threatened the assurance of a higher AngloBritish identity. (2002: 97) At the very moment Indian service promised a proper training ground for young men, it posed a significant threat to deeply held Victorian beliefs about the strength of the British character. Social critics such as John Ruskin commonly spoke of the British as being “undegenerate in race,” a pure mix of the best of northern European bloodlines and the inheritors of rich, untarnished cultural and religious traditions. For Ruskin and other Victorians, Britain’s unique racial heritage justified the subjugation of other races (Druce 1997: 188–9). However, as E.M. Collingham has argued, England’s domination of India required the Indianization of colonial officials. Thus was born the nabob, the “product of a dialogue between Indian and British ideas of the appropriate ruling body” (2001: 19). In order to secure their position as the legitimate successors of India’s elite Mughal rulers, Britain’s official representatives in India constructed for themselves Indianized bodies surrounded by all the trappings of Indian nobility, a process of Indianization evident in figures 5.2 and 5.3 (Collingham 2001: 15–24). Although “The adoption of Oriental habits by the Anglo-Indian could . . . be interpreted as a glorification of British achievements in India” and a confi rmation of the strength of British identity even in the midst of a foreign climate, the ready adoption of an Indian cultural idiom raised concerns about British cultural hegemony: The nabob as a hybrid of East and West was primarily the product of cultural miscegenation, but, according to the environmental doctrine, the adaptation of the European constitution to the Indian climate could be interpreted as a process of degeneration into a state of physical miscegenation. The hybridity of the nabob aroused fears that a racially impure and socially inferior creole community would develop in India as it had done in South America. (Collingham 2001: 34) A mix of East and West contrived for the legitimization of imperial rule, the nabob occupied an uncertain cultural position. Although the ability

Introduction to Part II 97 to impersonate non-Englishness was a particular, if peculiar, sign of the superiority of Englishness, the too-successful English mime of Indian manners could also undermine confidence in “the ontological stabilities” of the English identity (Stoler 2000: 91–2). In performing eastern gestures, figures like Richard Burton confi rmed beliefs in western powers of observation and performance, yet their adept mimicry simultaneously suggested the fragility of British cultural ties (Roy 1998: 2–32; Cooper and Stoler 1997: 26; Sen 2002: 96–104). The adoption of Indian manners was thus, at the same time, a sign of the nabob’s political authority and of his cultural degeneracy. At the very best, he represented the adaptability of the English to meet the new challenges posed by imperial expansion. At the worst, however, he was living proof of the weakness of that character and of the degenerative influence of the nation’s imperial project. The nabob thus stood as proof of Britain’s global reach yet also, disturbingly, as evidence of the equally expansive grasp of colonial culture. The figure embodied contradiction. He represented financial opportunity but also economic rapaciousness. He was, on the one hand, the very symbol of triumphant British masculinity and on the other, the effeminized evidence of British moral and cultural susceptibility. Although he braved the unknown, bearing his nation’s imperial enterprise into the darkest regions of the world, his status as national hero was compromised by his outlandish clothes and recognizably colonial habits (Sen 2002: 124–5; Collingham 2001: 13–80). This problematic figure was the subject of innumerable depictions, both visual and verbal, ranging from the comic to the sensational. And the widespread fascination with this inherently theatrical figure continued long after Hastings and his ilk ceased to perform a role in the real-world drama of empire, as we will see in the next chapter. Indeed, it was on stage that the nabob retained his cultural currency into the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a comically visible and grotesque embodiment of many of the anxieties attending the imperial encounter.

5

The Stage Nabob’s EighteenthCentury Origins At this crisis, preceded by all the pomp of Asia, Sir Matthew Mite, from the Indies, came thundering amongst us; and, profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces, corrupted the virtue and alienated the affections of all the old friends to the family. —Samuel Foote, The Nabob (1772)

Originally a morally neutral Anglicization of the Hindi term nawab (signifying “deputy”), the word nabob assumed a derogatory inflection in the late eighteenth century, when it became inextricably intertwined with popular perceptions of the corrupting influence of Anglo-Indian cross-cultural contact. At the root of this condemnatory connotation was the growing concern over the degenerative transformation of character that was the inevitable result of intercourse with the East. Tracing the word in the pages of Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases (Yule and Burnell 1886), we see that nabob assumed an increasingly pejorative connotation in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, being generally employed in reference to excessive fortunes acquired through dubious means and by men whose ethical standards were suspect. Perhaps most revealing among these references is the full title of Henry Fred Thompson’s 1780 book, The Intrigues of a Nabob; or, Bengal the Fittest Soil for the Growth of Lust, Injustice, and Dishonesty. Broadly reproachful, generally condemnatory, and occasionally mocking, the rich descriptive passages quoted in Hobson-Jobson vocalize the jeering, even aggressive tone of contemporary visual treatments of the nabob, which provide a more complete picture of how this peculiar character was imagined—and assessed—by his contemporaries. With the aid of the images below, we can resuscitate and reconnect with this long-extinct figure, gaining a clearer understanding of why the nabob became such a star on the theatrical stage and what he may have looked like striding across the boards.

THE NABOB’S EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PORTRAIT Anglo-Indian life was generally associated with wealth and privilege.1 Consequently, many Victorian visual representations of Englishmen in India focus on the immersion of the Occidental body in a world of Oriental luxury. In

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figure 5.2, for example, we see an Englishman at home in India, surrounded by an army of native servants. Bathing and clothing his languid body requires the assistance of four men. Nearby, a young boy stands with a large fan, ready to cool the overheated Englishman. The Anglo-Indian master who is the object of all these attentions is so utterly lacking in vitality that he cannot even lift the small fan that dangles limply from his drooping fingers. A saddle and tennis racket, symbols of masculine pursuits, lie strewn about the room, but their careless ordering betrays the Englishman’s disinterest in physical exertion. Indeed, the only object to which this pampered person pays any attention is the mirror that reflects the perfection of his grooming. This image captures the spirit of the nabob’s lifestyle in India. Although he is a civilian, the man in the picture exudes an aristocratic air as he commands his menials to attend to the needs of his body. William Mackintosh’s 1782 description of a day in the life of a Bengal nabob reads like a narrative accompaniment to this illustration: The moment the master throws his legs out of bed, the whole possé in waiting rush into his room. . . . In about half an hour after undoing and taking off his long drawers, a clean shirt, breeches, stockings, and slippers, are put upon his body, without any greater exertion on his own part, than if he were a statue. The barber enters, shaves him, cuts his nails, and cleans his ears. The chillumjee and ewer are brought by a servant, whose duty it is, who pours water upon his hands, to wash his hands and face, and presents a towel. . . . The hair-dresser comes behind, and begins his operation, while the huccabadar softly slips the upper end of the snake or tube of the houcca into his hand. While the hair-dresser is doing his duty, the gentleman is eating, sipping, and smoking by turns. (qtd. in Teltscher 1995: 160)2 As E.M. Collingham has explained, this image, and others like it, “constructed the nabob as a person of grandeur, above the concerns of his own body, but at the same time suggested a man who was helpless without the assistance of servants” (2001: 22). Commenting on the paradox of the powerful, yet dependent European body within the colonial context, Ann Laura Stoler observes that on the one hand, the European’s complete reliance on the ministrations of native servants betrays his physical weakness and dependency, while on the other hand his ability to command the services of so many menials is potent proof of his power (2000: 97). The pampered nabob’s body is both an empowered and an effeminized body— commanding and authoritative, yet also weak, indolent, and self-absorbed. Enervated by the oppressive climate and invested with superficial authority over his menials, the nabob in figure 5.2 represents the curious colonial confusion of empowerment and emasculation. If the image of the pampered nabob reveals a gendered degeneracy attending Anglo-Indian luxury, the Englishman in figure 5.3 represents a

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Figure 5.2. The Pampered Nabob: “A male Anglo-Indian being washed, dressed and attended by five Indian servants.” Colored lithograph by J. Bouvier. Published in W. Tayler, Anglo Indians (1842). Courtesy Wellcome Images.

potentially problematic immersion in eastern sensuality. The nabob in this image is more closely aligned with western masculine norms. His position at the far right of the frame, surrounded by men and visually separated from the female dancers by the horizontal line of the carpet, reinforces his position as a male observer of the femininity on display to the left of the

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Figure 5.3. Anglo-Indian Indulgence: “Sir David Ochterlony in Indian dress and smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in his house in Delhi” (1820). © The British Library Board.

picture’s center. While the Indian men stand, the Englishman sits upon a richly embroidered carpet supported by cushions. His physical situation, seated and in front of the groups of native men, indicates his privileged status, not unlike the status enjoyed by his counterpart in figure 5.2. He adopts the position of an eastern potentate, and he indulges his carnal appetites with the sensual pleasures of the East: the hookah and the nautch. Above it all can be seen a row of portraits, their stern subjects gazing down with disapproval upon this scene of the westerner’s inappropriately intimate engagement with the East.3 These visual images of Anglo-Indian indiscretion and excess fi nd their textual echo in historian George Trevelyan’s mid-century text, The Competition Wallah (1864), which includes the following condemnatory description of the habits of eighteenth-century Anglo-Indians: The earliest settlers were indolent, dissipated, grasping, almost Orientals in their way of life, and almost heathens in the matter of religion. . . . Our knowledge, derived from other sources, fully bears out [Mrs. Sherwood’s] vivid descriptions of the splendid sloth and the languid debauchery of European society in those days—English gentlemen, overwhelmed

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Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter with the consequences of extravagance, hampered by liaisons with Hindoo women and by crowds of olive-coloured children, without either the will or the power to leave the shores of India; English ladies living in a separate establishment from their husbands, in semi-oriental retirement, drinking largely of beer and claret, smoking hookahs, abandoning their little ones to the fatal blighting bestial influence of native conversation and example. . . . Great men rode about in state coaches, with a dozen servants running before and behind to bawl out their titles: and little men lounged in palanquins, or drove a chariot for which they never intended to pay, drawn by horses which they had bullied or cajoled out of the stables of wealthy Baboos. (1864: 132)

Taken together with the visual images above, Trevelyan’s text reveals popular presumptions about Anglo-Indian life. From slouching indolence to sexual indulgence, effeminate vanity to aggressive masculinity, the Anglo-Indian nabob was associated with a broad range of improper behavior, all of which was deemed, consistently and decisively, un-English (Mason 1985: 60–62, 96–104; Sen 2002: 124–49). These critical commentaries—whether verbal or visual—on the nabob’s Orientalized lifestyle betray the circulation of a more profound social anxiety, described by Ann Laura Stoler as the fear that “the Indies was transformative of cultural essence, social disposition, and personhood itself . . . [t]hat ‘Europeanness’ was not a fi xed attribute, but one altered by environment, class-contingent, and not secured by birth” (2000: 92). Although Stoler’s analysis focuses primarily on the problematic underclass of colonial societies—destitute and degenerate whites—it is easy to see how her discussion might be extended to include the very similar cultural crises inspired by the relatively privileged nabob. While these fi rst two images of Anglo-Indian life illustrate the behavioral effects of British operatives’ immersion in India’s indigenous cultural practices, other images remind us that the nabob’s unfavorable associations extended far beyond the sensual temptations of the Indian environment. Returning to England at the conclusion of his colonial career, the nabob served as a conduit for the transmission of colonial manners and materials into the metropolitan heart of the empire. He not only threatened to pollute England with effeminate Anglo-Indian decadence, but he also came to personify the polluting influences of Britain’s expanding imperial networks. One of the primary charges leveled against the nabob attacked his presumptuous social ambition. Armed with wealth wrested (often illegally) from India, the nabob mounted an assault (or so it seemed to many of his contemporaries) on British society, for he was known, upon his return, to purchase with his ill-got Indian gain a large English estate and to set himself up in the style of a country nobleman. He was the eighteenth century’s paradigmatic parvenu, his critics denouncing his power to purchase a lifestyle to which he was neither entitled nor suited (Lawrence James 1997: 45–48; Edwardes 1991: 28–33; Bayly 1990: 123–24; Sen 2002: 124–5).

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Observers anxiously watched this group of colonials displace hereditary fortunes with money “tainted by trade, and rather dubious trade at that” (Wild 2000: 73). “Count Roupee” embodies these concerns in figure 5.4, riding his horse in Hyde Park. His skin is tanned to a deep mocha; his clothing is well-appointed; his face is almost simian in appearance. This is a picture of the hybridized Anglo-Indian body, transformed by its exposure to the Indian environment, engaging in the emblematic aristocratic diversion. The picture is a caricature, certainly, but one underwritten with seriousness. Indeed, the title of the piece, “Count Rupee,” communicates the cause of concern, as his pretension to aristocratic privilege threatens to pollute Britain’s noble traditions with a colonial stain and further asserts the preeminence of wealth over birth. More troubling than the nabob’s social climbing was his upstart political ambition, his purse containing more than enough money to mount a successful Parliamentary campaign, thereby securing a position of considerable power. By the late eighteenth century, a number of nabobs had pursued this precise course of action, collectively exercising what many saw as undue influence over Britain’s domestic and colonial policies (Lawrence James 1997: 47–48; Edwardes 1991: 32–33; Suleri 1992: 53). Objections to the nabobs’ increasing involvement in the nation’s politics extended beyond

Figure 5.4. The Hybridized Anglo-Indian Body: “Count Roupee” (1797). © The British Library Board.

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criticism of their presumptuous purchase of political power, as Lawrence James explains: There were two complementary issues at stake. The fi rst was the possibly harmful impact of the nabobs on British political life, and the second concerned how far the British people were prepared to tolerate a despotism being exercised in their name in India. There had never been any objection in principle to nabobs buying Parliamentary seats in an age which accepted that wealth and political influence were synonymous. What upset contemporaries were the methods employed by nabobs seeking election. . . . They never bothered to cultivate constituencies and were indifferent to the feelings of those they had swept aside. It appeared, particularly to their victims, that the nabobs were behaving in Britain as they had in India. (1997: 48) In other words, the real trouble was the introduction of Indian political processes into British institutions of power. An infusion of “eastern despotism” into Parliamentary democracy inspired two overlapping anxieties. The fi rst was the fear of making corruption and tyranny the rule in British politics. There was also a reluctance to give the appearance of popular support to the East India Company’s scandalous methods of governing India. Either way, the nabob was the symbol of what had gone wrong in Britain’s involvement in the East (Sen 2002: 124–5). The debates about the nature of Company administration coalesced around the infamous eight-year trial (1787–1795) of Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1774–1785. Summoned before Parliament on twenty-three counts of crimes ranging from bribery to genocide—a list of crimes that rhetorically reenacts the destructive gluttony that would later form the key component of Victorian nabob typology— Hastings found himself in the middle of a public and political campaign against the Company’s methods of administering India and extorting its wealth (Suleri 1992: 49–74). Under Hastings’s predecessor, Robert Clive, the East India Company had become the de facto ruler of Bengal, and many in Britain objected to this fusion of trading rights and administrative power: in his opening oratory before Parliament at Hastings’s impeachment trial, Edmund Burke called the Company “a state in the disguise of a merchant, a great public office in the disguise of a counting house” (qtd. in Harlow and Carter 2003: 147). Beyond the issue of a private corporation’s exercise of the powers of state governance, the public objected to the brutality and greed of Company representatives who sought to distill their own personal fortunes out of India’s vast wealth. Although Hastings was officially the accused, it was the East India Company that was the real target of the trial. Hastings was ultimately acquitted, but the Company’s administrative practices in India were forever altered. Lord Cornwallis, Hastings’s successor, would oversee the transition from rule in an Indian

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idiom to the wholesale Anglicization of the Company’s Indian interests (Ferguson 2002: 3–55). Hastings is thus often thought of as the last of the nabobs, his trial marking the fi nal decline of this particular breed. But this trial also marks a point of transition as the nabob moved from real-world character to theatrical caricature. In 1772, Samuel Foote brought to the stage the fi rst of the theatrical nabobs in a play entitled, rather obviously, The Nabob. Fifteen years later, Hastings’s trial began. In the intervening years, Parliament launched a series of investigations into Company administration of India, leading to the passage of several acts that sought to limit Company power. The trial was thus a fitting conclusion to this stage of the nabob’s history, as it brought together the worlds of the theatrical and the political. Sara Suleri calls Hastings’s trial “dramatic,” describes Westminster Hall as “the most spectacular stage in London,” and comments on Burke’s “theatrical success” (Suleri 1992: 53, 49, 68). Niall Ferguson similarly describes the ordeal as though it were a play: On 13 February 1788 the most celebrated—and certainly the most protracted—trial in the history of the British Empire began in an atmosphere like that of a West End opening night. Before a glittering audience, Burke and the playwright Richard Sheridan opened the prosecution with virtuoso hyperbole. . . . Hastings could not match this; he fluffed his lines. On the other hand, the hallmark of a successful play, a long run, is not the hallmark of a successful trial. (2002: 55) The presence of Sheridan at the proceedings was sufficient to warrant such dramatic rhetoric to describe Hastings’s trial, but as Michael Edwardes makes clear, the public response to the event invites further comparison with theatre audiences: Westminster Hall had certainly been prepared for the theatrical. . . . By ten o’clock most of the ticket-holders were in their seats; some—not there by right, it was said—had paid £50 for the privilege. The Queen and two of her daughters occupied the box of the Duke of Newcastle. There were a great many diamonds and feathers and not only on the ladies, for the ambassadors of the great kingdoms of Europe were treating this as a state occasion and were wearing their orders. In the audience were: that greatest of contemporary actresses, Sarah Siddons [and] the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. (1991: 151) Edwardes’s rich description captures the sensationalism of the Hastings trial, which attracted large audiences, as though to a night at the theatre: Appropriate, too, that one of [the organizers] should have been a playwright, brilliant and witty. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The

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Clearly, the proceedings were infused with elements of the theatrical, but the staginess of the spectacle seems fitting given the place of Hastings’s trial in the story of the nabob, for the trial marked the end of the nabob as a historical, real-world figure and his emergence as a popular theatrical type.

THE THEATRICAL INCARNATION OF A DYING BREED Although in life the nabobs found their economic and political ambitions thwarted by the reformist policies of both government and Company, their image enjoyed wide circulation in the expansive vistas of the popular imagination. Long after “nabobery,” properly understood, disappeared in the face of new Company regulations, the nabob retained a remarkable degree of cultural currency, as Benjamin Disraeli noted in 1845: In a commercial country like England, every half century develops some new and vast source of public wealth, which brings into national notice a new and powerful class. A couple of centuries ago, a Turkish Merchant was the great creator of wealth; the West Indian Planter followed him. In the middle of the last century appeared the Nabob. These characters in their zenith in turn merged in the land, and became English aristocrats; while, the Levant decaying, the West Indies exhausted, and Hindostan plundered, the breeds died away, and now exist only in our English comedies, from Wycherly and Congreve to Cumberland and Morton. (qtd. in Harlow and Carter 2003: 208) Here, Disraeli astutely notes the evolution of the nabob from historical figure to theatrical character. By the 1760s, just as the power of the East India Company was beginning to wane, the nabob was becoming a familiar figure in novels, poems, and cartoons (Juneja 1992: 184; Edwardes 1991: 13). And as we have already seen, the nabob maintained currency in the nineteenth century within the pages of the Victorian novel (Edwardes 1991: 182–3).4 Yet it was in the theatre that the nabob was fi rst made into a popular cultural icon, and it was in the theatre that the nabob was truly kept alive through the end of the nineteenth century. A number of historians have made the nabob an eighteenth-century concern, rightly seeing the figure as the center of “misgivings over the many

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effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain,” yet mistakenly assuming that this personification of political uncertainty had vanished by the beginning of Victoria’s reign. Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips virtually banish the nabob from the Victorian period with their rather bold claim that “By the end of the [eighteenth] century the empire had been accepted and new lines of imperial responsibility [had been] drawn” (1984: 225–6). In a similar vein, Renu Juneja dates “The heyday of nabobery . . . [to] between 1760 and 1785” (1992: 184). Like Michael Edwardes, Juneja locates the end of the age of the nabobs in the 1790s with Cornwallis’s reform of Company rules to eliminate the conditions that had made possible “the accumulation of the kind of private wealth which had led to the creation of the nabobs.” She further claims that the term “nabob” had become relatively innocuous by the end of the eighteenth century (Juneja 1992: 183–4). Although these discussions of the historical rise and fall of the nabob often gesture to the theatre’s role in constructing and circulating popularized images of the wealthy Anglo-Indian, few historians have made full use of the later theatrical archive, which calls into question the conventional assessment of the nabob as a strictly eighteenth-century figure. Some of the very plays cited in these studies render problematic such strict periodization. We need only consider the nineteenth-century afterlives of the eighteenthcentury plays that lie at the heart of the cultural histories provided by Philip Lawson, Jim Phillips, and Renu Juneja: The Nabob (1772), The Carnival of Venice (1781), The Mogul Tale (1784), and The East Indian (1799). These plays, written in the eighteenth century, retained their popularity well into the nineteenth, keeping conventional representations of the nabob culturally current. A playbill in the Templeman Library at the University of Kent at Canterbury reveals that Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Mogul Tale, which premiered at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1784, was revived in Lancashire in 1822.5 Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, which, despite its titular nod towards the Caribbean, portrays the returned colonial in a manner consistent with dramatic representations of the East Indian nabob, debuted in 1771 and enjoyed several nineteenth-century revivals (Detisch 1970: 292). Reginald Clarence’s “The Stage” Cyclopedia (1909) records performances of Cumberland’s play in London at Drury Lane in 1814 and the Lyceum in 1822.6 And if we believe The Dramatic and Musical Review, Cumberland’s comedy was very well received when it was revived in 1872, a full century after its original debut.7 Such nineteenth-century revivals of earlier plays call into question the theatrical nabob’s confinement to the eighteenth-century stage. A second, more powerful objection to the characterization of the nabob as an eighteenth-century phenomenon arises out of the Victorian theatrical archive, which includes at least a dozen plays in which a nabob, either real or imagined, forms the center of the action: John Poole’s A Nabob for an Hour (Covent Garden, 1832); Charles Dance’s The Bengal Tiger (Olympic,

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1837); R.B. Peake’s The Nabob’s Return (Olympic, 1840); Charles Selby’s My Sister from India (Strand, 1852); Twenty Minutes with a Tiger (1855)8; Henry Pettitt’s The Nabob’s Fortune (Theatre Royal [Plymouth], 1881); C. and F. Corder’s The Nabob’s Pickle (Aquarium, 1883); Edwin Keene’s A Saucy Nabob (Variety, 1886); Amy Steinberg’s My Uncle (Terry’s, 1889);9 Walter Rhoades’s The Nabob (St. George’s Hall, 1898); and In the Soup (Empire [Southampton], 1900). As this substantial collection of plays suggests, throughout the nineteenth century, the nabob continued to exert a powerful hold on the British imagination, coloring the public’s perception of the East and helping to construct a national British identity that both incorporated and opposed the nabob’s colonial connections. The theatrical record thus requires that we reconsider the full extent of the nabob’s iconic circulation, for the archive reveals that the availability of the nabob as a cultural icon extended more than two centuries. Indeed, Bridget Orr has traced the earliest dramatic appearances of East Indies merchants to the 1670s. Such characters, she argues, “carried the threat of degeneration or even a collapse into savagery to which all travelers away from the centers of civility were presumed prone” (2001: 214). Though not labeled “nabobs,” the term not being available in the seventeenth century, these East Indian merchants exhibit many of the characteristics common to the nabobs of the Victorian theatre and serve a similar function: In the comedy, the East Indies merchant is sometimes a benevolist whose Providential appearance resolves questions of identity and provides unforeseen reserves of cash but he can also embody the fracture of civil identity and deculturation attendant on lengthy exposure to exotic, non-western societies. Such figures not only are ludicrous but can appear threatening to the social and cultural relations of the metropolis, as the wealth they have acquired in their foreign adventures gives them the confidence to intervene in matters (like the drama) properly beyond their ken. (Orr 2001: 225) Orr’s analysis of seventeenth-century texts reveals the roots of the cultural concerns articulated through stage representations of the Anglo-Indian, concerns that found continued expression into the nineteenth century via the theatrical nabob. As Orr indicates here, within the dramatic imagination the figure of the East Indies merchant simultaneously promises the beneficial infusion of colonial wealth and threatens the unwanted introduction of cultural contaminants. His sudden appearance can be both comic and menacing. He intervenes, perhaps beneficially, in domestic affairs, yet his presence inspires domestic disruption. As we will see in the next section, nineteenth-century playwrights maintained many of these contradictory characteristics of the theatrical nabob as they inherited them from their eighteenth-century predecessors, mobilizing this familiar figure ever more

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frequently to articulate social anxieties, on the one hand, and to reinforce bourgeois norms on the other.10 To fully assess the representational dynamics and ideological resonance of the nineteenth-century theatrical nabob, we must extend the analytical field to include the figure’s pre-Victorian prototypes. Thus the current discussion begins with Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (Haymarket, 1772),11 which is more serious in tone than its Victorian progeny yet shares with those later plays an interest in exhibiting the excesses of the nabob’s character even as the drama works to reconnect this colonial rebel with traditional English domesticity. This socially integrative project mimics what Ann Laura Stoler has identified as the real impulse of the Victorian “civilizing mission”: the disciplining of “recalcitrant and ambiguous participants in imperial culture at home and abroad” (2000: 95). Figures like the nabob—culturally hybridized though not racially Othered—demonstrated the tenuousness of British (bourgeois) cultural hegemony. Seduced by the sensual pleasures of the imperial periphery, the Orientalized Anglo-Indian demonstrated the acute vulnerabilities of the cultural identifications that defined the nation and held it together. Drawing on the work of Linda Colley, Kathleen Wilson has argued that imperialism challenged popular assumptions about Britain’s internal cultural homogeneity: But if the discourses of nationality sought to construct homogeneities within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, they also sought to identify and assert difference, and those differences, however artificial and tenuous, not only distinguished the nation from other nations, but also divided the citizens within its own boundaries. Empire confounded and completed this project in interesting and complex ways. (2000: 174) The nabob’s culturally hybridized body called into question the reliability of those commonly recognized differences that distinguished metropole from colony and defi ned the boundaries both of the nation and of the empire. In transgressing those boundaries, the nabob illuminated what Stoler has termed the nation’s “interior frontier”: The concept of an interior frontier is compelling precisely because of its contradictory connotations. As Etienne Balibar has noted, a frontier locates a site both of enclosure and contact and of observed passage and exchange. When coupled with the word interior, frontier carries the sense of internal distinctions within a territory (or empire); at the level of the individual, frontier marks the moral predicates by which a subject retains his or her national identity despite location outside the national frontier and despite location within the nation-state. (1997: 199) As both insider and outsider, the nabob was uniquely positioned to serve in the discovery and reaffi rmation of the nation and of the national

110 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter character.12 The stage nabob, in other words, helped the theatre to trace the very contours of Englishness that he threatened to transgress. If, as Antoinette Burton has argued, colonialism offered opportunities for Britons of all classes to conceive of themselves as belonging to a single national culture, the nabob—that internal Other who must be ejected from the community—simultaneously supported and challenged the nationalist construction project (Burton 2000: 138). This cultural reconstruction project is at the heart of theatrical nabobery, where it is apparent from the earliest of the nabob plays. Susan Lamb observes that in The Nabob, Foote “destabilizes conceptions of an orderly division between imperial metropolis, colonizer, and colonized. They are not geographically, culturally, and socially separable, nor do they function in discrete hierarchical subordination” (1996: 250). Although Lamb goes on to argue that a radical realignment of colonial anxieties rendered this ideological message culturally irrelevant by the 1830s, the favorable and sustained reception of other nabob-themed plays suggests that questions of national identity and the cultural tensions surrounding empire— what Lamb describes as “the mutable and contingent nature of national identity or of the deleterious impact on British identity of tourism and imperial expansion”—retained some degree of currency well into the Victorian period (1996: 261). Foote’s nabob, Sir Matthew Mite, has returned to England, “preceded by all the pomp of Asia . . . profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces,” and has turned his attentions to the daughter of Sir John Oldham (Foote 1772: 7). With a callousness natural to one who “owes his rise to the ruin of thousands,” Mite has vowed to take advantage of Oldham’s strained fi nances to gain for himself “a large territorial acquisition in England” by turning Oldham out of his own home and marrying his eldest daughter (1772: 10–11). Mite later confesses that he seeks a wife not out of passion but out of a sense of necessity, as a piece of furniture to complete his home (1772: 32). He also promises to send Oldham’s daughters to India to fi nd husbands and to secure work for Oldham’s sons in the East India Company’s shipping concerns (1772: 11). The personal confl ict between Mite and Oldham has much larger political implications, as Susan Lamb explains: Though most of Foote’s plays demonstrate a passing concern with the impact on national integrity of foreign influence, many of them engage the issue directly by exhibiting tourists, expatriates, or colonizers as central characters. The issues which these plays address make them part of the massive and particularly earnest cultural and political restructuring of Wales, England, and Scotland into a national community following the Jacobite uprising of 1745. The process of defi ning national identity and what is alien to it is a complicated, not entirely logical, and potentially explosive process. (1996: 246)

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The Nabob clearly falls into this category of plays strongly invested in the construction of the nation. At the center of the drama is a cultural clash, the nature of which is embedded within the two men’s names. Multiply suggestive, “Mite” carries the dual, and contradictory, connotation of strength and smallness. Mite’s very name intriguingly incorporates competing attitudes towards the figure of the nabob, as one who is powerful but also degenerative. Aurally, “mite” is readily confused with “might,” inverse concepts of proportion and power homophonically united in a name that simultaneously announces and undermines the character’s grandiose sense of self-importance. Etymologically, the word’s connotations of something small derive from its entomological denotation of a minute spider-like creature. In the world of fi nance, a “mite” is a trifling sum of money; in the world of insects, it is a parasitic arachnid, a creature that embodies popular associations of the nabob with extortion, corruption, and consumption. The name “Oldham,” in contrast, somewhat obscurely suggests a more traditional and settled source of English wealth. Thus, the new colonial man and his money are being pitted against older social and economic traditions (Lamb 1996: 249–51). Mite, whom most members of the audience would have recognized as a version of Robert Clive, represents the social cost of Britain’s involvement in empire, as Lawrence James explains: There was little in The Nabob which would have shocked audiences. During 1772 and the first half of 1773, Parliamentary investigations were uncovering the methods by which the nabobs had made their fortunes. The country heard details of chicanery, double-dealing, and extortion, which gave an added edge to blue-blooded jealousy. These revelations contributed to a widespread apprehension that a novel and unwholesome source of political power was on the rampage. (1997: 47) Foote’s play capitalized on contemporary concerns. Mite’s scandalous sexual schemes are more than distasteful, for unproductive eroticism, as Ann Laura Stoler points out, is fundamentally unpatriotic (2000: 111).13 Moreover, his brash and acquisitive manner symbolically enacts the displacement of Britain’s old aristocracy by a new breed of wealthy colonials who return to England in search of more raw materials to feed the engines of empire.14 Indeed, what is at stake in Foote’s play is nothing less than the future of England. While Mite laments the ingratitude “of this country to those who have given it dominion and wealth,” Oldham’s brother claims that Mite’s “riches (which perhaps are only too ideal) by introducing a general spirit of dissipation, have extinguished labour and industry, the slow, but sure source of national wealth” (Foote 1772: 55). What Mite sees as ingratitude Oldham and his family see as resistance to a new colonial order, a society in which honor and wealth are the products not of industry but of opportunism. In the closing speech, Thomas Oldham points to the play’s moral: “however praiseworthy the spirit of adventure may be,

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whoever keeps his post, and does his duty at home, will be found to render his country best service at last” (Foote 1772: 59). In rejecting Mite’s money and his proposed marital alliance, the Oldhams have dismissed the promises of imperial wealth and reaffi rmed their commitment to their country (Chatten 1980: 102–05). Though he is neither punished nor reformed at the close of the play, Mite is expelled from the Oldham home, a conclusion that departs from the dominant plot trajectory shared by Victorian plays featuring returned Anglo-Indians (Chatten 1980: 109, 136; Lamb 1996: 251). In these later plays, the reinscription of the nabob into the romance plot is an essential element in the taming of the titular “tigers” or nabobs.15 The Victorian theatre pursued this goal in fulfillment of its community-forming function, as identified by theatre historian Michael Hays, in his discussion of Charles Reade’s drama of Australian transportation and colonial fi nancial opportunity, It Is Never Too Late to Mend: [Reade’s play] participates in a socio-political reinscription that was also being advanced at the time in a number of other fields of cultural production: the fabulation of a new set of social modes of the “nation” and its inhabitants; a new image of social integration, control, and stability . . . a social recodification that made possible psychological and anthropological representations of the individual and the nation that were crucial to the development of the culture of high imperialism and to the description (and concomitant marginalization) of colonial peoples outside the national “center.” (1995: 72) The Victorian theatre, in other words, helped to consolidate British national identity in part by defining the characteristics of Self and Other that established the distinctions between Britain and its colonies. But as we have seen, the figure of the nabob was conspicuously resistant to this division, being both British and Other and living a colonially inflected lifestyle within the imperial center. We might think of nabobs as the “internal enemies” that Ann Laura Stoler argues are targeted by the “regulatory mechanisms” of imperial governments (2000: 88). This emblem of colonialism’s culturally contaminating influences was one of the problematic social types that posed serious challenges to popular presumptions of European cultural homogeneity: If the legitimation of European privilege and profit rested on a social taxonomy that equated Europeanness and bourgeois civilities, were those legally classified Europeans who fell short of these economic and cultural standards to be pulled back into these communities or banished from them? (Stoler 2000: 94) As one such anomalous figure, the nabob was an important target for the theatre’s social integration project, as defined by historian Kathleen Wilson:

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Theatres brought together a more volatile cross-section of the public but were nonetheless stridently defi ned as bulwarks of the national character and fomenters of those manly, civilized, and patriotic manners necessary to English success abroad and stability at home. Indeed, in both rationale and performance, theatre frequently drew upon and exaggerated the masculinist cultural identities circulating elsewhere in the public sphere in a self-conscious effort to socialize audiences into the mores of gender and national differentiation. (2000: 164) For Foote, the best way of dealing with the troublesome nabob was to purge him from English society, to reject outright his money and his record of service to the empire. Victorian playwrights found outright expulsion of the nabob unsatisfactory and instead promoted the social reintegration of these aberrant colonial types. Although Foote’s play established many of the stage nabob’s defining characteristics, its absolute ejection of colonial corruption from polite society contrasts with nineteenth-century plays’ more socially integrative “taming” of the nabob. This phrase, borrowed from the subtitle of the 1855 comedy, Twenty Minutes with a Tiger; or, Taming a Tiger (Drury Lane), best captures the disciplinary dynamic at the center of the nabob plays. For taming was an important part of the theatre’s disciplining of rogue social types resistant to the more rigid communal identities the theatre and related institutions of cultural production insisted upon. What is being performed in The Nabob is the struggle between western bourgeois values and despotic eastern practices. Mite’s assault on the Oldham family symbolically reenacts the cultural and economic pressures exerted upon Britain’s domestic center from its own imperial periphery. In exhibiting and then expelling Mite, the play reasserts the primacy of home and the homogeneity of nation in maintaining the community’s cultural integrity, a struggle that would continue over the course of the nineteenth century.

6

“The Yellow Beams of His Oriental Countenance” The Nabob as Racial and Cultural Hybrid [F]ive-and-twenty seasons spent Where man is either brown or yellow, Have to our friend’s complexion lent A warmth emphatically mellow. —Punch, “A Modern Nabob” (1906)

As we saw in the example of Sir Matthew Mite, the nabob represented a social threat that registered in a number of different areas, ranging from the sexual to the racial to the economic. Having traced in the preceding chapter the nabob’s eighteenth-century historical and cultural development, we can now more closely examine these different facets of the nabob’s destructive energies and investigate the ways in which the Victorian theatre worked not only to contain those energies but to direct them in more socially productive ways. In Chapter 7, I will differentiate between the nabob and other figures of colonial return, showing that the East Indian nabob’s wealth elicited a very different theatrical response from that of the Australian gold miners, whose providential prosperity was not considered morally tainted and was more readily aligned with Britain’s bourgeois domestic ideal. But before turning to that comparative character analysis, I want fi rst—in this chapter—to examine the primary obstacle to the (re)incorporation of the nabob into British society: the racial and cultural hybridization of the Anglo-Indian. Indeed, the term “Anglo-Indian” is itself revelatory of the cultural blending that accompanied British rule in India (Procida 2002: 56–80; Baucom 1999: 75–100). But while the term denoted the heterogeneic animus of colonial authority, the cultural hybridity that it suggests is what made the nabob such a threat to British bourgeois society and so resistant to incorporation therein. Returning for a moment to Foote’s play, discussed in the preceding chapter, we can see the critical associations between hybridity and theatrical nabobery. In The Nabob, the economic and the domestic are linked through Sir Matthew Mite’s acquisitive sexuality. Blending commercial and sexual desires, he uses his ill-got Indian wealth to purchase, with the help of his “banker for beauty” Madam Match’em, the sexual favors of fi nancially distressed women. In addition to using his wealth to purchase

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his own personal pleasure, Mite lays out a plan to engage in sexual commerce on a more public scale by establishing a seraglio in London. Built on an Indian model, his proposed seraglio will employ “three blacks from Bengal, who have been properly prepared” to manage this sort of enterprise (Foote 1772: 33). While the commercialization of sexuality is troubling enough by itself, the real cause for alarm, from the standpoint of the play, is the importation of those three unarticulated Bengalis, who raise the spectre of racial miscegenation. Indeed, as Susan Lamb has argued, Mite’s sexual appetites are further proof of how completely the Indian environment has altered him: Sir Matthew complains that his “complexion has been tinged by the East”—a physical change mirroring the deeper changes which make him entertain such ideas as founding in London that un-British institution, a seraglio. A fundamental transformation has been effected in Mite by his residence in the colonies. (1996: 250) Mite, as we have seen, has been adversely affected by his prolonged exposure to the colonial environment, becoming alienated from, and thus a danger to, England’s bourgeois society. Lamb points out that “he is no longer even categorizable in English . . . [being] known by an Indian word, ‘nabob.’ . . . He has lost his essential British nature without gaining a complete one in exchange, and is therefore identifiable as neither British nor Indian.” He is, in short, a monster, a hybrid being (1996: 249, 252). Mite’s hybridity is not racial miscegenation but a deeply resonant cultural alterity. By the mid-nineteenth century, popular perception held that the splendors of the East and the potential for personal gain would induce most civil servants to engage in opportunistic and base behavior (Druce 1997: 188–9). These widespread assumptions about the transformative effects of intercourse with the East were embodied in the figure of the theatrical nabob. In highlighting Victorian concerns about racial degeneration and hybridity, the nabob vividly demonstrated the inaccuracy of the rhetoric of British cultural and racial purity. Popular representations depict the nabob as an Englishman who either had “gone native,” a disturbing reminder of the seductiveness of Oriental culture, or had become a new sort of hybrid being, an Anglo-Indian, which possibility again underscored the fragility of British cultural integrity (Suleri 1992: 26–30). Hybridity has long played a key role in discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. The result of the mixing of two distinct species, whether animal or vegetable, the hybrid, in its infertility, further highlights the differences that produced it even as it presents the possibility of the erasure of these differences through incorporation and assimilation. Working from the hybridity theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha, Robert Young (1995) offers an intriguing characterization of Britain’s confl icted racial and cultural identity, arguing that the term “Great Britain” arose out of a

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desire to create a national totality out of deeply embedded difference and localized dissent. Like Young, Julian Wolfreys has noted the uncertainties and paradoxes embedded deep within the seemingly unproblematic and self-evident national designations “English” and “British.” Wolfreys contends that British national identity, particularly in the nineteenth century, was neither unified nor absolute but was, instead, problematic, uncertain, and riven with contradiction and paradox. Wolfreys fi nds evidence for this instability in the fiction and poetry of the period where, he claims, Victorian writers endlessly meditated on the problems of Englishness: If the imperial and colonial agendas are concerned with making other territories and other peoples English, then accompanying this is the fear that Englishness might be spread a little too thinly, its essence diluted, corrupted, lost, through being repeatedly employed as the narcotic by which foreigners lose their own identities. (1994: 31) Imperialism is thus simultaneously an expression of the nation’s strength of character and the eroding force that most threatens it (Suleri 1992: 2–32). The nabob serves as a perfect figuration of this confl ict, for he is, at one time, colonization’s agent and product. Charged with the restructuring of the imperial periphery according to the British model, he is himself reconfigured through his prolonged exposure to the cultural and climatic peculiarities of the East. The nabob is such a pervasive and important figure in Victorian theatre because he represents both imperial progress and degradation. In taming the nabob and redirecting his destabilizing energies in more culturally constructive directions, the theatre brought the empire into the service of the nation and bolstered Britishness in the process. Although it ultimately demonstrates the potential for the domestic integration of the nabob’s alterity, Charles Dance’s play The Bengal Tiger (Olympic, 1837) grapples with the tensions simultaneously embedded within and threatening to collapse British culture.1 In the play’s fi rst scene, Edward and Charlotte, nephew and niece to Sir Paul Pagoda, the tiger of the title, discuss the behavior of their uncle, newly arrived from India: EDWARD. These East Indians talk about our turning night into day, and then do worse themselves by turning day into night. CHARLOTTE. It’s twelve o’clock, isn’t it? EDWARD. It’s almost one—and I suppose it will be, as usual, about two before we have the honour of basking in the yellow beams of his oriental countenance. (Dance 1837: 3) In his relationship to time and his physical appearance, Sir Paul Pagoda is a typical East Indian nabob. His biological clock remains in synch with the temporal standard of the East Indies, resisting any adjustment to local London time, a temporal displacement that keeps Pagoda isolated from social

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interactions. Biological abnormality extends even to Pagoda’s skin color, which his nephew Edward describes as “yellow” and decidedly “oriental.” On stage, the nabob’s characteristic skin coloration is reinforced by his costume, with its eastern style and yellow hues: “Flowered cotton trousers, light double-breasted waistcoat with gold flowers, Indian flowered morning-gown lined with yellow, slippers, white long-hair wig” (Dance 1837). This characterization of the nabob as out of synch with British time and temper is typical, as Punch’s 1906 poetic proclamation of the “Modern Nabob” indicates: His taste in raiment quite suggests The sojourner in regions torrid; And in the pattern of his vests He shows a leaning tow’rds the florid. ................................. He sleeps nine solid hours at night Untroubled by digestive worries, And still retains his appetite For chutney and the hottest curries. (Punch 25 July 1906: 55)

The affi nities between Punch’s description of the nabob and Dance’s presentation of Sir Paul Pagoda are readily apparent: the temporal displacement, the preference for Indian costume and cuisine, and the pervasive yellow hue all attest to the hybridizing effects of the Anglo-Indian encounter. Positioned at the turn of the century, Punch’s poetic gesture further testifies to the continued legibility and cultural currency of the nabob more than a century after the figure supposedly retired from public discourse.2 We will return to the issues of time and temper in the next paragraph. For the moment, let us consider how the color of his skin rather than the cut of his clothes announces the extent of the nabob’s Orientalization. Pagoda’s altered coloration recalls Sir Matthew Mite’s objection to his florist’s delivery of yellow flowers: “Damn their smell! It is their colour I talk of. You know my complexion has been tinged by the East, and you bring me here a blaze of yellow, that gives me the jaundice” (Foote 1772: 27). These consistent references to the yellowing of the nabob’s skin highlight the physical vulnerabilities of European bodies too-long exposed to tropical environments; the East inscribes itself physically on the nabob’s body, marking him as an outsider among his own people (Sen 2002: 126). Though the script never specifies that her complexion is yellow in tone, the female nabob in Charles Selby’s play, My Sister from India (discussed at greater length below), echoes this popular presumption of climatic influence on the body: “thirty years’ campaigning in India plays the very deuce with one’s figure and complexion” (Selby 1852: 6). While skin color seems a readily legible sign of alterity, yellowed skin suggesting racial mixing and sexual hybridization, the issue of time seems

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a more unusual indicator of difference. How does hybridity, both cultural and biological, register in the temporal dissonance that distinguishes the nabob from his metropolitan kin? Visiting the observatory at Greenwich, Robert Young encounters the brass strip set into the pavement to denote the Prime Meridian, noting how this arbitrarily chosen line inscribes a temporal division within Britain’s imperial identity: Paradoxically, for Greenwich to be the centre of the world in time it must be inscribed with the alterity of place. Stand to the left-hand side of the brass strip and you are in the Western hemisphere. But move a yard to your right, and you enter the East: whoever you are, you have been translated from a European into an Oriental. Put one foot back to the left of the brass strip and you become undecidably mixed with otherness: an Occidental and an Oriental at once. (1995: 1) For Young, the Meridian is a prime illustration of what he terms the “rivenness within English culture itself, the selection of Greenwich as the base point for the measurement of time confi rming difference as deeply embedded within western notions of sameness” (1995: 2). Universal standardized time, geographically inscribed across the heart of England, places England, both temporally and spatially, at the center of the world. Though this is, without doubt, a position of power, it is also, inherently, a place of perpetual uncertainty, for England itself marks the border between East and West. The result is a British national identity that is constantly negotiating the tensions that both defi ne and destabilize it (R. Young 1995: 29–54; Robbins 1988: 1–11; Wilson 2003: 4–5, 14). In this context, Sir Paul Pagoda’s sleep schedule, his importation of East Indian time into the imperial metropole, itself the world’s geographic and temporal center, reminds the audience of the division at the heart of Britishness. But instead of confi rming Britain’s capacity for integrating difference into a stable national identity, Pagoda’s temporal alterity causes domestic distress. The nabob, in this way, represents the cultural and racial heterogeneity that threatens to undermine the very national identity that it creates. Sir Paul Pagoda, yellow in hue and asleep in the daytime, thus simultaneously represents a culturally integrative Britishness and its disintegrative antithesis (Dance 1837: 3). The contradictions inherent in Britishness itself are reflected in Pagoda’s problematic position within Edward’s household. To the extent that Great Britain is a composite political identity, Pagoda’s marks of cultural and biological difference represent an assimilable Otherness. But Pagoda’s unmistakably disruptive presence in Edward Henderson’s English home also, paradoxically, reveals the precariousness of a composite nationalism, as eastern influences threaten western domestic stability. The humor and dramatic tension in the play arise from Pagoda’s simultaneous draining of the family fi nances and disruption of their routine:

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SIR PAUL. I don’t like breakfasting in my own room any more, and don’t want you to alter your customs on my account, but can’t you breakfast at this time of day [2:00 pm], instead of getting up in the middle of the night to do it? (Dance 1837: 6) To save her brother from the inconvenience of breakfasting in the middle of the afternoon, Charlotte agrees to alter her own schedule so that she can attend her uncle at the breakfast table. But she begs Pagoda to excuse Edward on the grounds that his business duties require him to be in London well before noon. This compromise, however, is not enough to satisfy the nabob’s peculiar needs: SIR PAUL. I wish it would keep him there later. I detest dining before eight o’clock. EDWARD. Eight o’clock shall be the dinner-hour in future, sir. SIR PAUL. Don’t let me be the cause of any inconvenience. . . . EDWARD. Is there any other change I can make for you, sir? SIR PAUL. Do you say that on purpose to vex me? Didn’t I expressly tell you that I want no change made for me? I tell you what, though— you may as well buy a billiard-table; for I must candidly confess, that a house without a billiard-table is, to me, an abomination. EDWARD. I haven’t a room large enough to put it in, sir. SIR PAUL. Then build one, my friend—build one—build one; but don’t put yourself out of your way for me. (Dance 1837: 6) Despite his protestations, Pagoda clearly expects his nephew’s acquiescence to these increasingly oppressive demands, and hospitality requires Edward to accommodate his guest’s requirements, though it means rescheduling his day and reconfiguring his house.3 Domestic tranquility is undermined from within, as British standards of etiquette facilitate the incorporation of alien elements that will, ultimately, reshape the British home according to an Anglo-Indian pattern. Through comic dialogue and characterization, The Bengal Tiger quite cleverly sounds a serious social alarm, warning that cultural integration, the very force that defines an inclusive and expansive notion of Britishness, being both its form and function, carries with it the seeds of its own destruction.

IMPERIAL INVASION, DOMESTIC DISRUPTION I: ANIMAL IMPORTS If the theatrical nabob represents the cultural tensions of empire and nation, then the domestic sphere is both the victim of the nabob’s disruptiveness and the dramas’ ultimate victor, for in the nabob plays, it is the home, the Englishman’s paradigmatic refuge, that serves as the contested site of

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contact between East and West. This critical placement of the domestic at the imperial frontier is in keeping with Sudipta Sen’s contention that middle-class values and the traditions of the English domestic economy were popularly perceived to be both the victims of and the antidotes for the excesses and depravities of the nation’s Indian empire (2002: 128–33). In The Bengal Tiger, as we have seen, the nabob invades the Henderson home and makes increasingly burdensome demands on his host. Financially ruined and socially outcast, Edward fi nds his tranquil domestic retreat rendered oppressive by the presence of his insufferable Anglo-Indian uncle. Because he is unable to settle a fortune on his sister, Edward has forbidden her marriage to Arthur Onslow, and his personal pride further prevents him from asking his rich uncle, Sir Paul Pagoda, for fi nancial assistance. Indeed, Edward has chosen not to tell Pagoda anything at all about his fi nancial difficulties and has no expectations of receiving part of his uncle’s fortune (Dance 1837: 3–5). But while Edward tries to quietly endure his uncle’s presence, he does voice to his sister the difficulties of his situation: EDWARD. It is indeed enough that I should have lost so much money by the failure of that confounded speculation—that I should be trembling on the brink of bankruptcy—and that I should be ashamed to go into the city to face my creditors—without having my hours of restlessness and vexation at home made ten times worse by the presence of an old infernal Bengal tiger. . . . [I]n my present circumstances, when I scarcely know where to look for the next five-pound note I may want, it is rather trying to have a relation who is rolling in wealth, come from the East Indies, and place himself and all of his followers at free quarters in my house. (Dance 1837: 3) “Rolling in wealth,” Edward’s uncle—the nabob—contributes nothing to the maintenance of the domestic establishment and, indeed, makes things worse by introducing additional fi nancial burdens on an already overextended household economy. While the nabob’s hybrid nature might incur inconvenience—requiring adjustments to the breakfast schedule, for example—the more serious threat comes from his attendants, as Edward’s servant explains: EDWARD. My uncle? I desire, sir, you will speak with respect— DAVID. (Interrupting.) I speak with respect to his followers. He’s bad enough with his lobster curries and chicken pilaus—eating you out of house and home, when you can’t afford it. EDWARD. I don’t want you to come here to tell me what I can afford. DAVID. Of course not, sir. I’m come to tell you what you can’t afford—(on his fingers.) Here’s your uncle is one—his two Blackies

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are three—(and thay eat rice enough in a day to serve a moderatesized man like me for a week)—then there’s the gentleman in the stable, with the striped waistcoat. EDWARD. What gentleman with the striped waistcoat? DAVID. Your uncle’s tiger. (Dance 1837: 5) In this exchange with his employer, David cleverly connects the exotic, the excessive, and the economic in a wry reminder of the nabob’s general association with overabundance and consumption. The connection is reaffi rmed in a later dialogue, in which we learn that in addition to the tiger and two Indian servants, Edward’s uncle has also brought with him to England a pair of boa constrictors, which have demanding dietary requirements of their own: CHARLOTTE. Now get them something to eat, David, and don’t worry my brother any more about them. DAVID. I wouldn’t worry him for the world, Miss Charlotte. I only just want to tell him, that if these beasts are to remain here, he’ll soon be in jail. Why, they won’t eat anything but rabbits and fowls (holding out bill); just look at this poulterer’s bill, Master Edward. I think, for a snake, it’s a rattler. (Dance 1837: 5) Pagoda’s eastern companions, whether animal or human, are noted not only for their exoticness but more particularly for their ravenous appetites; it’s not what they are but what they eat that causes such concern. More than mere stage properties, the theatrical nabob’s animal and human companions represent an assault on the domestic economy, an assault which symbolically refigures the tensions of empire. Kurt Koenigsberger argues that the animals displayed in public menageries were “conspicuous signs of an imported or expropriated pomp, luxury, and excess,” their exhibition throwing into sharp relief the “English character” and the inherent meaning of Englishness (2007: 36, 42). This assessment of the animals’ symbolic function explains their availability to represent those characteristics they shared with the nabob. We are reminded here of the historical nabobs’ association with mercenary mercantilism, for the Anglo-Indian household was characterized by extravagance, servants, and luxury goods forming a core element in the colonial’s self-fashioning, an immersion in eastern excess generally considered degenerative by metropolitan observers (Sen 2002: 119–33). Indeed, as Sara Suleri points out, most of the charges against Warren Hastings reflected a deep desire to assert control over “the extremity of colonial excessiveness” (1992: 65). Like Sir Paul Pagoda, Mr. Chili Chutnee, the Anglo-Indian of R. B. Peake’s The Nabob’s Return (Olympic, 1840), imports beastly East Indian dangers into the British domestic sphere:4

122 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter MISS CLUTTERBUCK. So at last you made up your mind to quit India? CHILI. Yes, I left the country for two reasons, one was that I had made my fortune, and could not get any more out of it. . . . [A]nd the other reason was my hatred of cruelty . . . have you a live rabbit in the house? DAWDLE. Some beauties, lop-eared, Miss Clutterbuck’s favorites. CHILI. Yes, I repeat it was detestation of cruelty—give my boa constrictor a live rabbit. (Peake 1840: 584–5) Much is communicated through this bizarre (and rhetorically inelegant) exchange, in which Chili Chutnee disavows the cruelty he witnessed, and perhaps himself performed, while in India only to order Dawdle, his hosts’ servant, to feed Miss Clutterbuck’s beloved pet to his snake. His lack of empathy, revealed through his casual disregard for the physical suffering of the rabbit and the emotional distress Miss Clutterbuck will experience when she learns that her cherished pets have been consumed, belies his stated opposition to cruelty. Just as Chutnee has—in making his fortune— exhausted the wealth of India, so too will his Indian serpent squeeze the life out of Miss Clutterbuck’s English rabbits. By the end of the play, this snake will escape its box and swallow Miss Clutterbuck’s cat before it can be safely confi ned again (Peake 1840: 618), a dramatic reminder of the impossibility of containing or controlling the consumptive energies of empire (Koenigsberger 2007: 35). The boa constrictors in The Nabob’s Return and The Bengal Tiger are not simply comic devices or colorful character accoutrements. Even as they testify to the nabob’s exotic origins, the snakes vividly represent—indeed, embody—the nabob’s cruel nature, aggressive appetites, and dangerous presence within the English home. These ravenous beasts place a fi nancial burden on the nabob’s English hosts, who pay for the upkeep of these exotics even though they lack the resources of the nabob’s vast East Indian fortune. Empire is thus portrayed as a parasite on the domestic economy, a commentary underscored by the ubiquitous confusion of the snake for a luxury item, as in this moment in The Bengal Tiger: DAVID. There was a large chest in the stable, and so I inquired what was in it; and they told me two beautiful boas. Come, thinks I to myself, the old gentleman has brought Miss Charlotte a present after all. With that I lifted up the lid, and what should I see, but two nasty great long snakes, that looked as if they’d had their skins made at a patent oil-cloth manufactory. (Dance 1837: 5) Boa constrictors, concealed in boxes whose labels falsely advertise their exotic contents, continually surprise the unwary investigator in these plays. This surprise is caused by a homonymous error that itself points to a more

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serious substitution: that of a dangerous animal for an item of fashion. In other words, the luxury imports that one expects—even desires—from India have been replaced by agents of danger, indeed of death. To achieve the full comedic effect of this surprise discovery requires the audience’s ready recognition of the multiple meanings of the word: because we know that “boa” can mean either an animal or an article of clothing, we anticipate the substitution of the former for the latter. More than a simple comedic convention, the substitution of one sort of boa for another exploits a linguistic slippage that connects and even confuses objects of desire and of danger, associating the Indian adornment of the English body with the body’s destruction. Verbally and physically, then, “boa” implicates imperial trade networks in the destruction of the English domestic economy and social body. In The Bengal Tiger, this indictment of the domestic cost of imperial trade is reinforced by the design of the set, which includes a “large window down to floor in centre, looking across the Thames” (Dance 1837: 3).5 Britain’s imperial highway, the river, is thus at the play’s scenic center, a visual reminder of the metropole’s reliance on the movement of goods and people. Although the river carries the wealth of India into Britain, it also carries Pagoda, his native servants, and his ravenous exotic pets. The play thus mobilizes the nabob as a way of alerting the audience to the latent price of Britain’s imperial investments, a message not lost on the middle-class merchants and shopkeepers who formed the core audience demographic of the Olympic Theatre (for which The Bengal Tiger and The Nabob’s Return were initially written) and who might be expected to identify with the nabob’s besieged middle-class English family. The boa constrictors and tigers of The Bengal Tiger and The Nabob’s Return are not the only dangerous beasts to occasion concern on stage. Another diverse zoological collection is maintained by the (recently deceased) nabob of Henry Pettitt’s The Nabob’s Fortune (Theatre Royal [Plymouth], 1881), who “had a torpid serpent in the bedroom, a menagerie in the drawing room, and a wild monkey who broke every ornament in the house” (Pettitt 1881: 12). Most early nineteenth-century theatrical nabobs are accompanied by exotic animals, a convention we can trace to Richard Cumberland’s eighteenth-century play, The West Indian. Originally produced in 1771, The West Indian predates Foote’s The Nabob by one year, strongly suggesting that Foote’s play was a response to Cumberland’s portrayal of the domestically disruptive colonial (S. Williams 1920; Yearling 1978). Although Cumberland’s play revolves around the return of the son of a West Indian merchant, the play’s depiction of Belcour, the West Indian in question, is consistent with other plays’ representations of East Indian nabobs (Detisch 1970; Sen 2002: 124). Revived at least twice in the early nineteenth century, Cumberland’s eighteenth-century stage Creole is thus a potential progenitor of the Victorian stage nabob.6 This theatrical family tree helps to explain how the nineteenth-century theatrical nabob

124 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter acquired his characteristic animal companions. Those boa constrictors and tigers that not only accompany but in some ways defi ne the Victorian nabob evolved out of The West Indian’s menagerie: “two green monkeys, a pair of grey parots [sic], a Jamaican sow and pigs, and a mangrove dog” (Cumberland 1771: 194). The nabob’s ownership of exotic animals signals his colonial connections and extreme wealth, as well as serving as both cause and symbol of the domestic disruptions occasioned by the nabob’s presence in metropolitan domestic spaces. In order to understand the pointed political subtext underlying the nabobs’ particular selections of foreign fauna, we must consider more broadly the cultural significance of animal ownership and exhibition. Private menageries and more public displays of exotic animals, as Harriet Ritvo tells us, symbolized and celebrated Britain’s imperial enterprise. As early as the late seventeenth century, “citizens who wished to admire symbols of triumphant individual enterprise as well as those of national prestige could visit the numerous exotic animal displays that mirrored the spread of British commercial influence throughout the globe” (Ritvo 1987: 206). Caged animals represented conquest and acquisition, on either a personal or a national level. Displays of captive exotic animals functioned as important sites at which the motifs of imperial expansion, economic domination, and class difference converged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Ritvo 1987: 209). The theatrical nabob imported into England foreign species that represented the returned colonial’s distinctive behaviors and the threats he posed to bourgeois society. Even the West Indian’s pig, perhaps the most domesticated of the animals included in these plays, carried popular associations with cannibalism, gluttony, and filth. The boa constrictors, which appear in three plays, indicate deception (they are invariably mistaken for fashion accessories) and the strangling effects of imperial activity both within the colonies and at home, symbolically suggesting that the nabob’s insatiable pursuit of wealth has not only squeezed the colonies dry but has also established a stranglehold on the domestic economy (Lawson and Phillips 1984; Juneja 1992: 191; Chatten 1980: 104–5). Monkeys conjure images of racial degeneration, thus linking the nabob with fears of miscegenation and social degradation (Stoler 1997; Juneja 1992: 188–9). Together, these animal imports embody the worst aspects of imperialism, symbolizing not just what is objectionable in the nabob’s colonial activities or social behavior, but quietly and unmistakably pointing to the threat those activities posed to England itself, the animals imported by these nabobs being without exception menacing, unpredictable, and violent. In The Nabob’s Fortune, for example, the monkey is cited as having attacked, with a large stone, the gardener whose bald head he had mistaken for a coconut (Pettitt 1881: 12). The West Indian’s monkey, “who broke every ornament in the house,” clearly represents a colonial attack on English property (Cumberland 1771). The nabob’s classic associations with excess, physicality, and

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immersion in the exotic are visually carried by these ravenous and destructive beasts, through which the drama exposes colonialism’s campaign of rapacious economic exploitation, both at home and abroad.

IMPERIAL INVASION, DOMESTIC DISRUPTION II: HUMAN COMPANIONS Theatrical interest in exhibiting the destructive potential of immersion in empire-building found new visual iconography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Refiguring the threat of the exotic import, dramatists of the later nineteenth century largely turned their attention away from the snakes and tigers that represented the early theatrical nabob’s ravenous appetites and dangerous, unpredictable energies, invoking instead a host of Indian servants that pointed more directly to the pampered decadence of the Anglo-Indian lifestyle:7 From this chaos of profl igacy and corruption emerged, from time to time, that jaundiced purse-proud Nabob, who roused the indignation of our forefathers by his insolence, his ignorance of everything English, his effeminate habits, transplanted to a clime where men lead a manly life, his curries and spices, his fans and cushions, the crowd of shivering helpless dark-faced beings who hung about the corridors of the hotel in which he occupied the choicest suite of rooms. (Trevelyan 1864: 133) We can hear in this description many of the theatrical nabob’s typical associations—yellowed skin, insolent behavior, and material luxuries—as Trevelyan connects the charges of political corruption and greed that were the hallmark of the Hastings trial with the nabob’s physical appearance and social outsider status. Intriguingly, the nabob’s multifaceted alterity manifests itself in “the crowd of shivering helpless dark-faced beings” who vividly testify to the nabob’s physical alterity (their faces are dark and they shiver in the northern climate), to his material extravagance and general superabundance (they form a crowd that fi lls a luxurious and expensive suite of rooms), and to his importation of colonial materials into metropolitan spaces (he brings with him not only curries, spices, fans, and cushions but also, and most importantly, a crowd of Indians). The passage above considers not only the larger political objections to corrupt administrative practices in British India but also the more practical concerns about the effects of imperial contact on the English corporeal and social bodies. Moving from the abstract to the concrete, the passage concludes with the symbolically laden spectacle of the crowd of shivering servants. More than curries, fans, and jaundiced skin, it is these servants that represent the cultural anxieties inspired by and articulated through the nabob.

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Though Indian servants are associated with some of the earliest theatrical nabobs, being verbally referenced in both The Nabob (1772) and The Bengal Tiger (1837), it was not until the 1852 production of Charles Selby’s My Sister from India (Strand) that Indian servants appear on stage, replacing the tigers and snakes that had become the theatrical nabob’s familiar accessories. While such a substitution might at fi rst blush seem a violent and pointedly racist assault on the indigenous inhabitants of Britain’s Indian empire, such an easy denunciation obscures the larger cultural forces that prompted this striking alteration of representational strategies. Here it is the timing of this shift that interests me, for it happens at a critical historical moment: Selby’s play appeared on the heels of the Great Exhibition and reveals much about the focus of mid-century anxieties of empire.8 If the early Victorians worried about global trade networks and the circulation of consumer commodities (concerns effectively embodied by animal exotics), the late Victorians were obsessed with the movement of people across imperial and national boundaries (Arata 1996). This shift in social concern was effected in part by an event that brought together, in a most spectacular way, the commodities and people of empire—the Great Exhibition of 1851: When the Great Exhibition presented Eastern crafts and raw materials to the London public, London’s panorama halls and pleasure gardens responded with displays of actual Eastern people. . . . Entertainment venues ranging from the museum to the hippodrome announced the accessibility of the world’s products as well as its peoples. . . . London housed the world. Native peoples became the preferred fragments of the real as the proliferation of human displays made evident the expansiveness of Britain’s imperial and commercial domain. These humans were undeniably real, their behavior signaled more of their absent context than static objects ever could, and past sensual associations lingered in even the most serious of human displays. (Ziter 2003: 103) Although the Great Exhibition was designed to showcase manufactured goods and mechanical processes, the public imagination was captured by the parade of people streaming into London for the occasion. Spectators became spectacles, being better representatives of their respective lands and cultures than the material objects arrayed for that purpose (Burton 1998: 44–6). Crowds of foreign exhibition visitors confi rmed Britain’s global preeminence, certainly, but many contemporary observers worried that their great imperial metropolis might be overrun with foreigners (Ziter 2003: 104–6). Lurking behind the Exhibition’s promise of material abundance was the fear that Britain might drown in its own globalized excess. Within the theatrical archive we can see evidence of the struggle to differentiate between the Exhibition’s commodity and human spectacles. Such evidence is provided by a playbill from Punch’s Playhouse (also known as

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the Strand Theatre), dated 12 January 1852. The bill lists a full evening’s fare, including Charles Selby’s My Sister from India (discussed at length below) and Hale and Talfourd’s The Mandarin’s Daughter; or, the Willow Pattern Plate. As its subtitle announces, The Mandarin’s Daughter dramatizes the traditional story inscribed into the blue willow pattern that adorns the familiar dinnerware of the same name. The opening monologue, delivered by the Chinese magician Chim-Pan-See, explains the drama’s underlying didactic purpose:9 CHIM-PAN-SEE. So of course when I heard of your Great Exhibition, I was speedily found in a state of transition. On my dragon I came, but conceive my surprise! Round a public-house kitchen on casting my eyes, I perceived, upon table, stand, dresser, and shelf, In earthenware, china, stone-ware, and delf, Drawn longways and shortways, drawn outside and in, On plate, cup, and saucer, dish, basin, tureen, A picture, which is but a full illustration Of an old love story, well known in my nation. But still more my surprise, on expressing my pleasure At fi nding the English so ready to treasure The legends of China, to fi nd that unknown Was the story from which the picture had grown! . . . But still quite determined to enlighten the age, I looked, as we do at last, to the stage, And to-night all my powers of vivification I’ll employ on that plate. (Hale and Talfourd 1852: 4–5) This opening speech is worth noting as it connects the Exhibition’s commodity displays with the cultural traditions and human dramas invested within them. But though this human story is inscribed upon the surfaces of familiar, everyday objects, it would remain unheard were it not for the theatre, which assumes a didactic, exhibitionary function. It is also important to note that the willow pattern china is described as being everywhere in England, from kitchen to boudoir, and covering every conceivable surface. It is more than ubiquitous; it is invasive. This sense of Britain’s domestic spaces overwhelmed by foreign forces also motivates the dramatic action of its companion piece, My Sister from India, where it is the importation of foreign peoples, rather than foreign objects, that incites social anxiety.10 Behind this playbill’s description of an evening’s entertainment lurks the British public’s very complicated perception of the Great Exhibition, for along with the enthusiasm for the celebrated spectacle of commodities (The Willow Pattern Plate) came anxieties about the social costs attending Britain’s embrace of consumerism and cosmopolitanism (My Sister

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from India) (J. Auerbach 1999: 40–7; 128–58). These anxieties found dramatic expression in plays whose action centered around the exhibition’s foreign visitors and their London lodgings, all of which use the unique domestic arrangements of the lodging house to reveal, in a chiefly comic way, the social disruption caused by the Great Exhibition (Ziter 2003: 105–6).11 Perhaps the clearest example of this genre is William Brough’s Apartments, which opened, like the Exhibition itself, in May 1851. Apartments was staged at the Princess’s Theatre, which enjoyed the distinction of being the closest theatre to the Exhibition itself. Given that the Princess’s management worked to make their house a tourist attraction, an integral part of the Exhibition experience for those visiting London, it is not surprising that it would adopt the Exhibition as a subject for comedic treatment (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 199–201).12 Unlike earlier plays that celebrated the fantastic transformative power of the Crystal Palace, Brough’s lodging house play criticizes the domestic consequences of the Exhibition’s commercial ideology. At the beginning of the play, Mr. Tippity returns from a business trip to fi nd that his wife has turned their home into a lodging house for visitors to the Exhibition. What begins as a plan to make a little extra money gets out of hand when Mrs. Tippity, driven by greed, brings in more lodgers than her home can comfortably accommodate. Each of the lodgers demands the attentions of Mrs. Tippity and her servant, turning a private residence into an extremely crowded and busy hotel. Much of the play’s humor, in fact, comes from the large number of unusual people who occupy unusual beds in the Tippity home, a situation visually expressed by Punch in a cartoon published at about the same time (fig. 6.1). All of these lodgers demand so much in the way of goods and services that poor Mr. Tippity is left without food or a bed of his own.13 Usurping the function served by the tigers, monkeys, and boa constrictors that lurk offstage in The Bengal Tiger, The Nabob’s Return, and The West Indian, the exotic visitors of Apartments represent the intrusive and demanding incursions of the foreign into the British domestic sphere, where their presence causes disruption and elicits expense, strongly suggesting the high price to be paid for the globalism that brings these visitors to Britain. My Sister from India—which premiered at the Strand Theatre in 1852, just three months after the close of the Crystal Palace—demonstrates quite clearly this culturally critical mobilization of the nabob’s exotic attendants and, moreover, illustrates how these domestically disruptive foreign influences could be realigned to promote a domestically productive agenda: My Sister from India redirects the nabob’s money (with all its familiar suggestions of corruption and greed) away from Anglo-Indian indulgence and towards the reinvigoration of metropolitan familial fi nance, even making possible the marriage that brings the comedy to its close.14

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Figure 6.1. Domestic Disruption and the Great Exhibition: “Perfidious Albion Lets His Drawing Room to a Distinguished Foreigner—the Result!” Punch (1851): 174. Courtesy of Punch Ltd., http://www.punch.co.uk.

Selby’s play is set in the home of Mr. Tinderly Timmins, a middle-class Londoner whose emotional frailty is inscribed into his very name. All aflutter in anticipation of the arrival of his sister from India, Timmins hopes that a warm reception will induce his sister to share her fortune with him. Having gone to great lengths to provide Indian food and an intensely warm room for his East Indian guest, Timmins is dismayed by his sister’s repudiation of these comforts. Years of association with the Anglo-Indian army have hardened and masculinized Mrs. General Hydrabad, making her loud, assertive, and disparaging of material comforts: MRS. HYDRABAD. The army is the profession for a woman of spirit. When I married Hydrabad, I was all blushes and timidity, insipid as a boiled chicken, and delicate as an Italian greyhound. Ha! ha! a campaign or two soon took all that nonsense out of me. Barracks and Bivouacs do away with fine ladyism. Now, I’m one of the merriest, happiest creatures that ever commanded a husband or regiment. The poor silly dawdles who sit at home and make their sham point lace, know nothing of happiness. They should see how we carry on the war, hunting, shooting, fishing, riding, driving, singing, dancing,

130 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter and fighting. Oh! we live our lives twice over. . . . So now, my dear brother, put out the fire, open the windows. I’m a soldier, and love to rough it. (Selby 1852: 10) This speech alone confi rms the assessment of the reviewer for The Athenaeum, who described Mrs. Hydrabad as “a person of military habits and despotic disposition . . . [who] lives in a perpetual tempest,— always in battle and ever aiming at victory” (The Athenaeum 10 January 1852: 58). After dismissing the food and her sleeping arrangements, Mrs. General Hydrabad continues her rampage, criticizing her brother’s wife and installing her army of Indian servants in the back garden. When the servants start a fi re to cook their food, the neighborhood is roused into alarm: (A loud crash is heard without—female voices in altercation—police rattles—the roll of carriages—the barking of a dog—a glare of light— huzza’s [sic] of boys, which must be kept up). VOICES. Oh, you foreign niggers, get out! MRS. HYDRABAD. How dare you speak to my servants in that way! VOICES. But, ma’am, they shan’t. MRS. HYDRABAD. But I say they shall, &c., &c., &c. (Crash). ......................................................... Enter Susan at back, out of breath, alarmed. SUSAN. Oh, sir, your sister’s servants, they’ve lighted a fi re in the area, the flames have been seen by the police, the engines have come, and the whole street is in an uproar. There’s your sister and the Indians jabbering away foreign gibberish in such a rage, and the cook’s fainting, and Betty’s screaming, and missis and Miss Emma and the ladies and gentlemen visitors are all out of their wits with fright. She broke her beautiful ivory-handled parasol on the head of poor cook—and I’m going into hysterics myself—oh, it’s a mercy we’re not all murdered by those blood-thirsty foreigners, or burnt to death in our beds. (Selby 1852: 12) This scene recalls the fi re alarm Mr. Tippity (of William Brough’s Apartments) starts in order to scare away his unwanted house guests. In both cases, crowds of foreigners are connected with confl agration, suggesting the potentially catastrophic consequences of Britain’s colonial connections. As the flames threaten to spread beyond the confi nes of the Timmins home, the entire neighborhood is thrown into an uproar, the sounds of which provide the only evidence of the servants’ existence. Though invisible—never being seen on stage—they make their existence known

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in a most spectacular way, through the disruption they cause. Theirs is a shadowy, menacing presence, the threat they represent being unseen but distressingly real. Like the tigers and boas of earlier nabob plays, the servants in My Sister from India remain offstage and thus do not perform “Indianness” in a direct and visible way; India, then, is performed only through Britain’s hysterical reaction to and violent expulsion of it. Thus does the play symbolically enact the protection of England through the reinscription of the divisions separating the imperial metropole from its dangerous periphery. In Susan’s description of off stage events, the servants and the parasol represent equivalent physical dangers: imported domestics (the servants) and domestic objects (Mrs. Hydrabad’s ivory-handled parasol)—otherwise foreign persons and personal items—equally threaten the English (social) body. As in The Bengal Tiger, the domestic sphere is under attack by these Indian imports, as Britons are forced to pay the unaccountable price of empire. Clearly, something must be done to protect British life and property, but Mrs. Hydrabad fails to see the seriousness of the situation: MRS. HYDRABAD. Pooh! pooh! You’re a silly old man—don’t tell me about your foolish customs—police and fire engines, and a mob of ragamuffins to prevent three poor, harmless, famished Indians from boiling a little rice. . . . I never reflect, in India we never do. There was no danger, and even if there had been, what did it matter? What’s a house burned down? Build it up again next day, and it’s all right again—never make a disturbance about a trifle. (Selby 1852: 13) Mrs. Hydrabad’s dismissive gestures to the contrary, the heightened excitement of the moment begs for the soothing imposition of control: the nabob’s flagrant disregard for English property must be taken in hand if she is to remain in England. And remain she must, for her brother needs both her money and her domestic direction. Annoyed by what she sees as a series of inhospitable gestures on the part of her brother, Mrs. Hydrabad threatens to return to Calcutta with her fortune. In a last-ditch effort to keep his sister and her money, Timmins summons a neighboring nabob, Colonel Howitzer, to come and make his sister feel more at home: MR. TIMMINS. My sister from India, for whom I have been to such an expense and trouble, instead of being a comfort to me is a misfortune. She contradicts me, fi nds fault with my wife, frightens my daughter, abuses my servants, offends my friends, turns my home topsy-turvy, and now when she fi nds there’s nothing else to vent her spite upon, she’s going away in a huff to lodge in a hotel, which will of course put an end to my hopes for her fortune. What can I do to pacify her? . . . [U]nless I could persuade Colonel Howitzer, who lives over the way, or the great banker, Sir Bungalore Bun-

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His plan works, and soon Mrs. Hydrabad and Colonel Howitzer are exchanging war stories and singing patriotic songs of military heroism. At play’s end, Mrs. Hydrabad promises to stay with Timmins, send her servants back to India, and take charge of her nieces’ marital arrangements. Just like her male counterparts, the female nabob is tamed by the end of the play, her eastern excesses either purged (as in the case of her servants) from England entirely or redirected (as in the case of her commanding temper) in support of British domesticity. Through the taming of the nabob, potentially disruptive—even destructive—imperial energies are thus put into national domestic service. Mrs. Hydrabad’s aggressive manner and “peppery” temper recall Dance’s Sir Paul Pagoda (The Bengal Tiger) and Peake’s Mr. Chili Chutnee (The Nabob’s Return), whose names similarly indicate their Orientalization. And like her male predecessors, Mrs. Hydrabad—whose surname might suggest miscegenation—spectacularly exhibits her alterity: her altered complexion is encased in “showy Indian costume,” and she arrives at her brother’s door “in four cabs, with a black nusmaid [sic], and a black cook, and a black valet, and such a regiment of bags and boxes” (Selby 1852: 6). All three of these figures are paradigmatic nabobs, illustrating the consequences of what E.M. Collingham has termed England’s overseas “rule in an Indian idiom” (2001: 14). Mrs. Hydrabad’s commanding nature and her entourage of servants recall the means through which the British reconstructed themselves to fit the model of Indian rule, the defi ning characteristic of the Anglo-Indian household being the large staff that attended to the Europeans’ every conceivable need: An orderly middle-class household was the site of respectability, happiness, and discipline, but despotic customs of the Orient in India thwarted this possibility. . . . Most contemporary observers remarked on the immoderate number of servants that surrounded the Englishman in India. . . . Extravagance was the norm even in relatively sober families. Added items of luxury in a warm climate . . . multiplied the most laborious pursuits, where the labor of extra hands became quickly indispensable. (Sen 2002: 132) Recalling Trevelyan’s comments about “the crowd of shivering helpless dark-faced beings” who not only surrounded but defined the nabob’s body, Sudipta Sen’s description of the army of servants attached to the AngloIndian household reiterates the nabob’s association with luxury and excess but also, and perhaps more critically, repositions the domestic sphere as the

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contested point of contact between East and West. The theatrical nabob’s Indian servants thus represent the excesses of Anglo-Indian life as well as the empire’s consumption of metropolitan resources and its assault on domestic tranquility. Because the nabob and his (or her) companions (whether animal or human) embody the wealth and luxury of Britain’s Indian empire, they represent an economic and cultural force that, though potentially disruptive, is also of great value to the nation’s interests. East Indian money, though associated with political corruption and extortionate greed, is nevertheless necessary for the maintenance of the bourgeois British household and must therefore, as in The Bengal Tiger and My Sister from India, be redirected towards its support. Consequently, the plays cannot utterly banish the nabob back to the imperial margin but must instead fi nd some way to harness the nabob’s energy and resources in the service of English domesticity. Selby’s play concludes with the removal of the servants and Mrs. Hydrabad’s vow to assist her brother and nieces, a closing gesture towards the social incorporation of the Anglo-Indian Other that bears striking resemblance to The Bengal Tiger, which ends with Sir Paul Pagoda’s promise to be more sociable, to contribute to the household economy, and to settle his fortune on his niece and nephew upon his death. Both Hydrabad and Pagoda, as we have seen, are tamed in the progress of their respective plays, their disruptive East Indian energies redirected in support of traditional British domesticity. In both cases, the nabob figure introduces muchneeded fi nancial resources into the household economy and makes possible the marriages of whatever single women are attached to the family. It is also important to note that the nabob does not marry in either play. Both Hydrabad and Pagoda are themselves kept out of the marriage market, their racial and cultural hybridity safely contained by sexual abstinence and reproductive sterility. They do, however, make possible the marriages of their young nieces, thus mobilizing the resources of empire in the service of metropolitan domesticity. Nabob plays, then, are not simply dramas of character transformation, for taming these Anglo-Indian tigers involves more than the removal of their disruptive colonial attributes. The plays’ comedic endings are achieved not solely through the nabob’s taming but through the marriages that are anticipated at their conclusions. But as is always the case with the theatrical nabob, embedded within the comedic, socially productive promise are the seeds of domestic disruption and cultural collapse. While the integration of Anglo marriage and Indian money subsumes the energies of empire within the needs of the nation, the assimilation of eastern energies into western domestic space carries the attendant threat of inverting the imperial order—integration becoming invasion as the metropole is subverted to the service of the colony. An interesting example of this domestically (de)constructive dilemma at the heart of theatrical nabobery is Harry and Edward Paulton’s 1895

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comedy Horace; or, a Man with a Past, performed, like My Sister from India, at the Strand Theatre, a house that was by the end of the century particularly known for farce (Mander and Mitchenson 1968: 396–401).15 Horace Hooper Drummond’s Wildean dilemma is suggested by the subtitle of this Anglo-Indian answer to The Importance of Being Earnest (which had premiered six months earlier): Horace has no past and so must invent one quickly if he is to hold onto the affections of his wife, Blanche. Although Horace married Blanche precisely because he has vowed never to marry a woman with a mother—Blanche’s mother being conveniently deceased—he fi nds too late that Blanche’s mother exerts an influence from beyond the grave. Horace’s impractical connubial criterion is more than matched by Blanche’s own peculiar prerequisite: her mate must have a scandal in his past. Blanche’s mother always insisted that every man has a skeleton in his closet, and Blanche distrusts her husband because he claims to have no such compromising sexual history. For Horace, honestly maintaining his innocence would mean losing Blanche, while inventing a sordid sexual past, though dishonest, will secure her devotion (Paulton 1895: 1.12–20).16 Fortunately, Horace’s godfather and business partner Josiah has recently returned from India heavily laden with precisely the sort of sexual baggage Horace so notably lacks. Hearing of Horace’s dilemma, Josiah cheerfully offers to lend his own indiscretions to his partner. When a blackmailer arrives to demand money from Josiah in exchange for silence regarding Josiah’s fling with Maggie Bondon in India, Horace steps forward and pretends that the affair was his own. Satisfied that Horace has the secret past he ought to have, Blanche forgives him. But this minor indiscretion is not enough, for Blanche is eager to prove her love to her husband and so begs him to reveal another past sin for her to forgive. As luck would have it, another of Josiah’s skeletons arrives in the shape of Mrs. Major Bluff, who accuses Horace of jilting her daughter, Letitia, in Simla (Paulton 1895: 2.13). While Horace tries to figure out what to do about Letitia, who her mother claims is losing her sanity, the parade of Josiah’s crimes continues. A third woman, Zoora—described in the dramatis personae as “a child of the Orient”—arrives and claims to be married to Horace (Josiah). She even produces a Eurasian child, who clings to Horace and calls him “papa” (Paulton 1895: 2.21). Zoora, “the fierce black-eyed sister of the Lily of the Punjab,” her “white haired old wreck” of a father, Hyder Runee, and “the dusky infant,” Goodje Gumnee, together “pitch their tent on the drawing room carpet” and refuse to leave the house. This Indian invasion prompts Blanche to declare her absolute loyalty to her husband: “My life is linked with yours; your present is mine, your future is mine, your past is mine. I am resigned!” (Paulton 1895: 3.7). Josiah’s Indian indiscretions invade the Drummonds’ English home, the surprising net result being not the destruction of the domestic sphere but the strengthening of the marital relationship. Horace’s intriguing

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mobilization of Anglo-Indian sexuality in the service of British domesticity departs in some ways from other plays’ more direct disciplining of the nabob’s rogue energies. Instead of taming the nabob—Josiah—and turning him into a respectable member of the household, Horace redirects his potentially destabilizing influences towards more domestically productive purposes. The play, in other words, enacts not the assimilation but the appropriation of the nabob’s superabundant sexual energy. In bestowing upon Horace his own Anglo-Indian past, Josiah places himself—and his sordid colonial connections—in the service of metropolitan marital tranquility. Sexual rapaciousness, the nabob’s most threatening characteristic, is thereby reclaimed—surprisingly and comically—as a constitutive element of British domesticity. Josiah thus performs a critical function in the play, serving both the needs of plot development and the greater interests of political commentary and social significance. In the most immediate and obvious sense, he is the source of the play’s situational comedy, as the women from his past march onto the stage and assault, embarrass, and otherwise traumatize poor Horace. On a more metaphorical level, Josiah represents the impulses of empire, his personal characteristics positioning him within the tradition of the theatrical nabob. He fi nds fault with English ways and complains nonstop about all things non-Indian. Although he has been back in England for two years, he continues to suffer the physical effects of the change in climate, demonstrating yet again the acclimatizing effects of the Indian environment on the Anglo-Indian body. And as with Sir Matthew Mite’s seraglio, Josiah’s Indian intrigues establish an uncomfortable presence in England. The product of Anglo-Indian sexual desire, in the figure of Goodje, is literally deposited on the floor of Horace’s home. That home, not coincidentally, was built with the proceeds of Horace and Josiah’s Indian trade and is fi lled with objects representing the subcontinent: oriental rugs, tiger skins, idols, pottery, etc. English domesticity and colonialism occupy the same space, within the home and on the stage. Both set and plot confi rm the entanglement of metropole and periphery: far from being expelled from the scene, India is acknowledged as the foundation of English domesticity. For not only is the home built upon and overbrimming with the produce of India, but Horace and Blanche fi nd renewed marital commitment through their (misguided) acceptance of responsibility for Anglo-Indian sexual dalliance: HORACE. Good Heavens! This is a cheerful fi reside. Blanche, what is the meaning of this? Have the Hindus got a mortgage on the place? Why are they here? Hadn’t we better depart and leave them our effects? BLANCHE. Horace! They are strangers in a strange land, brought here by us.

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HORACE. By us? BLANCHE. We are the cause! (Paulton 1895: 3.7) The play’s climactic moment is multiply resonant, for at the very moment bourgeois domesticity is reaffi rmed, the imperial order is subverted as colonial guilt is acknowledged. Those colonial energies that promise to reinvigorate the Drummonds’ marriage also threaten to destabilize the preexisting domestic order. Popularly recognized as both source and symbol of British national values (Meyer 1996: 1–28; Sen 2002: 88–91), the middle-class home comes under attack in Horace. By introducing these figures of unrestrained colonial sexuality into the ideological heart of the nation, Horace dramatizes the phenomenon Stephen Arata has described as the late-Victorian fear of reverse colonization:17 Yet if fantasies of reverse colonization are products of the geopolitical fears of a troubled society, they are also responses to cultural guilt. In the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms. . . . Reverse colonization narratives thus contain the potential for powerful critiques of imperial ideologies. (Arata 1996: 108) Blanche maintains that Zoora, Hyder Runee, and Goodje Gumnee have been brought to London through British empire-building activity; Horace sees their presence in his drawing room as an invasion. His interpretation is visually confi rmed by Blanche’s attitude when she fi rst sees the trio’s drawing room encampment: as the strains of “Home! Sweet Home!” play in the background, “Blanche [goes] to the fi replace and stands outside the circle sadly contemplating the group, as if shut out from the family hearth” (Paulton 1895: 3.6). Blanche’s position here is confl icted, as she feels responsibility for these people whose presence threatens to expel her to the periphery of her own home. The Drummond family hearth, the scene of East-West engagement, has been co-opted by this foreign family, as the colonial periphery asserts its own claim to metropolitan domestic territory. Perhaps too conveniently, these potential threats to the nation’s cultural and racial integrity are, in the end, dispersed, as the allegations against Horace/Josiah are variously dismissed as cases of mistaken identity or as parts of an elaborate blackmail scheme. Horace thus represents a further refinement of the ongoing Victorian project to place the empire in the service of the nation. This project, as we have seen, is both complicated by and made possible through the figure of the nabob, whose hybridized body and behavior reflect contemporary concerns about the potential hazards of colonial contact but whose inevitable and incessant reintegration into metropolitan bourgeois society perpetually reasserts peripheral alterity and subordination to metropolitan domesticity. Intriguingly, this reaffi rmation of the imperial order is accomplished in this

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instance not directly through the nabob (Josiah) but through an intermediary, Horace, who assumes for a moment the nabob’s identity. Horace’s title character is thus aligned with a group of figures we might collectively label “false nabobs,” for they represent a further refi nement of the theatrical nabob tradition and reveal, through their appropriation and characteristic renegotiation of the familiar stage nabob, a more complete picture of the nabob’s continued visibility and association with issues of imperial excess and national identity. In portraying himself as a nabob, Silas Barn, in Walter Rhoades’s The Nabob (St. George’s Hall, 1898), draws upon all of the prevailing stereotypes about Anglo-Indian life: SILAS: When I was a mullah, I used to hold a Durbah every month. I’d sit like this in my tent—on a chair of state, solid gold, studded with precious stones—and all the princes and chiefs and rajahs used to crawl in and salaam (does so) and I used to say “how do?” (condescendingly) like that. . . . And the presents they used to bring me! Jewels! Brought ’em on strings like onions. Diamonds! Rubies! Pearls! Bless you! The place was quite cluttered up with ’em. I threw most of them in the dustbin and tipped a man an anna maria to take ’em away. (Rhoades 1898: 11–2) The exaggerations don’t end there. Silas goes on to describe the full-time executioner he employed to maintain “British prestige,” the “olive-coloured woman” he married, and the three hundred men he hypnotized (then killed) during the Mutiny (Rhoades 1898: 15).18 His performance would be a success were it not for the heavily spiced food that chokes the truth out of him. Silas Barn is peculiar but not anomalous; there are a number of other false nabobs in the Victorian theatrical record.19 The “nabob” in John Poole’s 1832 farce A Nabob for an Hour (Covent Garden) is not really an Anglo-Indian but merely a working-class man who adopts the guise of the nabob in order to manipulate a girl from a poor family into marrying a much wealthier man. 20 Similarly, in Sydney Blackburn’s The Cousin from Australia (Opera Comique, 1898), the expected arrival of a wealthy Australian colonial provides a humble newspaper reporter with an opportunity to don a disguise that he hopes will encourage his beloved’s father to consent to their marriage. 21 In both cases, the “nabob” is a carefully crafted performance that serves the ends of the marriage plot. In these farces about working-class British characters who pretend to be nabobs in their pursuit of money and/or marriage, it is the demonstrably foreign and the inauthentic that are expelled in order to achieve the domestic resolution. Even when the nabobs are not “real,” they are, nevertheless, mobilized towards the triumph of English domesticity. These “false nabob” plays further manifest what Nina Auerbach (1990) and Lynn Voskuil (2004) have described as the occasionally antitheatrical impulse of the Victorian theatre. What triumphs in these plays is “true” Englishness, which suggests—contrary

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to the arguments of David Cannadine (2001)—that class identity was ultimately less important than ethnic solidarity, at least on stage. These plays are all comic, brimming with humor and ending with a restoration of the proper order, with identities restored and the normative relationship between metropole and colony reaffi rmed. The reform of the nabob, which is the comic premise of the plays treated here, presupposes a certain mutability of character, which on the one hand makes the nabob a disruptive social type and on the other hand diffuses his destructive social potential. If the nabob threatens British identity and cultural integrity by revealing their susceptibility to the influences of the colonial environment, the same flexibility of character serves as reassurance that the nabob can be reshaped to fit the metropolitan mold. Much of the rejection of the nabob can be traced to anxieties surrounding illegitimate upward mobility and fears of colonial contamination of metropolitan culture. As the hybridized embodiment of colonial contact, the nabob focused anxieties about the possible erosion of British culture by the inward movement of cultural energies emanating from the imperial fringe. In animating this national threat the Victorian theatre dispelled it, performing an important role in the disciplinary processes of social construction, a role it also performs in the Mutiny plays, as we shall see in Part III.22

7

Australian Gold Rush Plays and the Anglo-Indian Nabob’s Antipodal Antithesis One can never tell what fancy an Australian nabob may take. —Sydney Blackburn, The Cousin from Australia (1898)1

Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips argue that much of the eighteenth century’s hostility towards the nabob is focused on his shocking social mobility, the mere crossing of class lines being sufficient cause for public censure (1984: 230–1). However, this picture of a general backlash against social ambition is complicated by the nineteenth-century theatrical record, for if we look at the Australian gold rush plays of the 1850s and at later representations of Australian immigrants in England, a much more complicated picture of class tensions emerges. Australia-themed plays throw into higher relief the nature of middle-class rejection of the East Indian nabob’s artificially fueled social elevation and indicate that British attitudes towards colonially produced wealth were more fi nely nuanced. While the nabob’s social-climbing aspirations were fueled by the very colonial wealth that the stage worked so hard to reclaim in the interests of domestic prosperity and stability, it is important to note that not all overseas fortunes are treated with equal suspicion in the world of Victorian drama; on stage Australians and Anglo-Indians returning to England laden with wealth from the colonies are treated very differently. In fact, they constitute two separate and readily recognizable dramatic types that, when contrasted, show exactly why English sensibilities took such objection to the East Indian nabob. Although the East Indian nabob continued his theatrical reign through the end of the nineteenth century, India had by that time ceased to be the favored destination of British-born fortune hunters. By the middle of the century, the Union Jack waved above vast new territories of economic opportunity. The discovery of gold at Ballarat in 1850 transformed Australia from a dumping ground for England’s social refuse to a thriving center of mining activity. Nor was Australia the fi nal fi nancial frontier: South Africa’s diamond deposits brought tens of thousands of British immigrants to the area in the early 1870s and 1880s, while gold mining in the Transvaal fueled further British expansion at the Cape from the mid-1880s through the 1890s (Saunders and Smith 1999: 604–12; Featherling 1997: 42–66, 94–123). Mineral wealth produced a new type of imperial fortune hunter

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in Australia and South Africa after the doors of fi nancial opportunity had closed in South Asia. While thousands of men and women undertook the voyage to the Australian gold fields in the 1850s, London’s theatres sent smaller, yet proportionately significant numbers of characters on a parallel journey.2 Australian gold rush plays complemented other, more overtly documentary spectacles to provide potential emigrants with the information they would need to make their journey successfully, adding a dramatic element to the utilitarian coverage of the gold rush provided by panoramas and public lectures. Few of the gold rush plays appear to have made it into publication in the nineteenth century, but the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is a rich source for texts, including J. Sterling Coyne’s Wanted, 1000 Spirited Young Milliners for the Gold Diggings! (Olympic, 1852); J. Courtney’s Off to the Diggings (Surrey, 1852); Hugo Vamp’s In for a Dig; or, Life at the Diggings (Astley’s, 1853);3 Mrs. Alfred Phillips’s Life in Australia from Our Own Correspondent (Olympic, 1853); The Goldfields of Australia; or, Off to the Diggings (Bower, 1853); New Tontine; or, the Gold Seekers of Carpenteria (Queen’s, 1853). By no means exhaustive, this list provides a sense of the popularity of the gold rush as a dramatic subject in the early 1850s. It also suggests something of a range of audiences for such plays, from the more respectable patrons of the Olympic to the tradesmen and laborers of the Surrey and Queen’s. Appearing in the wake of the Great Exhibition, the gold rush plays of the mid-1850s reveal the Exhibition’s influence on staging techniques; many of these plays offer a detailed documentary realism that could compete with the illustrated newspaper, the magic lantern lecture, and the Exhibition itself as venues for the circulation of information about conditions in the Australian goldfields. This media rivalry is enshrined in the title of the Olympic Theatre’s Life in Australia from Our Own Correspondent (1853). But the newspaper was not the theatre’s only competition; the magic lantern show, panorama, and exhibition all laid claim to representational authority, forcing the stage to appropriate the techniques of these rival forms of spectacle. Reviewing Mrs. Alfred Phillips’s Life in Australia in 1853, the Theatrical Journal noted the theatre’s pictorial impulses: “Managers, always on the alert to turn a popular subject into a dramatic form, have, therefore, seized upon Australia, and have brought visibly before the public all the singular scenes and incidents that a gold-seeking emigrant is supposed to encounter at the diggings. . . . The pictorial effects are excellent, and the views of the Gap of Dunlow, in Ireland, of the town of Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay in Australia . . . are all specimens of the scenic art” (13 April 1853: 115). In a similar vein, the third scene of Hugo Vamp’s In for a Dig; or, Life at the Diggings (Astley’s, 1853) includes directions that reveal the play’s exhibitionary ambitions: “Section of the diggings at Ophir. Miners discovered working. Carts, tools, tents, machines of all kinds, process of gold-making—throwing up earth, sifting and examining it—quartz crushing” (Vamp 1853: 22). The licensing script for the play includes a detailed sketch of the scene that resembles the

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engraved images of the diggings printed in the Illustrated London News in the same period, and the merging of visual registers recalls The Two Lands of Gold (Marionette, 1853), discussed in Chapter 1. In for a Dig draws on competing visual media as it confi rms the theatre’s own exhibitionary impulses, impulses that are—admittedly anachronistically—confi rmed in Henry Byron’s 1872 Haunted Houses (Princess’s). Belonging to a later tradition of gold rush plays (discussed below), Byron’s sensational crime drama nevertheless highlights its predecessors’ engagement with the visual display techniques of the Great Exhibition. Moving from the Australian landscape of act three, the play concludes in act four in a Sydenham drawing room, complete with window view of the reconstituted Crystal Palace, a scenic detail that reminded the play’s audiences of the theatre’s proximity to Hyde Park, the site of the Great Exhibition (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 199–200). The set piece for the fi rst scene transports its audience spatially, moving them from the Princess’s location in Oxford Street to Sydenham, but the sight of the Crystal Palace recalls the building’s initial situation in Hyde Park, generating a second spatial relocation that carries an imaginary temporal adjustment. This indirect, anachronistic invocation of the 1851 Exhibition recalls the Princess’s historic rivalry with the attractions of the Crystal Palace and subtly reinforces the play’s exhibitionary content.4 Australia’s gold rush lent itself to a blending of exhibitionary techniques with nationalist ideology and educational intent, a combination of theatrical dynamics and representational impulses that made plays such as In for a Dig and Life in Australia more than mere documentary entertainments. Like the nabob plays and the plays about the Great Exhibition, Australian gold rush dramas redefined Britishness by reenacting Britain’s relationship with its imperial hinterland and through a calculated display of the character traits that constituted the British ideal.5 Though they claimed to be about Australia, these plays participated in the ongoing concomitant projects of constructing a metropolitan culture of empire and a national selfimage inflected through an imperial imaginary.

AUSTRALIA AS LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Working-class characters, such as George Fielding in Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend (Theatre Royal [Leeds]; Princess’s, 1865), went to Australia primarily as a matter of fi nancial necessity (Cannadine 2001: 28).6 In Fielding’s case, agricultural work at home is scarce and poorly paid. Lacking the fi nancial resources he needs to marry the woman he loves, Fielding goes to Australia in the hopes of making his fortune and returning home for his true reward: a wife and a farm of his own. When Fielding’s Australian ranching venture fails, an aborigine gives him an enormous gold nugget, a gift that allows him to return to England and claim his bride.

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The return of Fielding enriched by his Australian adventure is not meant to incite class hostility in Reade’s play. On the contrary, the play offers a vision of social integration and “lower-class self-transformation” made possible by the antipodal extension of England (Hays 1995: 72–9). Australia transforms Fielding not into a nabob but a respectable member of the middle class; Fielding’s found Australian fortune makes him a more productive member of English society, and so the play (and its audience) celebrates his return. As one reviewer points out, Fielding enriches himself through somewhat dubious means, though the generic conventions of melodrama direct the audience’s judgment of the hero: The drama owes its success, as do so many infi nitely worse plays, to the undying love of the public for seeing vice crushed and virtue rewarded after sore trials. In this case the virtue is not very conspicuous, for, after all, a hero who buys a nugget worth seven thousand pounds from a savage for a box of matches, is not a much honester man than a villain who suppresses letters and steals bank notes. However, a melodramatic hero’s conduct must not be tried by the ordinary rules of morality. (Quiz 6 June 1884: 128) Sensitive to the way in which generic conventions offset the play’s potential to misdirect its audience’s affective response, the critic notes how Fielding’s status as melodramatic hero outweighs any moral questions his activities might raise. Fielding essentially steals Jacky’s gold, offering in exchange a mere token, one that Jacky will ultimately misuse in his scheme to become king of the Aborigines. Disciplined by melodramatic convention, however, the playgoer ignores Fielding’s appropriation of Jacky’s gold and consequent disruption of aboriginal society, celebrating Fielding’s domestic success rather than condemning his morally questionable activities abroad. As the unsigned reviewer for Academy noted in reference to the 1881 Adelphi production of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, “the pathos is genuine, and the sympathies of the audience are invited to be in the right place” (Academy 1 October 1881: 266).7 At the other end of the social scale is Mark Rivers of The Golden Nuggett; or, the Fatal Treasure (Queen’s, 1853).8 “Brought up in the lap of luxury by [his] wealthy guardian and uncle,” Rivers finds himself, on the unexpected death of his uncle, “a beggar, even without a trade by which to win [his] daily bread!” (1853: 8–9). Rivers goes to Australia, where his knowledge of chemistry and geology improves his ability to fi nd gold deposits. His kindness and moral strength make him an asset to the other miners, whose fortunes he increases and whose coarse ways he improves. At the conclusion of a drama brimming with sensation, adventure, and dastardly deeds, Rivers is given his uncle’s lost will, so that his fi nal fortune is not dug from the Australian soil but inherited from his family’s English estate.

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If he returns to England richer than when he left, it is not because his bags are full of colonial wealth; an aristocrat by birth, Mark Rivers is restored to his proper socio-economic position. Though the term “nabob” does not appear anywhere in the play, Philip Reid’s 1885 comedy Our Colonial Relative illustrates the critical issue involved in the rejection of nabobery.9 The relative of the title, John Williams, is the Australian cousin of Samuel Tipps, a schoolmaster. When Williams visits Tipps in his home, he speaks in Australian slang, which appalls the schoolmaster, who is militant in his insistence on the use of proper grammar by his daughter and maid. Williams’s rough language and manners convince Tipps that his cousin is nothing but a squatter, a judgment that leads Tipps to intervene to prevent an attachment between his daughter Kate and Williams. As is so often the case in comedies with characters newly arrived from the colonies, much of the humor of the piece is in Williams’s coarse language and Tipps’s hysterical responses to it. The audience laughs both at the stereotype of the uncouth colonial and at the overreaction of the uptight Englishman to this shocking behavior. Though it is somewhat aligned with Tipps in his condemnation of the rough colonial, the audience remains sufficiently distanced from Tipps’s perspective to see the ridiculousness of his reaction. Simultaneously in- and outside of the play, the audience laughs at both the colonial and the Englishman. The entire encounter itself is thus made ridiculous, as actors and spectators, metropole and periphery, collide in the theatrical space. At the end of the play, a note arrives announcing the fi nancial ruin of Tipps’s investment house, but Williams saves the day by announcing his own news: gold being recently discovered on his Australian estate, he is now rich and has returned to England to settle down. Hearing this news, Tipps eagerly consents to marriage between Williams and his daughter. Williams immediately discards his slang, claiming it was all an act to have some fun with his relative: he is really perfectly respectable and not a wild bushranger after all. At issue in Reid’s play is the problem of how to integrate colonial wealth into a respectable English family without also introducing unwelcome colonial behavior. So long as he acts like a rustic Australian, Williams is rejected, but when he trades his rough Australian manners for the wealth of that country, he is transformed into an acceptable suitor. Obsessed with linguistic propriety, Tipps, whose name betrays the instability of his position (and recalls Mr. Tippity of William Brough’s Apartments of 1851), objects to cultural degeneration, the threat of which he sees in Williams’s Australian performance. When Williams, who at fi rst claims to bathe infrequently, and then only with the sheep, turns out to be a respectable, and wealthy, landowner with middle-class English manners, his integration into the English family is assured. As an example of the successful integration of the colonial into metropolitan domesticity, Our Colonial Relative reveals, by way of contrast,

144 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter what was considered objectionable in the nabob. Wealth itself was not the issue, for as we have seen part of the comedic promise in such plays is the fi nal introduction of colonially derived money into the middle-class English household. What is rejected is the set of recognizably colonial behaviors. Whether it be Indian indolence or Australian coarseness, non-English customs must be cast off before familial integration can take place. We might also note how easily Australian manners are discarded compared to those typical of the East Indian nabob. To some extent, we can attribute the greater mutability of the returned Australian emigrant to the historical conception of Australia as Terra nullius, a land devoid of indigenous cultures, a blank page utterly open to British cultural inscription. Returning Australians were thus not engaged in the wholesale importation of a foreign culture but were merely reintroducing to the metropole a colonially modified Britishness. Though Australia was founded by convicts, they were British convicts, and this, somewhat surprisingly, seems far less damning an association than the nabob’s infamous involvement with eastern sensuality and despotic authoritarianism (Lawson and Phillips 1984; Juneja 1992: 188–90). Life in Australia (Olympic, 1853) further recuperates the antipodes by inverting the association between Australia and crime, depicting the colonies as a place of redemption rather than punishment. Having killed his brother Grenville, Redmond Barry flees Ireland for Australia. Plagued with guilt, Redmond works in the mines, until he discovers that his brother is still alive. Redmond turns out not to be a murderer after all, and the two are reconciled. As they prepare to return to Ireland, they are invited to travel to London instead: ERASMUS. You had all better come to England to visit the metropolis of that little island, on whose glory the sun never sets. I’ll astonish you. You shall see the British Lion in all its grandeur—damme— I’ll make Lions of you all. (M. Phillips 1853: 82) More remarkable than Grenville’s unexpected reappearance is the play’s closing invitation to return to London: having reunited, the Irish Barry brothers are ready for promotion within the imperial family. Their experience on the imperial frontier has made them “lions,” and in this transfer of identity from Irish to British, the play reveals the imperial metropole’s reliance on the periphery, as fractured families and fringe ethnicities are reassembled to form a composite metropolitan unity. Far from posing a threat to British domestic culture, the return of the men from Australia not only testifies to, but also helps to constitute, Britain’s expanding cultural hegemony. The typical Australian gold rush play follows the trajectory of the theatrical Robinsonade, opening in London with a scene of domestic trouble and closing on a scene of return. Like Crusoe, the central figure of the gold rush play is frequently a young man who needs a fortune in order to marry

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his betrothed, and it is this fortune that leads him to the gold diggings. His life endangered and frequently beset by thieves, the plucky hero somehow manages to retain his virtue and to wrest enough of a fortune from Australia’s soil to make possible marriage to his English sweetheart. The music that closes Vamp’s In for a Dig (Astley’s, 1853) could not be clearer: all depart for England to the strains of “Home Sweet Home.” Having thwarted crime and apprehended thieves and murderers, the gold rush plays bestow fortunes on the virtuous and hard-working and return them to England, where they will marry and lead respectable middle-class lives. Australia is imagined as an extension of England, a spatial annex that allows for the expulsion of vice and for the enrichment of virtue, a foreign landscape that sustains the nation’s normative bourgeois culture. The figure of the returned Australian offers a revealing counterpoint to the East Indian nabob, for though both figures bring wealth from the imperial periphery into the metropole, this wealth is treated differently depending on its country of origin. From Australia comes gold dug from the ground of what was erroneously and tragically considered an empty country; the plays rather conveniently elide the issue of indigenous dispossession. In It Is Never Too Late to Mend, the aborigines, who have no concept of personal possessions, wealth, or even time, willingly hand the gold over to the English, for it is something they simply do not value. The fortunes of the East Indian nabobs, on the other hand, were far more suspect, their money being generally thought to have been accumulated illegally and through immoral means (Juneja 1992: 187–9). Bribery, blackmail, and outright theft were the tools of the nabob’s business, and these activities were considered, at least in the popular imagination, oriental practices (Lawson and Phillips 1984: 236–8; Edwardes 1991: 25–8, 50–65). A true Englishman, the Australian miner earned his money through hard labor, while the East Indian nabob, in imitation of the locals, stole his. But the means by which this wealth was acquired is only a part of the story, the use to which colonial wealth was put upon its owner’s arrival in England also determining its level of social respectability. The fi rst nabobs to return to England used their fortunes to usurp aristocratic privilege, building impressive manors in imitation of the landed gentry (Edwardes 1991: 34–50; Juneja 1992: 188–9). They were seen purchasing electoral votes in the hopes of edging their way into Parliament. In actuality, the nabobs exercised very little influence over English politics, but as Lawson and Phillips convincingly argue, “The historian who concentrates on the actual power wrested by nabobs in English society ignores the valuable lessons to be learned from contemporary fears about them. . . . The attitudes developed in response to nabobs were crucial to the later debates about imperial rule that took place in the wake of the American fiasco” (1984: 226). These fears are expressed quite clearly on the stage, where we see numerous examples of the nabob as social upstart and Oriental-style despot. Such depictions starkly contrast with those of Australian returnees, who have

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smaller fortunes and who use their money to win a bride, save their cousins from fi nancial ruin, or build a business. Charles Reade’s George Fielding uses his gold nugget to buy a farm and marry the lovely Susan Merton; Sydney Blackburn’s Peter uses his £300 fortune to marry his cousin and start a business in London; Philip Reid’s John Williams shares his fortune with his fi nancially distraught London relatives. Australian money in all of these plays is both free from moral taint and embraced in the service of English domesticity. Aside from shedding the rough language of the bush, the stage Australian is fairly readily assimilable into British bourgeois society and does not require the sort of “taming” efforts so frequently directed at the East Indian nabob. Like India before it, mid-century Australia sparkled with the promise of ready wealth, yet as Douglas Featherling notes, conditions in Australia encouraged co-operative partnerships among miners who, unlike the pampered Anglo-Indian nabob, were “independent, self-reliant, self-respecting, egalitarian, and energetic” (1997: 43). Australian gold miners, in other words, embodied defi nitively British values and characteristics. Indeed, the primary difference between India and Australia seems to lie in their respective relationships to that ill-defined but always instantly recognizable concept, Englishness. As a penal colony, Australia existed, through the fi rst half of the nineteenth century at least, as a necessary extension of England, a space physically removed from yet culturally aligned with the mother country. Its original purpose was the elimination of England’s socially disruptive criminal class: Australia was designed to make English society better, either through the removal of unwanted elements or through the reformation and reintegration of rogue individuals (White 1981: 36).10 For free settlers, Australia was a land of opportunity, a more spacious version of England, as David Cannadine explains: Froude’s reassuring conclusion from visiting Australia was that there was now ample room in the colonies for settlement “for all sorts and conditions of men,” from the top of the British social hierarchy to the bottom, and the result was “English life all over again: nothing strange, nothing exotic, nothing new or original.” (2001: 43) One conception of Australia hailed the new colony as an Arcadian alternative to industrial England, an unspoiled landscape that recalled images of England’s own rural past. By spatializing an impossible temporal movement, colonization—the urge to build something new—merged with the nostalgic desire to rejuvenate the present via return to an imagined past (White 1981: 34). Australia thus served two primary functions in the English imagination: a distant, alien landscape to which problematic figures (criminals, fallen women, the industrious poor) could be expelled and—antithetically—a familiar, readily domesticable landscape in which

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England could replicate itself. In either case, whether through expulsion or replication, Australia was the colonial key to Britain’s social salvation. In contrast with the popular conception of Australia as an empty territory in which Englishness readily took root, India was imagined as an ancient land, a cultural crossroads with a long history and a complex interweaving of ethnic groups and their traditions.11 India represented an unassimilable culture, alien history, and an exotic, bewildering landscape. Theatrical depictions of East Indian nabobs reflected the popular perceptions of the effects of exposure to eastern religious mysticism, exotic sensuality, and despotic political institutions. Tainted by his exposure to the environment of the East, the nabob posed the threat of contamination, and this anxiety attends theatrical representations of this iconic figure of cross-cultural contact in an imperial context. Comparing the stage nabob with his closest Australian analogue—the fortune-seeker of the gold rush plays—throws into further relief the precise source and character of the concerns associated with Britain’s relationship with India. The issue is not the permeability of social class, for the gold rush plays—performed at theatres catering to audiences across a wide socio-economic spectrum—generally celebrate the class mobility made possible by newfound wealth. Why did the stage routinely portray the nabob as a domestically disruptive figure yet reward the hard-working, virtuous gold miner with a wife and home? The answer, of course, lies in the perception of the permeability of culture rather than of class, and with the image of Australia as a blank canvas, without a culture or history of its own, an empty stage ready to be made into an extension of England itself, as the concluding lines of Off to the Diggings (Royal Surrey, 1852) attest:12 GARLAND. Let all forget the past and dream upon the future. Not gold alone—but a fair new world of promise to all is here, where fond husbands and doting fathers may meet the due and worthy need of love, may see their children rise around them a blessing to their hearts and joy to the mind. In place of idleness and sham and sorrow . . . a home where the broad and liberal teeming land invites the plough, the hand—let’s dream of a century may make it. (1852: 28) To some extent, the closing dialogue, with its invitation to emigration, is in tension with the action of the play, which rests on a series of attempted thefts and scenes of back-breaking labor. Yet the play concludes with a rhetorical flourish that encourages the audience to think not of Australia’s past but its future, a future in which the red sands of Australia yield neither crime nor gold but the fruits of harvest and of hearth. That invitation to imagine Australia’s future as a new England, an extension of greater Britain, marks it as significantly distinct from the image of India, a land so

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saturated with history and culture as to be unassimilable to the model of English life.

THEATRICAL RETURN: THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOLD RUSH In his 1882 memoir, author, actor, and theatre manager Edward Stirling recalled how Charles Reade’s play Gold! (Drury Lane, 1853)—the drama that inspired his novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend, itself later adapted to the stage—allowed Drury Lane to tap into its own bit of Australian wealth, using the proceeds of that popular play to turn a profit at a time when the theatre had suffered from poor management and slow ticket sales (Stirling 1881: I.250). Theatre managers would find further opportunities to capitalize on the Australian gold rush, returning to the subject in later years as they looked for ways to contextualize and represent discoveries of mineral wealth in other colonial locations. This repeated retrospective engagement made the figure of the Australian gold miner one of the nabob’s chief stage rivals as the theatre continued to search for ways to place colonial wealth in the service of metropolitan society. Initially, diamonds were South Africa’s most significant mineral resource, but after gold deposits were found in the Transvaal in 1873, new fields of opportunities began to open. When extensive gold reefs were discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the rush was on, and the British public was again stricken with gold-fever. Never an institution given to starving a fever, the London theatre mounted a whole host of plays with topical interest in the discovery and excavation of gold. Somewhat surprisingly, the plays inspired by the public interest in the South African gold rush tended to adopt Australian settings and characters. With one or two exceptions such as Conquest and Spry’s The Gold Craze (Princess’s, 1889), the gold rush plays of the 1880s feature the search for gold in Australia and not South Africa.13 The mid-1880s stage brought forth plays that looked backwards in time, capitalizing on public interest in the South African goldfields by celebrating gold’s role in the transformation of Australia’s settlers from convicts to colonists. Manchester’s Queen’s Theatre, for example, dramatized Marcus Clarke’s novel of the Australian penal system, For the Term of His Natural Life, in July 1886, the year of the Witwatersrand discovery. George Thorne and F. Grove Palmer set their 1886 pantomime, Old King Cole, in Australia circa 1851, a temporal shift that combined the fantasy transformations of the harlequinade with the cultural transformation of Australia. These plays were followed by similar dramas, including Tom Taylor’s Ups and Downs; or, the Antipodes (Holborn, 1887) and Henry Pettitt’s Hands across the Sea; or, Advance, Australia (Theatre Royal [Manchester], 1888). Why did so many playwrights choose to represent the South African gold rush in terms of its earlier Australian analogue?

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Titles of plays licensed in the mid-1880s offer compelling evidence that theatres wanted to capitalize on popular interest in the South African gold rush by luring audiences to topically irrelevant plays with tantalizingly topical titles. In 1886, in the midst of the Transvaal rush, Drury Lane advertised A Run of Luck, a Harris and Pettitt play about horse racing and marriage. In the following year, Conquest teamed up with Henry Spry to produce the misleadingly titled Dead Man’s Gold, a drama of gambling and intrigue set in London. The next year, 1888, the Elephant and Castle produced George Lander’s The Land of Gold, set partly in San Francisco, recalling the California gold rush four decades prior. Though the titles of these three plays invoke the speculative spirit and adventure connected with the public interest in the South African gold fields, none of them delivers on that promise, leading us to wonder why so many playwrights chose to ignore South African settings, even in plays whose titles appealed to audiences’ desires for topical dramas. Further evidence suggests that the South African gold rush may have been theatrically unrepresentable. The complicated plot of The Gold Craze follows the theft and subsequent transfer of diamonds through the African gold fields. Moving from London to France and thence to Africa, the play neither shows its audience a gold mine nor takes them to the scene of the diggings. Instead of the stock image of the gold miner, toiling in the earth, the play offers the corporate conglomerate involved in financial speculation and accounting. In this drama of corporate sleight-of-hand, the lone adventurer is replaced by the spectre of Cecil Rhodes and his consolidation of excavation work in the Kimberley diamond mines. We might account for this representational shift geologically, for unlike Australia’s alluvial gold deposits, which could be mined by individuals armed with only shovels and pans, the gold in the Witwatersrand was locked inside auriferous conglomerate and pyrite, requiring more elaborate and expensive extraction techniques. Individual effort would not be enough to wrest wealth from the South African ground; substantial capital was needed, and that resource was readily supplied by the capitalists who had already made fortunes at Kimberley (Stephens 2003: 149–72). Mining gold in South Africa was a corporate effort, a matter of big business, and was therefore less readily representable on stage.14 Shifting the scene to Australia allowed plays to deploy more traditional images of colonial adventure and opportunity while retaining a contemporary topical interest in gold mining.15 Though playwrights of the 1880s largely avoided direct representation of the Transvaal gold fields, in the decade following they readily revived scenes from the diamond rush of the mid-1860s, and even then, the scripts they wrote were largely destined for provincial theatres. There was Charles Longden’s The Kimberley Mail in Blackburn in 1892 and George Day’s The Diamond Rush in Cambridge in 1895. 1896 brought Merritt and Conquest’s The Raid in the Transvaal; or, the King of Diamonds to Drury Lane. This retrospective interest in the diamond rush is all the more notable given the lack of diamond

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dramas in the 1860s, when the rush was in full swing. There are multiple possible explanations for the theatre’s initial reluctance to represent the diamond rush: the sparseness of white settlements and the continent’s reputation as an unmapped and savage wilderness resisted scenic representation; the corporate nature of diamond mines baffled melodramatic conventions; the traditional association of diamonds with femininity imported an unseemly genital symbolism to the Big Hole at Kimberley. Why, then, did the theatre return to the scene of the mines thirty years later? Perhaps because, as John Tosh notes, the end of the century saw a series of British military defeats and humiliations in various quarters, a pattern that prompted a popular nostalgia for the empire’s better days and a renewed interest in events like the Mutiny, which promised lessons in imperial management and colonial control (Tosh 2005: 194). Or perhaps it took time to put into proper perspective the implications of the diamond rush, to see how this massive infusion of mineral wealth would reshape not only the Cape Colony, but Britain as well. Were South Africa’s diamond miners destined to become Crusoes or nabobs? Were they to use their wealth to advance a normative domestic agenda or to subvert the social and political frameworks that structured, indeed defined, the imperial metropole?16 From Crusoe to Anglo-Indian nabobs to Scots soldiers, the Victorian theatre was most interested in exploring evolving conceptions of Britishness. In its early stages, the impact of the South African gold rush was less certain that that of its Australian counterpart. Though it spurred territorial annexations, the Transvaal gold discovery did not immediately alter the fundamental cultural and political identity of the South African colony. The Ballarat discovery, on the other hand, completely changed Australia, both as a political entity and as a cultural image. No longer an arid wasteland for the dumping of social undesirables, Australia was rapidly transformed by its gold rush into a land of opportunity, a new world with abundant opportunities for the creation of personal wealth. A continental prison became a country of settlement, its bustling cities en route to becoming antipodal metropolises. Unable to anticipate the effects the gold rush would have on South Africa, the stage could at best speculate, offering up the Australian precedent rather than the current event. Imperial theatrics became retrospective, as the theatre reached for historical analogues that would provide for contemporary events a context that laid claim to colonial wealth in the interest of metropolitan cultural ideals: nationalism, virtue, domesticity, masculinity. Tracing the development of masculine norms across the nineteenth century, John Tosh concludes that the link between masculinity and martial valor gradually eroded, as masculinity moved from being an object of public discourse to being a state of internalized subjectivity (Tosh 2005: 65). By mid-century, the soldier had been replaced by the colonial settler as the primary embodiment of British masculine behavior.17 This shift occurred, in part, as a result of the gold and diamond rushes, which

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drew large numbers of single men to the most rugged corners of the empire. Where immigration had traditionally focused on the relocation of entire families, the gold and diamond rushes attracted the lone adventurer (Tosh 2005: 186). In search of an easy fortune, these independent men didn’t always remain in the colonies, their goal being the accumulation of wealth sufficient to provide a comfortable life in England. Like the East Indian nabob, the miner was more often a fortune-seeker rather than a settler, and he was content to leave the colonies as lawless and undeveloped as he found them. Consequently, gold mining potentially represented something of a cultural crisis, as it encouraged a form of masculinity disengaged from domesticity and the expansion of European civilization (Morrell 2001: 14). Australia’s gold miners, however, offered an alternative model of rugged masculinity tied to civility and normative metropolitan domesticity, as Robert Morrell explains:18 In Australasia, the colonialist state itself attempted to eradicate frontier masculinity and replace it with a more conformist set of gender values which stressed family life and workplace discipline, to meet the growing demands of the economy. This was paralleled by organic changes within the settler population itself, the leading sections of which attempted to develop a social image which mimicked that of the metropole. (2001: 14) The story of Australia’s rise from convicts to colonists was a narrative of the emergence of a modern civil society from Britain’s criminal refuse. Untouched by associations with decadence or despotism, Australia’s wealth was readily appropriated for metropolitan purposes, an ideal celebrated in Robert Buchanan’s drama, The Old Home, licensed for the Vaudeville Theatre in 1889. Opening on the “Exterior of a manor house, with a view of distant country,” The Old Home follows the fortunes of Mr. Septimus Porter, whose Australian fortune has purchased an English country estate. Unlike the East Indian nabob, however, Porter is presented as the true embodiment and guardian of Englishness: PORTER. Everything old, Bramble—nothing noo, nothing colonial here. Look at the sundial—it’s been here for ages! Notice the old church as you came by? There’s an old vicar, and an old clerk, and an old pew there belonging to my family. . . . Instead of the lonesome bush, green fields and real old-fashioned hedges. Instead of kangaroos, hedge sparrows and fi nches. Instead of the drinking bar, the dear old-fashioned English pub. (Buchanan 1889: 7–8) Porter is no colonial upstart: his fortune has “saved an old English estate from ruin, and restored wealth and position to its spendthrift and bankrupt

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heir” (1889: 10). He has raised his daughter to be a lady, and has instilled in her a reverence for England, which she knows as “home” even though she was raised in Australia. But, as the play reveals, England needs more from Australia than just its wealth; it requires an infusion of its values, for England has lost its way, honor having surrendered to self-indulgence.19 In contrast to the nabob plays, in which colonials are cured of their contaminating influences, The Old Home shows England to be in need of the cleansing influences of the New World. Here it is the metropole that is degraded, and the imperial hinterland provides the money and moral fortitude required for its restoration. Faced with the challenge of translating to a visual and dramatic idiom a gold rush in a country traditionally considered unrepresentable on stage, theatres in the mid- to late-1880s looked back in time to an earlier model, triangulating current events through an established theatrical precedent. South Africa’s gold rush was treated indirectly, enshrined in plays that were ostensibly about the earlier Australian gold rush but which resonated with much broader thematic import. The plays produced by this frenzy of retrospective imperial theatrics were not, strictly speaking, about Australia or South Africa; they were about the imperial periphery more generally and its relationship to the metropole. In recuperating colonial wealth, showcasing colonial masculinity, and celebrating colonial virtue, the gold rush plays of the 1880s joined with those of the 1850s to offer an alternative to East Indian nabobery and reveal something of the complexity of popular perceptions of the empire. Furthermore, they reveal something of the theatre’s role in shaping these perceptions and in defi ning the relationship between Britain and her various imperial frontiers.

Part III

Staging The Mutiny Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Imperial Crisis

Figure 8.1. The Theatre of War: “The Fall of Delhi” at Burford’s Panorama in Leicester Square (1858). © The British Museum.

Introduction to Part III But Mutiny! A word of evil-sounding Needing indeed supreme justification, There where the dusky millions swarm, surrounding The seat of him who represents our nation, Its scepter symbolising to the hordes Of subtle aliens. Foolish as disloyal Self-wounding insults, wild and whirling words! Unworthy of a race self-deemed to royal, This vocal fury, Fit but to shake the rafters of Old Drury! —Punch, “The Anglo-Indian Mutiny” (1883)

For contemporary British observers, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, as Don Randall, Steve Attridge, and others have argued, was not so much about India as it was about Britain.1 Though modern historians still debate whether the Mutiny represented an eruption of nationalist consciousness in India, 2 there is widespread agreement that the event inspired an intensely nationalist reaction at the imperial center (Randall 2003: 8; Peck 1998: 72). Public responses to the event (in the form of sermons, news reports, illustrations, novels, and plays) sounded the depths of Britishness itself, reappraising the nation’s relationship with India and interrogating—and consolidating—Britain’s own political and cultural identity (Randall 2003: 12–15; Killingray 1999: 16; Paxton 1999: 111). If Britain’s imperial consciousness was rooted in the nation’s military establishment, then the military crisis that the Victorians knew as “the Mutiny” did more than cast doubt on the nation’s ability to maintain expansive territorial boundaries and to permanently subdue a foreign population; Britain’s very identity as an imperial power was at stake. The Mutiny captured the British public’s imagination. In pamphlets, poems, newspapers, and novels, references to the Mutiny proliferated (Brantlinger 1988: 199–224). In the years following the rebellion, journalistic accounts gave way to a frenzy of narrative production, the Mutiny inspiring the publication of dozens of novels.3 But the energies of this colonial crisis exceeded the narrow limits of pen and page, the uprising being similarly prevalent in photographic histories and magic lantern shows. To quote James Ryan, it was “the single most important influence in the making of British images of India in the nineteenth century” (1997: 197). Carefully choreographed and politically reinterpreted, the major events of this military crisis—perhaps the most memorable of Britain’s wars in

156 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter India—found further representation on stages from London to Glasgow, in plays whose titles laid claim to journalistic objectivity, historical accuracy, and pyrotechnical extravagance: Revolt in the East; or, the Fugitives and Their Faithful Steed (Astley’s, 1858); The Storming and Capture of Delhi (C.A. Somerset; Astley’s, 1857). In its review of The Sepoy Revolt at Liverpool’s Adelphi Theatre, The Era comically confused the representational with the real, a rhetorical move that indicates the extent to which the event had become theatricalized: The Indian mutiny is spreading throughout this country to an alarming extent, and many a peaceful ‘temple of the drama’ has been transformed into a ‘theatre of war’. . . . Accordingly, on Monday the last, the British forces . . . were marched in full array to the Park Theatre, where they proceeded to demolish the Sepoys in fi ne style, although The Sepoy Revolt as here displayed is unlikely to be put down for some time. (31 January 1858) This theatrical interest in the Mutiny confi rms what Gillian Russell has argued about the theatre’s role in transforming distant military engagements into metropolitan cultural events, constructing to a significant extent the public’s experience of war: For the majority of the civilian population of Britain, war was experienced as long periods of ignorance and anxiety about what was happening, punctuated by days or weeks of heightened significance as sketchy details of a major battle fi ltered through to the newspapers, followed immediately by confi rmation of victory or defeat. Communal celebrations such as illuminations, bonfi res, and transparencies served the important purpose of expressing and enhancing patriotic fervour, but no less significant was their ritualistic function—the marking of these times of national catharsis. The fact that the theatre was an intrinsic part of these rituals bound it even more closely to the culture of war at this period. (1995: 64) In connecting war with public spectacle, Russell invites us to consider the term “theatre of war” as multiply resonant, simultaneously suggesting the battlefield, the public celebration, the military reenactment, and the topical dramatic representation. In the chapters that follow, we will look more closely at these intersecting forms of spectacle as we consider the theatre’s transformation of a distant colonial rebellion into a moment for metropolitan self-reflection. Plays such as The Storming and Capture of Delhi were designed to “convert” their viewers into virtual actors, a rescripting of roles that sought to mobilize the audience in support of the very empire that defi ned them. This is not to say that every member of a given audience acutely perceived

Introduction to Part III 157 this patriotic indoctrination or that these ideological messages were universally and unquestioningly accepted. Theatrical audiences were of course quite diverse, and it is entirely possible that some or all of a play’s viewers ignored or actively rejected the political messages embedded within the drama. Individually resistant reactions against the affective intent of any of the plays under consideration here would have violated the theatre’s communal ethos, as explained by Julie Stone Peters: “the individual spectator was to transcend the unfreedom of individuation and enter into the spirit of the collective . . . broadening the focus from individual subjectivity to collective subjectivity” (2001: 306–7). Records of audience reception are sketchy at best, though most reviews of these plays note the audience’s enthusiastic applause. We can, however, identify the work these plays were designed to perform, a design that becomes more apparent when we consider these plays together as a group and examine similarities in their internal mechanisms (plot, character, setting, language, etc). In Vermuh Kareeda; or, the Fall of Delhi (Marylebone, 1857), we see the issues of national identification and commitment to the imperial mission played out on a personal level.4 Like George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899), Vermuh Kareeda gives center stage to a man of mixed racial heritage and observes the crisis of conscience that ultimately leads him to self-identify with his white paternity. In this way, Vermuh Kareeda explores the divided loyalties thrown into crisis at the outset of the rebellion, tracing the conversion of Kareeda from rebel to ally, an ideological realignment that the play attributes to biological compulsion. Kareeda, the legitimate yet unacknowledged son of a British officer and an Indian woman, discovers his white paternity on the day the Mutiny is set to begin (1857: 6–7).5 He has a choice: join the mutineers or protect his father’s family. Adding to the tension is his long-felt romantic interest in Emma, the wife of Edward, Kareeda’s longtime friend and newly discovered half-brother. Pulled in different directions by the forces of sexual attraction, ethnic identification, political obligation, and familial duty, Kareeda feels himself trapped “upon a precipice from which there is no retreat” (1857: 6). Initially, “sacred vows” prove stronger than blood ties, for Kareeda joins the rebels as he promised to do. But he experiences a sudden spiritual transformation when he spies Mrs. Gleeson and her children asleep on a tomb. Her husband killed by the rebels, Mrs. Gleeson has fled with her children in search of safety. The cold slab of marble on which they rest clearly announces the fate of this family: for now they sleep atop the tomb; they will soon be encased within it. Like the play’s audiences, Kareeda immediately recognizes their danger, and more importantly, sees that “Avarice and superstition have done this work” (1857: 9). Here Kareeda articulates a British view of the rebellion, seeing it as the violent expression of an ideologically warped and morally misaligned culture. Fortunately for Mrs. Gleeson, “humanity holds its place within [Kareeda’s] breast”

158 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (1857: 6). Like the warring tribe of Cataract of the Ganges (see Chapter 2), Kareeda is redeemed by his own humanity and an overwhelming sense of human compassion that the play hails as a hallmark of British honor. Acknowledging his paternity, Kareeda makes the fi nal shift from Indian villain to British hero: “Yes, you behold a rebel. Yes, but some British blood runs in my veins. I was not always so. I would now save those I would have destroyed” (1857: 9). As spokesperson for British honor and duty, it is Kareeda who gets his eponymous play’s most moving and patriotic lines. By the end of the drama, Kareeda has been fully transformed and addresses the British troops, and the British audience, as one of their own. But ere the curtain falls Kareeda must die, for the play cannot imagine a proper future for this hero of mixed blood. His heart has, after all, burned in lust for a white woman and such interracial desire is the most serious crime in Mutiny literature (Paxton 1999). His duty to Britain fi nished, Kareeda, the self-sacrificial subaltern, dies to protect British blood and British women from foreign invasion: “Father, brother, farewell. I die exulting in our success. Weep not for me Emma. I loved you fondly. I die to seal your happiness. Soldiers, Britains [sic], give me your parting cheer. Victory to humanity. Hurra, hurra” (1857: 28). With his dying breath, Kareeda invites the emotional outpourings of soldiers and Britains (Britons), the latter term doing double duty, metonymously marking both the soldier/actors who surround Kareeda on the stage and the audience observing from the auditorium. All are invited to cheer for Kareeda—for his victory as well as his death—for all are Britons and thus included in his appeal. In cheering for Kareeda, the audience registers acceptance of its own inclusion in the appellation, “Britains.” Vermuh Kareeda thus exhibits the interpellating effect that J.A. Mangan has identified as one of the primary functions of popular cultural forms: “they played a not insignificant part in the indoctrination of an elite community of sacrificial subalterns from the upper middle class, and imbued them with an uncomplicated concept of patriotism, imperialism, and masculinity” (1995: 34). Kareeda fulfills this patriotic duty by calmly accepting his own death to secure a more widespread public commitment to the needs of empire. In this one example we can see how Mutiny plays consolidated British public sentiment in the most spectacular way possible. They fit events into a tidy and familiar narrative, the ultimate point of which is the constitution of an imperial public via the celebration of British heroism. There was, of course, nothing particularly new about the theatricalization of war. By the time the Mutiny erupted in 1857, the theatregoing public had become accustomed to seeing staged renditions of Britain’s military exploits, particularly the wars of conquest and territorial consolidation in India. Indeed, the “Mutiny plays” are just one small subspecies of a much larger theatrical genus: the Victorian military drama. We might, therefore, do well to begin by considering how the Mutiny dramas fit into the theatre’s

Introduction to Part III 159 longstanding interest in Anglo-Indian affairs. Are the Mutiny dramas simply more examples of an obsessive translation of colonial warfare into metropolitan entertainment? Or is there a new story to be told from this portion of the theatrical archive? These are the questions I take up in Chapter Eight, where I trace the tradition of Victorian military dramas as they relate to Britain’s wars in India. Although the Mutiny plays exhibit certain generic norms, fulfilling both the documentary and ideological functions of the military drama, they do not merely imitate but in fact supersede their generic predecessors: in the wake of 1857, the Mutiny became the definitive military spectacle, to the nearly total exclusion of all other colonial conflicts. Having positioned the Mutiny plays within a larger theatrical history, I next look at how these plays reformulate such basic identity categories as gender and ethnicity. This discussion begins in Chapter Nine, which investigates the theatre’s portrayal of the Mutiny’s implications for metropolitan masculinities. The earliest of the Mutiny dramas mock the emasculating effects of Britain’s bourgeois mercantilism. Through comic action, plays such as Charles Selby’s The Drapery Question (Adelphi, 1857) equate imperial stability with the reinvigoration of British masculinity through a commitment to a more aggressively martial spirit. In Chapter Ten, I look at how mid-century playwrights transformed colonial rebellion into an opportunity for metropolitan cultural consolidation. By mobilizing Scottish characters, dramatists helped forge a broader, Celtically inflected British identity that ideologically aligned the people of England and Scotland in clear opposition to the mutinous hordes of India. Through a peculiar, though consistent, cultural compression, plays about the Mutiny deploy kilts and bagpipes as emblems of a culturally inclusive, heterogeneous Britishness while simultaneously reducing India’s distinct ethnic groups to a culturally undifferentiated, and unassimilable, mass. The sharp juxtaposition of these collapsed racial and cultural identifications helped to transform an imperial crisis into a metropolitan project of nationalist reconstruction, a project which, remarkably, continued long after the Mutiny had been suppressed. As late as 1898, Mutiny-themed plays continued to attract audiences as the stage became a dynamic memorial of one of the nation’s most important defi ning moments. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the typical Mutinythemed drama paired historical spectacle with a timely investigation of the nexus of gender and social class. Plays such as The Victoria Cross (J.W. Whitbread; Pavilion, 1896) and The Star of India (Sims and Shirley; Princess’s, 1896) feature illegitimacy and questions of inheritance, appropriating to an English context the very issues that led the followers of Nana Sahib to take up arms against the Company that had denied his claim to the throne of Bithur. Such appropriation further indicates the extent to which the Indian Mutiny had become “domesticated”: no longer a distant colonial crisis but a setting for the exploration of familiar metropolitan social concerns.

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By the end of the century, the Mutiny had thus become a fairly familiar theatrical spectacle. As George Bernard Shaw noted in his 1895 critique of Fyles and Belasco’s The Girl I Left Behind Me (Adelphi), the siege of Lucknow “as a dramatic situation, is so strong and familiar that it is hardly possible to spoil it” (Shaw 1932: 101). Given the size of the archive, it would be impossible to treat in the limited space of this volume all of the plays that invoked the Mutiny in some way. The Lord Chamberlain’s catalogue lists at least a dozen dramatizations of the confl ict licensed for production in 1857 and 1858, the period in which the revolt erupted and was suppressed. At least a dozen more appeared in later years, as the stage kept memories of the Mutiny alive through the end of the century. From Charles Selby’s The Drapery Question, which premiered at the Adelphi in 1857, to J.W. Whitbread’s The Victoria Cross, which played at various theatres from 1886 through 1898, Mutiny-themed dramas celebrated British martial prowess and moral character as they delineated the masculine and feminine virtues that defi ned and supported the nation’s imperial ambitions. As it was replayed on stage, the Mutiny illuminated the qualities that defi ned the British people, aligning the potentially disparate socio-economic interests of theatre audiences with a larger national identification. Arising out of a rich tradition of theatrical war recreations, Mutiny plays both exhibited and entertained, their perennial presence on the stage confi rming the transformation of the Mutiny from imperial crisis to theatrical sensation.

8

India in the Limelight Empire and the Theatre of War The identities of patriot and theatre-goer are one and the same. —Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War (1995)

As darkness descends over the rebel Sepoy camp at Peshawar, the sounds of drunken revelry fi ll the air. Tied to the rough trunks of trees, women in tattered clothes gaze across the clearing to fi nd reassurance in the faces of their husbands and brothers: all listen to the boisterous celebrations of the mutineers; all contemplate their dreadful doom. From afar the faint report of artillery fi re echoes through the scene. Drunken revelry turns to panic as the rebels realize that the British army is upon them. Freed from their bonds, the grateful prisoners collapse weeping on the ground, while British troops enclose and capture the entire rebel force. A triumphant General Wilson strides forward and dramatically pronounces the act of justice about to take place: “A Providential rescue. Parents, bereft of your Dear Children, point out the fiendish murderers who shed the blood of innocence. From the cannon’s mouth blow and scatter them to countless atoms.” Prosecuted by the slightest nod of a single hysterical Englishwoman, three Indian sepoys are tied to cannons. Wilson gently escorts the women away and gives the order to fi re. The echoing boom of artillery mingles with thunderous applause as the curtain falls and the act closes (Somerset 1857: 18). If the timing of the military relief force is providential—saving in the nick of time the lives of British civilians—the dropping of the curtain seconds before the mutineers are blown to bits in the name of justice is propitious— saving the play’s audience from witnessing the full spectacle of violence and gore. In this way, C.A. Somerset’s play The Storming and Capture of Delhi (Astley’s, 1857) carefully tempers the titillating prospect of bloodshed with the reassuring promise of justice and decency.1 Balancing good taste with documentary accuracy, The Storming and Capture of Delhi simultaneously entertains and informs, excites and reassures. As a chronicle of current events, the play claims for itself a serious mission: reproducing some of the sights and sensations of one of the most critical moments in Britain’s imperial history, the event the Victorians came to call the “Indian Mutiny.” But as a popular entertainment, Somerset’s play offers a number of tantalizing pleasures, delighting an audience alternately horrified and thrilled by the spectacle unfolding before its eyes. If longevity is any indication of popularity, this entertainment was a smashing success: notices of performances

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appear in the Times from October 1857 through mid-February 1858, a solidly respectable four-and-a-half-month run. Punch praised Astley’s treatment of the Mutiny, hailing The Storming and Capture of Delhi as “quite a national” show, “in which the history of the rebellion is set out, from the mutiny of Barrackpore to the storming of Delhi” (1857: 259). The patriotic tone of the piece and the audience’s enthusiastic reception of it resonate in the reviewer’s description of the night: We see the black rascals plotting and rebelling, and rendering themselves just detestable enough to make the audience shout with joy when the swift vengeance of countless supernumeraries breaks upon the miscreants, and they are banged, beaten, bayoneted, blown from guns, or otherwise disposed of, to fit the scene. (26 December 1857: 259) That fi nal phrase, “to fit the scene,” carries a double register, as both commentary on the internal structural coherence of the play and a recasting of the Mutiny itself as a sort of theatrical piece that appropriately concludes with harsh British retribution. In the words of the reviewer, the rebels are “just detestable enough” to deserve the brutal punishment they receive, a judgment that seeks to redeem in the name of measured justice what are essentially impassioned outbursts of rage and revenge. Violence which might in another context be deemed shocking or offensive “suits” this theatrical presentation of a naturalized, militaristic, imperial order. Moreover, the play’s bloody conclusion satisfies the aesthetic unities of the drama and the real-world demands of justice. The execution of the rebels and the conquest of the city thus meet all dramatic and political demands for appropriate closure. As Ronald Hyam has shown, contemporary and historical accounts of the Mutiny were awash in such rhetoric of just retribution, the massacre at Cawnpore giving “sanction to a retributive savagery which is one of the most shameful episodes of British history” (2002: 137). In the eyes of British observers, the unprovoked slaughter of innocents demanded an equivalent—i.e., horrifically bloody—response (Chakravarty 2005: 38). On the ground in India, the explosive dismemberment of the mutineers, or those suspected to be mutineers, was a spectacular display of British authority which subdued the rebel spirit through fear and awe, while in faraway London, reports of such reprisals reassured the public of their nation’s military supremacy and its commitment to a vision of empire that was increasingly cast as a moral crusade (Sharpe 1993: 77–9; Lawrence James 1997: 251–6; Mangan 1995: 13–4). The Mutiny was neither the fi rst nor the only Indian confl ict to inspire theatrical production. Beginning with the Mysore Wars of the late eighteenth century, Britain’s military campaigns in India were waged in much smaller scale on metropolitan stages, in plays that praised British heroism, demonized Indian society, and transformed even the most horrific atrocities

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into spectacular entertainment (O’Quinn 2005: 314–29). Indeed, each of the three key episodes in Britain’s centuries-long conquest of India inspired dramatic productions of some sort: the defeat of Tippoo Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, at Seringapatam in 1792; the conquest of the Punjab and the final settlement of India’s northwest border in the mid-1840s; and, fi nally, the Mutiny of 1857 and the subsequent transfer of power from the Company to the Crown. Because plays such as The Storming and Capture of Delhi are but one manifestation of a much larger tradition of Victorian theatrical recreations of Britain’s military engagements abroad, in order to understand the Mutiny plays’ cultural significance and internal dramatic dynamics, we must fi rst reconnect this theatrical subspecies with its proper stage genus: the Victorian military drama. Through the work of scholars such as Gillian Russell (1995) and Bridget Orr (2001), we can trace the development of popular war dramas backwards through the eighteenth and into the seventeenth centuries, uncovering some of the core conventions of this theatrical subgenre. But while the Mutiny plays mimic to a large extent the military melodramas that preceded them on stage, they distinguish themselves by rendering all other such spectacles irrelevant. What distinguishes these plays is their characteristic claim of a military victory that is complete, total, and fi nal: if the Mutiny posed the most dire challenge to British rule in India, its suppression—or so the plays would encourage us to believe—settled once and for all the question of British supremacy, rendering unnecessary further wars of conquest on the subcontinent. Unlike their generic predecessors, the Mutiny plays portray not the continuation but the culmination of Britain’s conquest of India. The promise of bloody justice that closes The Storming and Capture of Delhi provides more than full and appropriate closure for the play; it represents Britain’s fi nal conquest of India.

INDIA AND THE MILITARY DOCUDRAMA Whenever Britain mounted a new military campaign abroad, London’s theatres staged spectacles that rendered immediately visible events that were distantly removed—in both time and space—from the plays’ audiences. As they documented current events, topical dramatizations celebrated the heroic character of the British people, as John MacKenzie has argued: [I]t was the rapid translation of military and naval news to the stage which became the principal excitement of nineteenth-century theatre and one if its most enduring characteristics. . . . As the century progressed the deeds of imperial expansion were found to fit perfectly the tradition of translating topical events into spectacular display, combining the Victorians’ search for realism with an admiring self-regard in their own exploits. (1986: 46)

164 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Integrating information with entertainment, the theatrical stage crafted the spectacles that fashioned an imperial public consciousness (Bratton 1980: 119–20; Orr 2001: 97–8). Public attention turned eastward during the decade of the 1840s, when British military forces were engaged in a series of confl icts along the northwestern borders of the territories consolidated under the East India Company’s banner. It was through the Afghan and Sikh Wars that British expansion into central Asia reached its limits, the Company formally annexing Sind and Punjab but failing to establish a loyal satellite government in Afghanistan. Together, these three consecutive wars brought the northern Indian frontier to popular attention. Seeking to capitalize on public interest in these struggles for British supremacy in India, theatre managers transformed each of these wars into lavish stage spectacles that resonated with an unmistakably patriotic fervor. Dramatically refiguring foreign conquest as a national, moral duty, the plays promoted popular patriotic support for Britain’s continued military presence in India. The stage spectacles inspired by the Afghan and Sikh wars of the 1840s interest us here because they established the contours of the tradition that would later shape theatrical treatments of the 1857 Mutiny. In 1838, in an attempt to stop Russia’s southward expansion towards India’s borders, the British government engineered a plan to invade Afghanistan, depose its Russia-friendly ruler Dost Muhammed, and install the pro-British Shah Shuja in his place. In early August 1839, after a year of intense fighting under difficult conditions, British forces captured Kabul, the Afghan capital. It took a full-scale invasion to seize the Afghan throne; alone, Shah Shuja could not hold onto it. Widely unpopular, the British puppet was fi nally deposed and executed in 1842. In the face of overwhelming opposition, British military forces withdrew from Kabul and retreated back across the Indus; Dost Muhammed reclaimed the throne, and Britain abandoned its plans to secure Afghanistan as an allied state (Lawrence James 1997: 87–98; Farwell 1972: 4–10). Oddly enough, the Afghanistan debacle was memorialized in the theatre as a British victory. In April 1843, a full year after the assassination of Shah Shuja and the evacuation of British forces from Kabul, Astley’s raised the curtain on what the playbill called “a new Grand Easter, Military, Equestrian and Dramatic Spectacle, written by G. Almar . . . under the title of The Affghanistan War! or, the Revolt of Cabul! and British Triumphs in India” (Saxon 1968: 144). 2 As the title of the piece strongly suggests, British intervention in Afghanistan is depicted as both just and triumphant, the play depicting “the whole of the Splendid Achievements of the British Arms.” Anticipating the journalistic pretensions of The Storming and Capture of Delhi and other Mutiny plays, Astley’s management advertised The Affghanistan War! as a historical documentary, a “graphic representation” of “the late eventful Wars in India.” To this end, the timing of the play was critical, for it appeared not during but after the Afghan

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campaign, lending the theatrical enterprise an air of objective historical distance from the events it sought to “graphically represent.” Those events were well-chosen to create a spectacular celebration of British successes in a war that the play’s audience knew had been a disastrous failure. The play presents the imposition of Shah Shuja on the throne as a “restoration” of Afghanistan’s rightful ruler. Shuja’s “splendid entrée” is accompanied by “a grand military brass band,” which continues to play as the British “army of the Indus” marches across the stage, musically uniting the interests of Shah Shuja and the British army in a spectacular convergence of military might and political right. Despite the Afghan massacre of the retreating British army, the piece celebrates the campaign as a British triumph. Moreover, the play invests the war with a moral justification, the playbill hailing the invasion of Afghanistan as “the British Lion’s” appropriate response to “the treachery of the Afghans.” While the sights and sounds of battle in an exotic location immerse the audience in sensual delights, the play’s careful recharacterization of the conflict makes the spectacle an interesting piece of patriotic propaganda. As in the twenty-plus Crimean War plays produced in the 1853–54 season, theatrical pleasure serves a serious political function, as historical events are reconfigured to better reflect the public myths of national heroism and imperial prestige (Bratton 1980: 120–2). For Britain, the First Afghan War was a resounding defeat which severely damaged its reputation as an invincible force in southern Asia. The withdrawal from Afghanistan—punctuated by the infamous massacre at the Khyber Pass—strongly suggested that Company forces were overextended. This inglorious retreat from Afghanistan inspired militant uprisings in the northwestern provinces of British India: Sind (1845–46) and Punjab (1848–49). In both cases, local rulers sought to free themselves of British influences but succeeded only in convincing officials of the need for full incorporation of these kingdoms into Company territory. Historically, the Sikh Wars of the 1840s marked the end of British expansion in the region, the annexations of the Sind and Punjab kingdoms concluding a ninety-year campaign to conquer India and bring it under British rule (Lawrence James 1997: 118). Like the Mutiny that would follow a decade later, the Sikh Wars were popularly perceived as being rooted in unjustifiable insurrections, and like the 1857 Mutiny, they inspired a host of theatrical productions. When considered together, these plays reveal much about how the mid-century stage homogenized substantially different events by recasting them in entertainments with strikingly similar ideological resonances. All of the dramatizations of the Sikh Wars are strikingly similar in plot and effect. “Victory,” “triumph,” and “conquest” echo through their titles and associated playbills. Quite unabashedly, they celebrate Britain’s moral and military supremacy over the Sikhs who, like the Afghans before them, are portrayed as treacherous, deceitful, and rebellious. Curtains open to

166 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter reveal rajahs in sumptuous Indian palaces plotting to drive out the British once and for all. Motivated by personal greed or lust for British women, these indigenous leaders wage the wars that are the visual centerpieces of these plays. Spectacular portrayals of Indian indulgence are common in plays set in India, visual extravagance inciting in the audience both scopophilic desire and moral condemnation. This is the wealth of India that Britain seeks to make its own, yet here too is the proof of Indian cultural decadence and social depravity. If the visual splendors of Indian luxury— grand banquets, lavish feasts, and exotic ceremonies—are meant to inspire the British audience’s moral condemnation, the closing scenes of heroic battles, bloody sieges, and brave cavalry charges—all punctuated by martial music—are designed to rouse the audience to patriotic fervor.3 In every way, these plays delight the senses and direct the audience’s emotional responses, as empire-building is given a clear nationalist purpose, the invasion of distant foreign territories being cast as a moral mission undertaken for the defense of British values. This final defensive posturing is reinforced by the plays’ frequent depiction of British soldiers being called into duty and embarking for India. In some ways this action recalls the standard movement of characters in the perennial stage favorite, Robinson Crusoe, whose adventures both begin and end in the metropolitan center of England. Such geographical centering domesticates the plays’ more exotic scenes and links the distant colonial periphery to the very heart of the British Empire. In plays about Britain’s wars abroad, these scenes of troops departing Britain for overseas conflicts rally the audience’s support for the army and even subtly encourage participation in military service. In this way, mid-century plays about the Sikh Wars anticipated the early fi lms of troop movements in the Boer War, which J.H. DeLange argues inspired confidence in the nation’s military and celebrated the martial spirit that forged and defended the empire (DeLange 1991: xxiv). The Sikh Wars were the fi rst to be reported with the fullness and immediacy made possible by “The simultaneous development of the fast overland route, cheap postage, and the spread of national newspapers.” Staged military reenactments thus complemented the static pictorial images of British “commanders, Sikh soldiers, and dramatic battle scenes” that were circulated through the illustrated newspapers (Lawrence James 1997: 281). Titles and posters advertised the play’s pretensions to documentary function and historical accuracy. Take, for example, the playbill that announces Astley’s Mooltan and Goojerat (J.H. Stoqueler; 1849) as a drama “founded upon recent Oriental events,” or the bill that hails The Conquest of Scinde (Astley’s, 1845) as “an entirely new national spectacle . . . Founded on the Heroic achievements of the British Army in Northern India.” These claims of historicity are particularly evident in the advertisement for Astley’s 1846 production of The Sikh Invasion; or, Our Indian Victories of 1846. While the play’s subtitle has a sort of almanac quality, this sober objectivity is

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complicated by the small-print announcement on the playbill, which states that the piece is “founded on our late ASIATIC CONQUESTS . . . and has been written by a popular Dramatist, which by its novelty and Excellencies, shall uphold the established renown of the theatre.” On the one hand, the play is based on historical events, but on the other hand, it is an artful— even novel—creation of an imaginative mind. Astley’s offers both accuracy and innovation, blending history with entertainment. This dual function is highlighted in a later playbill for the piece, which first insists that “Holiday visitors of this popular Place of Amusement, have been provided with a well sustained and faithful representation, on an extremely liberal scale, of the Military Operations of the British and Sikh forces during the late Campaign in India” [emphasis added]. Having promised an authentic recreation of the war, the bill proceeds to temper its own claims to documentary veracity: [C]onsidering the very great difficulty of producing Battles, Marching Troops, Ambuscades, Sieges, &c., &c., before an audience with any degree of success, it has been got up in a manner which reflects the greatest credit upon the Management, and upholds the Established renown of the Theatre. It is impossible to speak too highly of the Performance; in all its parts it was perfect, the by-play excellent, and the whole piece instructive, as well as amusing, as it served to convey some idea of the immense apparatus of Modern Warfare; as a Theatrical or Equestrian Performance, there can be no doubt of its being the greatest effort of the kind ever witnessed in this Country. [emphasis added] (1846) Hyperbole aside, this quotation reveals how a play like The Sikh Invasion can self-consciously be both entertaining and instructive. As it delights audiences with impressive feats and spectacular images, it acquaints them with the mode of modern warfare, the staged battles simultaneously seeking to thrill and teach, excite and instruct. That The Sikh Invasion of the Punjab, which Lawrence James describes as a play fi lled with “warlike alarums, war cries, the thunder of cannon, bugle calls and British hurrahs in plenty,” also strives to impress is evident from the playbill’s grand promises of sensory delights (Lawrence James 1997: 282). Such lavish claims are often found on bills advertising Indiathemed plays, and they give us a sense not only of how India was portrayed on stage but also why it was such a popular topic for playwrights. Reviews, too, testify to both the scenic splendor and the widespread popularity of some of these plays. The Theatrical Times notes that despite the intense summer heat, The Sikh Invasion was a noted success at Astley’s, and that The Conquest of Lahore “nightly attracted crowded audiences.” Mooltan and Goojerat (Astley’s, 1849) promised audiences scenic delights on an “unprecedented scale of grandeur,” including the “interior of the palace of the Rajah of Mooltan,” the “wild charge of the Sikh Horse upon the British

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Artillery,” and the fi nal “flight of the Sikhs pursued by British cavalry.” To the usual cast of equestrian performers, The Conquest of Scinde (Astley’s, 1845) added an appearance by “two state elephants.” According to a review in The Clown of London, this latter play “brings before the wondering eyes of the transportive play-goers a marvellous series of hair-breadth escapes and combats against awful odds, and more feats of British valour, and displays of Afghan treachery than we imagined could characterize one war, of whatever duration it might be” (1845: 5–6). This comment, though brief, conveys quite clearly the attractions of this type of entertainment. It is both emotionally evocative and visually appealing, its scenic delights “transporting” the audience to the site of battle, where they cheer brave British troops to victory over their dastardly Indian foes. And, like other entertainments of its type, it is quite powerful in its ability to align the disparate interests of its audience with larger national and imperialist ideologies (Bratton 1991; Russell 1995: 64). As they entertain their audiences and reconstruct historical events, these Indian war plays exude a martial energy that must certainly have inspired a patriotic fervor, for the lavish theatrical celebrations of Britain’s victories feature triumphal military marches, the heroic feats of British soldiers, and allegorical representations of Britannia triumphant. The wars of conquest through which Britain extended and consolidated its hold over India were thus celebrated and commemorated on the stage, in plays that attracted audiences by their promises of spectacular stage effects, historical accuracy, and resonance with contemporary events. Theatrical interest in these early nineteenth-century confl icts waned in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny, which quickly became the defi ning moment in Britain’s relationship with India, assuming visual and dramatic primacy of place in popular entertainments. This topical usurpation is evident, for example, in Imre Kiralfy’s historical spectacle India, featured as part of the 1895 Empire of India Exhibition. As Breandan Gregory has noted, the play recounted more than nine hundred years of Indian history, culminating in Victoria’s coronation as Empress in 1877 (Gregory 1991: 152). The play consists of nine scenes, divided unevenly into two acts. Act one opens with the eleventh-century Muslim conquest of India and ends in the late seventeenth century. Act two takes up the story nearly two centuries later, opening on the 1857 departure of British troops from Portsmouth, bound for the Indian provinces in rebellion. Between the two acts, Britain’s progressive military conquest of the country is kept hidden by the curtain. The whole of Britain’s history in India is thus reduced to three brief scenes: the suppression of the Mutiny; the declaration of Victoria as Empress of India; and a fi nal “grand apotheosis,” featuring a procession of “the makers of British India” (Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, etc.). This scenic arrangement has three immediate effects. First, as Gregory points out, Britain’s possession of India is visually rendered as the logical progression of the subcontinent’s historical development: the

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play’s scenic arrangement naturalizes the imperial order (1991: 166–7). Furthermore, two centuries of aggressive British military activity in India are eliminated from the historical panorama, being reduced—and this is the third effect—to the nation’s defensive response to the 1857 Mutiny. In other words, Britain’s long series of bloody conquests is replaced by a single scenic celebration of the nation’s victory over rebel colonial forces. Such a historical compression repositions the Mutiny at the beginning of what we discover in the fi nal scene to be Britain’s assimilation of India into its own imperial identity, an incorporative act graphically represented by Victoria’s coronation as India’s empress. Although Gregory argues that India is distinct in its overt claims to authenticity and historical verisimilitude, it shares in many of the traditions we have seen were common to theatrical representations of India: the play makes claims to historical veracity; Indian religious practices are emphasized as the region’s cultural core; British intervention in local affairs is justified on moral and historical grounds (Gregory 1991: 152, 171). There is undoubtedly much that remains to be said about this play, but the key thing to notice in terms of the present discussion is the central role occupied by the Mutiny in this dramatized history. It stands as both the end of India’s religious mysticism and the beginnings of orderly rule by an “Eastern Empress, Western Queen” (Kiralfy 1895: 1). Blending amusement with instruction, Kiralfy’s play transforms its viewers into eyewitnesses to the historical trajectory of Britain’s conquest of India, a trajectory culminating in a formal incorporative act that is itself motivated by the infamous events of 1857. Like the Mutiny novels that form the core of Gautrum Chakravarty’s study, Kiralfy punctuates his spectacular replaying of India’s historical script with the Mutiny, making it the central moment separating India’s barbaric past from its modern imperial present (Chakravarty 2005: 112–3). In such a production, the Mutiny serves as the moment that defi nes Britain’s relationship with India and, in consequence, characterizes Britain as a nation, a people, and an imperial power.

FROM HEADLINES TO SPOTLIGHTS: THE STORMING AND CAPTURE OF DELHI Like earlier plays chronicling Britain’s military engagements in India, the fi rst Mutiny plays to reach the stage served a vital documentary function, animating and illustrating the conflict for a curious domestic audience: These spectacular reconstructions of scenes from imperial campaigns were the equivalent of newsreels, and were an exciting and immensely popular entertainment for Londoners and their families until the end of the century. India, as seen from the stalls at Astley’s, was a remote, exotic

170 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter land where the British triumphed over wild-eyed savages, whose images were familiar from the illustrated papers. (Lawrence James 1997: 282) In plays such as The Storming of the Bastille (1789) and The Battle of the Alma, Astley’s Amphitheatre, which specialized in military spectacles, reenacted for London crowds battles that had been fought just weeks before (Russell 1995: 63). This immediacy of engagement has prompted both Antony Coxe and Lawrence James to liken Astley’s military recreations to the newsreel, their parallel invocation of analogical visual media accurately capturing the documentary function of the Victorian military spectacle (Coxe 1980: 112; Lawrence James 1997: 282). The stage, as we have seen, routinely functioned as a venue for the transmission of imperial news and information. There is an unmistakably journalistic quality within Victorian military recreations.4 In many ways, the Mutiny dramas reflect, to varying degrees, their theatrical heritage, restaging, with aggressive claims to verisimilitude, the key players and places involved in this momentous event in the history of British India. The Era’s review of The Sepoy Revolt at Liverpool’s Park Theatre, for example, recognized the production’s pretensions to verisimilitude: “as [the author] has furnished his descriptions of the various localities of the mutiny from his own experience in India, the accuracy of the situations are placed beyond a doubt” (31 January 1858: 11). The Era echoed this sentiment in its review of Edmund Glover’s Indian Revolt at the Glasgow Theatre Royal, calling the production “at once remarkable for magnifi cence of appointment, vividness of depiction, truthfulness of detail, and [exhibiting] a startling reality that we have never seen equaled on this stage” (15 April 1860: 13). To further illustrate the documentary ambitions of the Victorian stage, I would like to return for a moment to the play with which this chapter opened: C.A. Somerset’s The Storming and Capture of Delhi. This particular script is unique in its focus on the battle for Delhi rather than the events unfolding in Cawnpore and Lucknow, the two cities that dominated later Mutiny dramas (Lloyd 2001: 175; Brantlinger 1988: 204). 5 Consistent with its title, the focus of this play is on the fall of Delhi as the symbol of British victory over rebel forces, an interpretation that is understandable given the status of the city as the administrative center of the Raj and the recency of its recapture at the time of the play’s production.6 Though British forces recaptured the city of Delhi from sepoy troops in rebellion on 20 September 1857, it was more than a month before the British public received news of the city’s fall. When Astley’s restaged the conquest of Delhi a month later, on 23 November, it was, in one sense, recreating history in its invocation of a conflict already settled. And yet, given the delays in communications from India, the late September seizure of Delhi was still fairly recent news when The Storming and Capture of Delhi was conceived. There was thus a sense of immediacy in this dramatic portrayal, for though the battle for

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Delhi had already concluded, the communications delay meant that the Mutiny remained a current event for the British public. In the weeks leading up to the play’s premiere, the headlines of the London Times repeatedly proclaimed “The Fall of Delhi,” “The Storm of Delhi,” and “The Capture of Delhi and the Relief of Lucknow.” Blurring the line separating information from entertainment, these headlines were echoed in bold type on the playbills announcing “The Storming and Capture of Delhi” at Astley’s. This convergence of journalism and entertainment is perfectly consistent with the documentary tendencies we have already seen operating in the Victorian military drama. I am more interested here in this particular play’s rhetorical and symbolic registers, which are less obvious though more consequential. Although one critic labeled the play the work of the “war-chronicler of the period,” the drama of war is curiously repressed in The Storming and Capture of Delhi, no doubt to its audience’s relief. The Times critic goes on to praise this representational absence: “We should add that, to the infi nite credit of Mr. W. Cooke [Astley’s manager], every attempt to gratify a morbid taste by the representation of revolting scenes of horror is scrupulously avoided” (30 November 1857: 4f). Echoing this sentiment is a review in Punch, which reassures its readers that the play’s “author has had the good taste . . . to omit any attempt at reproducing the horrors of the Indian crisis” (26 December 1857: 259). A good example of the play’s refusal to provide full dramatic realization to the more gratuitous elements of violence associated with the rebellion and its suppression appears near the midpoint of the drama. Having retrieved a group of British men and women from the clutches of “The Rebel Sepoys,” General Wilson strides forward and hails their “Providential rescue. Parents, bereft of your Dear Children, point out the fiendish murderers who shed the blood of innocence. From the cannon’s mouth blow and scatter them to countless atoms. But fi rst for the proof that they are really guilty” (Somerset 1857: 18). Three sepoys are brought forward, denounced by one weeping woman, and on that evidence alone are found guilty and tied to cannons. Wilson then tells the women to retire. His chivalrous gesture might well be directed at the audience, for at this point “the Act drop falls scarcely down. A voice is heard to say ‘Fire,’ and a volley of artillery and loud shrieks announces that execution has been done on the assassins” (1857: 18). The audience’s desire for vengeance, thinly disguised as justice, is satisfied by sound and not sight, by thunder rather than blood. Some members of the audience may have been disappointed by the suppression of direct representations of violence, having been lured into the theatre by the playbill’s boldly announced promise that the “rebels . . . as just Punishment of their Mutiny are ordered to be blown from the muzzles of the guns!” Of course, the bold, all-caps announcement of violence is tempered by the fi ne-print disclaimer, “are ordered to be.” Although the playbill boldly announces that the mutineers are “blown from the muzzles

172 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter of the guns!” the fi ner print indicates that this retributive action takes place off stage. A similar elision occurs as the play draws towards its close. Gesturing to the besieged city, Colonel Havelock rouses his men, telling them to storm “Delhi. For all the Innocent Blood that has been shed, justice demands from you just Retribution. Kill all the mutineers when you meet in arms but spare the native women and children now. Soldiers rush like lions to the Breech, and Heaven crown our course with victory” (Somerset 1857: 29). Havelock’s speech mobilizes the soldiers on stage and prepares the play’s audience for the bloodletting that is to follow, but our anticipation of violence is checked by the freezing of the action and the opening of the scene to reveal “the ramparts and city of Delhi which will be stormed and captured by British troops” (1857: 29). As in the earlier scene, the play stops short at the threshold of horror, leaving to the imagination the full realization of scenes too disturbing to show. Once again, the language of the script carries a double meaning. Though it promises that the city “will be stormed and captured,” either in the next, unperformed, scene, or offstage, this prediction of the Mutiny’s fi nal, bloody resolution remains suspended at the drama’s close: Suppressions (of voice in pantomime, for instance, or sound and movement in the fi xed tableau) served to control the excesses of a theatre committed to the exploitation of spectacle. The wordless image could smooth over what otherwise seemed too disturbing to be capable of staging. If tableaux or pictorial dances were intended as visual stimuli, they also emblematically silenced what was felt to be ‘too much,’ resolving into pleasing pictorial unity the complexities (aesthetic, political) that the union of things too shockingly disparate might convey. Tableau was suppression, but suppression offering a new sort of dramaturgical decorum. . . . [T]ableau made [spectators] conscious of theatrical motion by attempting to suppress it, freezing the living performances into pictorial stillness. (Peters 2001: 298–9) The stop-action tableau intervenes to perpetually postpone the enactment of the fi nal scene, an episode which the playbill hails as the “glorious victory of the British.” By stopping short of this consummation, the play commemorates a key moment in the history of the Mutiny, celebrates military ardor without the stains of blood or violence, champions will and virtue over action, and refrains from prematurely giving closure to a war still raging half a world away.7 While it both promises and postpones resolution, the play’s concluding tableau serves an additional function, highlighting the virtues that, once tested, have emerged triumphant through the course of the action: justice, mercy, and honor. By shifting the execution of the rebels offstage, the play can deliver both vengeance and mercy. This, I would argue, is the play’s true

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agenda, the ideological substance behind the spectacular absence noted by Punch and the Times. For we recall Punch’s commendation of the management’s “good taste . . . to omit any attempt at representing the horrors of the Indian crisis,” and consider how this dramatic elision exerts tension on the play’s documentary mission. Out of respect for the audience’s sensibilities, the play stops short of the full representation of historical events, a complex balancing similarly observed in C.H. Stephenson’s Pindee Singh, the Pearl of Oude (Royal Alfred, 1868): The main object of this Drama is to shadow forth as slightly as possible the social and religious machinery of the Indian Outbreak of 1857, without shocking the spectator with its horrors, and yet make him feel interested in the fate of the heroine, whose pure love triumphs over the false doctrines in which she has been so carefully educated. (Stephenson 1868: 3) This description makes clear the difficulties attending any dramatic representation of the Mutiny: the need to suppress the representation of graphic violence which, left unchecked, would not only limit the drama’s appeal but overshadow its ideological message. Despite its restrained representation, The Storming and Capture of Delhi managed to inspire an enthusiastic response from its audience, as its critics recorded: “British enthusiasm is thoroughly stirred up, and we are far from sure that if the Sepoy actors held out too long, a reinforcement from the pit would not storm the orchestra and whack the traitors” (Punch 26 December 1857: 259). This comical prediction reveals the tenuousness of the line separating audience from actor, spectator from soldier. What Punch describes is a compelling alignment of the audience with Britain’s military mission. The play’s very careful scenic arrangement and dramatic gestures roused the patriotic spirit of the audience, encouraging active— even violent—opposition to the rebels’ cause. The piece exceeded its mandate to entertain, rallying its audience to attack the nation’s enemies, sham though they may be. Theatre historian J.S. Bratton notes a similar phenomenon in many of the plays that took up the subject of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s: “the concentrating, simplifying lens of popular art was still needed to transmute the war for its audience, and the audience for the war” (Bratton 1980: 119–20). Bratton’s formulation is key to understanding the mediating function of theatrical entertainments like The Storming and Capture of Delhi, which translated distant, complicated events for a domestic audience that was itself politically and ideologically realigned by the staged spectacle. The Storming and Capture of Delhi informs its audience of recent events in a far-off place, shocks them with startling portrayals of the horrors of war, and perhaps most importantly, places them at the scene of events both geographically and historically removed, inviting them to witness and even

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participate in the imperial crisis unfolding simultaneously on the plains of India and in the ring at Astley’s. No wonder, then, that the theatre critic for the Times hailed the play as a theatrical achievement which maintained Cooke’s status as “war-chronicler of the period.” The play’s documentary impulses are physically embodied in one of its central characters: Frank Foz Fix, a writer and photographic artist for the Illustrated London News. Fix certainly plays an important role in the plot of the piece—saving Mrs. Hewson and her children from the rebels—but he also serves as a reminder of the play’s authenticity, as he sketches the battle scenes that would inform and entertain the ILN’s readers, some of whom would also have been in the theatre’s audience. In the character of Frank Fix, in other words, The Storming and Capture of Delhi bridges the worlds of journalism and entertainment, inviting its audience to think of themselves not merely as playgoers but as eyewitnesses to—even potential participants in—the defense of the nation’s imperial mission.

9

The Empire Needs Men Mutiny Plays and the Mobilization of Masculinity The one amongst you who will volunteer his life, let that man raise his hand! (Every hand on the instant raised—picture). True British pluck!! Good! I accept you all. Listen. We are the sole protectors of the little ones. Pleading women, weeping children call upon us now to act as men. Tonight not one of them may remain alive. But if they must die, we must die fi rst defending them! Immediate service calls to me. Here are my orders! . . . Place yourselves between the defenceless and the foe. Remember the regiment you belong to, and when you strike, strike home! For them—the helpless and the innocent—your country and your Queen! —George Daventry, Indian Mutiny (1892)

In the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857, the rapid suppression of the rebels and the severe retribution visited upon those who were perceived to be guilty of atrocities committed against colonial noncombatants inspired renewed celebrations of British cultural superiority and served as confi rmation of the moral soundness of the country’s imperial project (MacKenzie 1999: 280–1; Peck 1998: 72). As empire-building became reconfigured as a stand against armed resistance, Robinson Crusoe gave way to Sir Henry Havelock as the mythic embodiment of Britain’s imperial mission (Dawson 1994: 79–116). Although the heroic figurehead of empire took on a new appearance, this central symbolic embodiment of Britishness retained its most essential ideological associations. A soldier rather than a builder, the imperial hero Havelock nevertheless shared with Crusoe, his colonial explorer predecessor, a definitive masculinity and sense of honor that set him apart from the villains and indigenous peoples with whom he shared theatrical space (Mangan 1995: 18–9). This symbolic realignment helped to create the image of the “‘masculine’ Anglo-Saxon” that would come to dominate the cultural imaginary of the late nineteenth century (Hyam 2002: 170). Defi ning masculinity in terms of martial prowess had wide racial and cultural implications, the reorganization of the British Indian army in the wake of the 1857 revolt effectively dividing India’s various ethnic groups into “martial” and “non-martial” races, categories that translated into a gendered idiom that contrasted Punjabi manliness with Bengali effeminacy. The Mutiny, in short,

176 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter inspired a reconsideration of masculinities, both British and Indian (Sinha 1995: 447; Killingray 1999: 14–6; Mukherjee 2003: 138–9). Linking manhood with nationhood, Mutiny-themed dramas exhibit an interest in the intersection of masculinity and national identity. This nexus of masculinity and nationalism is evident from the earliest theatrical treatments of the Mutiny, the theatrical archive complicating current critical assessments of literary and cultural responses to the insurrection. With only novels before her, Nancy Paxton argues that the 1890s witnessed a readjustment of gender norms that emphasized “male aggressiveness as one of the racial signs of Englishness” (1999: 127). But her example of Ralph Bathurst, who “questions his own manhood” in George Henty’s Rubjub the Juggler (1893), while perhaps a novelty in the world of fiction, merely echoes a lengthy theatrical tradition of reluctant heroes forced to embrace an aggressive masculinity on India’s fields of battle. To demonstrate that the ideological shift that Paxton locates in 1890s fiction has its roots in 1850s drama, I turn to a play we have already seen—The Storming and Capture of Delhi (Astley’s, 1857), which crafted a precisely gendered celebration of Britain’s military triumph. In The Storming and Capture of Delhi, Matilda temporarily assumes a masculine, authoritarian role upon the death of her father, General Wheeler.1 As “assassins rush down the rocks,” the “noble” Matilda shields “his lifeless corpse” (Somerset 1857: 23). Shielding the body of her erstwhile protector from possible desecration at the hands of the mutineers, Matilda takes on the attributes of heroic masculinity, shooting and killing two rebels before announcing that she will lead the charge against Delhi to avenge her father’s death (1857: 23, 26). Where most accounts of the historical Miss Wheeler hyper-feminize her by focusing on her heroic defiance of the rebels in defense of her own sexual purity (Sharpe 1993: 71–2), the emphasis in this play is her decidedly masculine courage and patriotism: Oh, how I glory in being a soldier’s daughter and above all a British soldier. What a pity I was born of the gentle sex, as the gentlemen call us by courtesy, but nature oftentimes performs strange freaks, and gives to weakness more than manly strength. Nightingale, all woman, yet in mind fully equal, if not superior, to man himself. (Somerset 1857: 8)2 At fi rst glance it would seem as though The Storming and Capture of Delhi spotlights female heroism at the expense of masculine integrity. After all, in this play, soldiers don women’s clothing for strategic advantage, a great general dies under the protection of his daughter, and a maid takes up arms against the rebels. Although there are plenty of individual elements in the play that represent assaults on traditional concepts of masculinity, other, extra-textual, evidence shows that audiences did not see in the play a sustained assault on masculine norms, and that the play did not sell itself as a celebration of feminine empowerment. The playbill omits all mention of

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feminine heroics, perhaps to make more room for the bold announcements of “Brave General Havelock’s” arrival and the triumphant “Charge of Our Brave Troops.” Similarly, Punch’s reviewer says scarcely a word about the play’s women, instead lavishing praise on the “heroic recklessness” of the soldiers (26 December 1857: 259). Indeed, the play’s closing moment rescues British masculinity by reasserting more familiar gender norms: having vowed to lead the charge against the rebels holding Delhi, Matilda, “overcome by her feelings . . . sinks into the arms of Mrs. Hewson” (Somerset 1857: 29).3 Following Matilda’s surrender of physical strength, Colonel Hewson gestures the two women offstage and then orders his men into battle. Temporarily endowed with rhetorical authority and moral clarity, Matilda nevertheless succumbs to hysteria in the end, sacrificing a potential gender transcendence for the triumphant display of British masculinity in defense of helpless womanhood. In this way, The Storming and Capture of Delhi inverts traditional gender roles in order to reinscribe, in its fi nal scene, those very gender norms it initially called into question. This restoration of men and women to their “proper spheres” echoes the ideological trajectory of other Mutiny dramas: Highland Jessie Brown (Queen’s, 1858), The Drapery Question (Adelphi, 1857), and The Fugitives (Grecian, 1858), to name but a few. In each of these plays, women temporarily assume “masculine” authority only to retreat into emotion, insanity, domesticity, or feminine industry while the men, initially cowardly and uncertain, rush forward in search of heroism on the battlefield. To be sure, women in the Mutiny melodramas are often invested with masculine qualities of bravery, strength, and leadership. But in this appropriation of normative male attributes, such women act as a standard against which the inadequacy of their male counterparts can be measured. Additionally, these masculinized women (Boucicault’s Jessie Brown [in Jessie Brown] and Conquest’s Susanna Layal [in The Fugitives], for example) only temporarily assume leadership roles traditionally held by men: the curtain inevitably closes on the restoration of gender norms and the triumph of militaristic masculinity. The plays’ treatment of gender roles mirrors their treatment of the Mutiny itself, raising the possibility that the native rebellion will be successful only to show the fi nal defeat of the rebels and the revivification of British imperial authority, translated as militaristic masculinity.

A PLAY OF PATRIOTIC PURPOSE: THE DRAPERY QUESTION Citing David Gilmore’s book-length study of masculinity, historian J.A. Mangan describes “manliness [as] a cultural construct with the important concomitant of martial expendability” (1995: 12). The social significance of the self-sacrificial masculine imperative forms the central concern

178 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter of Charles Selby’s The Drapery Question; or, Who’s for India? (Adelphi, 1857). Selby’s farce, which is unique among the mid-century Mutiny plays in having a wholly metropolitan setting (such domestic settings being fairly common among the Mutiny dramas of the 1890s), traces the development of a proper masculine spirit of military duty among a group of men who are initially reluctant to trade the comforts of the shop for the dangers of the battlefield. Ultimately, the men come to embrace the idea of self-sacrifice as both a masculine and a patriotic duty, as Selby’s play vividly, if humorously, demonstrates how the Mutiny triggered a theatrical reassessment of British manhood. Just three months after the full scale of the Mutiny became part of the public’s consciousness, Selby staged a play not about the Mutiny itself, as we might expect, but about Britain’s response to the news.4 Despite the widespread circulation of firsthand accounts of the events unfolding in India and the availability of sensational stories from the front lines of the confl ict, Selby chose not to bring the sights and sounds of colonial rebellion before the eyes of his metropolitan audience, opting to write a small-scale patriotic farce rather than a thrilling military spectacle. The Drapery Question allows the Mutiny to remain a distant event, its chilling details left to the imagination. Focusing not on India but on England, the play’s broad comedy pointedly investigates British masculinity as it tests public commitment to empire. While the play is obviously a call for popular support for retributive action against the rebels, it is also a critique of the emasculating effects of British culture. The Drapery Question was written for the Adelphi, a well-established West End venue that specialized in comedies and melodramas.5 Set in a draper’s shop in Regent’s Street—a location not far from the door of the Adelphi, located on the Strand—The Drapery Question features characters that represented local figures familiar to the theatre’s audience. Indeed, the reviewer for The Daily News took special note of the play’s familiar setting, noting the “lifelike fidelity of the sketch” (29 October 1857). Along with his counterpart at The Era, this reviewer recorded the audience’s favorable reception of the piece, noting “loud applause” and “shouts of laughter” (The Era, 8 November 1857). As the curtain rises, we see a group of linendraper’s shopmen who are upset after reading an article in the Times calling for volunteers to enlist in the army. Mr. Doohem Shoodler, whose name indicates his devotion to masculine duty [Do-HIM SHOULD-ler], berates the men for not embracing the role of soldier in Britain’s moment of need: SHOOD. It’s a burning shame that such a lot of hulking, broad shouldered, big whiskered, able bodied young swells as you are should skulk behind the counters, when you should be scaling batteries, and handling lace and ribbons, when you could do so much good with muskets and sabres.

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WHEED. What! would you have us give up our genteel comforts? PUSHER. Our personal elegancies? TEAZER. Our elevated positions? OGLER. (sentimentally.) Hour ‘ighmeal haspirations? SHOOD. Yes, you’re not Britons, if you wouldn’t. (Selby 1858: 4) Shoodler concludes the exchange with a line that intriguingly connects the seemingly disparate conceptual threads of self-sacrifice, Britishness, and masculinity, a connection that appears repeatedly in theatrical treatments of the Mutiny dramas. Reluctant to sacrifice ease and comfort, the men dismiss the idea of enlisting in the army. Shoodler cannot believe that the men are so willing to “stand tamely by, and see our countrymen and women butchered” (1858: 4). He tries to overcome their objection to mix with “common” soldiers by suggesting they form their own “genteel” regiment of drapers. This idea, too, is rejected: SHOOD. Then you refuse to be heroes? ALL. Yes—yes! SHAVER. This pattern won’t wash. We prefer letting well alone, and sticking to our counters, and our domestic comforts. SHOOD. But, have you no patriotism, no feeling for the cause? SHAVER. Lots! but we don’t like the prospect of wooden legs, and ninepence a day. Let the government give us companionship with our equals, and the certainty of promotion by merit, and we’ll march to a man. It’s too much to ask us to leave our comfortable homes and prospects to associate with our inferiors, without a hope of ever being able to elevate ourselves. (1858: 6) This last speech clearly protests aristocratic privilege in the army, highlighting the class tensions that overshadow patriotism and interfere with the nation’s mobilization of all its potential resources. There is, of course, a limit to Shaver’s radicalism: although he wants to remove the current obstacles to promotion by merit, he insists on the desirability of some hierarchical divisions within the army to recognize merit. It’s easy to imagine that Shaver’s speech ventriloquized the general sentiments of the Adelphi’s audience of shopkeepers and clerks. Selby’s play uses the Mutiny as an opportunity to question official military practices that have seriously compromised Britain’s ability to address such a crisis. 6 At the same time, Selby’s play suggests that the real problem may lie not with military policies but with the character of modern British men. As Ogler says, “if we’re to be tweated as common soldiers, we’ll stick to our counters, and devote our ‘arts and henergies to the service of the ladies” (Selby 1858: 7). Here, bourgeois identity, rooted in commerce, is expressly connected to feminine comforts. Gender roles are thus implicated in the obsessive

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urge to maintain middle-class distinctions, the selling of feminine fi nery displacing the defense of imperiled womanhood as the appropriate sphere for middle-class masculine activity. Situated at this intersection of gender and class, The Drapery Question gives these broad social issues a patriotic spin: to win the war in India—incidentally safeguarding Britain’s access to the very fabrics the drapers have devoted themselves to—middle-class men must embrace a normative masculine identity that transcends class distinctions. As in The Storming and Capture of Delhi, women are given primary roles in the play’s exhibition of proper masculine behavior. Ginger Bob, too short and fat to enlist in the army, is approached by Anna Maria Mittens, a housemaid, who has a plan “to shame the gentlemen into being soldiers” (1858: 8). But it is Miss Swansdown, a fashionable shopwoman, who announces the play’s gender agenda. In the second scene, Swansdown delivers a passionate indictment of the masculine invasion of feminine occupations: SWANS. I’m positively certain that the world is coming to an end— the revolutions that are taking place in all our institutions are perfectly appalling! What with machinery, foreign competition, and (sternly) the encroachments of the men—women will soon be driven from all their occupations, and considered in no other light than Circassian slaves, without the consolation of their Cashmere shawls. Oh, the degradation is frightful. Go where you will there’s nothing but men! (spitefully) Men—men—milliners, stay makers, shirt makers, flower makers, straw bonnet makers, waistcoat makers, cooks, and—(savagely) linendraper’s assistants! All men—men—men! The monsters! I’ve no patience with them—so I’ve called a meeting of my fellow-sufferers, to concert plans to put them down, and regain our natural rights. (1858: 10–1) The tone of Miss Swansdown’s rant is unmistakable, as she describes in seething detail how men have invaded female fashion trades, leaving them without scope for proper occupations of their own. Forced out of the supply side of the market economy, the women can do little beyond consuming the clothing designed, produced, and sold by men. The ridiculous effect of this male appropriation of female fashion is vividly, and hysterically, displayed when Miss Swansdown’s fellow women’s rights activists appear on stage. Dressed in what the stage directions describe as “The extreme of modern fashion with large crinolines,” the women “endeavour to kiss each other . . . [but] their crinolines will not permit them” (1858: 2, 11). Embedded within the slapstick effect of ricocheting crinolines is a serious political statement: not only are these women rendered ridiculous by male-designed fashions, but their efforts to come together in a spirit of collective political action are thwarted by these male-engineered garments, which keep them physically

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separated. Encased in a cage of cloth, each woman is a walking indictment of the male-dominated fashion industry. This image—and its concomitant cultural statement—might have been lifted from the pages of contemporary illustrated periodicals such as Punch, whose 1857–58 volume is filled with absurd images of women encased in overly large cages of whalebone and drowning in a crinoline sea. Selby’s play thus engages with the popular press and redirects towards his dramatic call for military volunteers current cultural conversations about modern women’s fashion. In this single play we can see how distant colonial events might be seen as domestic issues of the most intimate sort, as the middle-class Englishwoman’s wardrobe becomes the front line of the battle for the defense of empire. Once the women have tamed their crinolines, Miss Swansdown brings them to order and offers a call to action: SWANS. Shall we continue in our present ignoble position, as the assistants of the men who have taken up our distaffs and crochet needles, and turned us out from the legitimate employments of our sex; or shall we take advantage of the present Indian crisis, and boldly strike for our women’s rights and privileges? . . . Now as ridicule is well known to be the strongest weapon to crush an abuse—I propose to you to join me in a plan to shame the monsters into the abandonment of their ladylike employment, and persuade them to take the Queen’s Bounty, and swell the ranks of our countrywomen’s avengers. (Selby 1858: 11–2) Here Miss Swansdown boldly proposes a women’s mutiny to reclaim properly feminine occupations while simultaneously forcing the shopmen to accept their duty to protect the nation’s imperial interests by avenging the innocent female victims of the Indian rebellion: a revolution abroad not only inspires but requires a revolution at home. Further echoing the patriotic parallel, the scene ends with an inspirational call to arms, sung to the tune of “The Campbells are Coming”:7 Tape, pins, and scissors, away, away! Rifles and sabres now carry the day, The men at whose cutting some folks may jeer Cut Indian Muslin as well as Cashmere. Rouse up, rouse up, to women restore Their silks and laces, be shopmen no more, Honour awaits you—leave Venus for Mars— Deal only in ribbons with crosses and stars. (1858: 13–4)

The song’s clever use of double entendre reminds the audience just how thoroughly British fashion is reliant on Indian textiles: the British economy needs Indian goods, and that means a redeployment of British men

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along the lines of production, away from the metropolitan point of sale and towards the colonial site of supply. This comic tune might have been ripped from the pages of Punch, whose satiric gaze fell repeatedly on the shopkeeper who put commercial interests before patriotic duty.8 Selby was not alone in chastising Britain’s legions of ribbon-cutters for their reluctance to trade scissors for sabres: in the weeks immediately preceding the opening of The Drapery Question, Punch printed more than half-a-dozen articles, illustrations, and poems on the subject. In a poem entitled “Drumming for the Drapers,” men are urged to “Spurn the effeminate shop” in favor of the more “manly and masculine work” of military service (3 October 1857, 138). Punch’s characterization of the clothing store as a feminine space motivates both action and costume in The Drapery Question, in which the shopmen actually hide in women’s clothing to escape the army recruiter. The 3 October volume of Punch includes a pair of full-page illustrations that capture two central preoccupations in Selby’s play and, in the absence of direct visual representations from the play’s performance, help us to imagine the staging of this peculiar dramatic piece. In figure 9.1, we see the recruiting sergeant, who we might imagine is Ginger Bob, inviting the surprised sales clerk to put his “shoulders” in the service of his country, leaving the ladies, his present customers, to fill in for him at the shop. Figure 9.2 nicely captures the revolutionary spirit of the Swansdown subplot and its celebration of female emancipation. This illustration makes clear the radicalism embraced by the women in Selby’s play. These women are marching into a battle of their own, waving a standard made from their garments and beating time on a hatbox. As their banner proclaims, these are women’s tools, and the keeping of the shop is women’s work. If the question in “Who will serve the Country?” is left unanswered in figure 9.1, figure 9.2 volunteers a correlative proclamation that makes possible the implied—but unspoken—masculine affi rmation. Shopmen may not initially heed the call to “Serve the Country,” but Britain’s women enthusiastically embrace the patriotic spirit of volunteerism, attending to matters of trade so that shop clerks can serve the nation’s greater military interests. Among the women in figure 9.2 are placed two pairs of scissors, recalling the two pairs of scissors carried by the shopmen in figure 9.1. Should the shopmen in the fi rst illustration heed the nation’s call and lay aside their tools of trade, the viewer is reassured that very capable hands are ready to take up the work. Even with this reassurance, there is some uncertainty surrounding the question posed by figure 9.1, for while figure 9.2 shows militant femininity marching to commercial action, figure 9.1, with its interrogative caption, cannot verify the existence of the patriotic masculinity ready to heed the call. It is a question that can only be answered by the immediate military enlistment of the picture’s implied male viewer. Along with the Crimean War and the Jamaican slave revolt, the Indian Mutiny was one of the mid-century crises that vividly demonstrated a need

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Figure 9.1. Britain’s Men Are Called to Duty: “Who Will Serve the Country?” Punch (1857): 140. Courtesy of Punch Ltd., http://www.punch.co.uk.

for increased military readiness as the commercial, maritime empire which privileged profit over territorial acquisition gave way to a militaristic model of armed defense and direct territorial control (Mangan 1995: 16; Hyam 2002; Tosh 2005: 66). Selby’s play thus participates in a larger cultural investigation of masculinity, using the Mutiny both as a catalyst for this

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Figure 9.2. Britain’s Women Answer the Call: “We’ll Serve the Shop.” Punch (1857): 141. Courtesy of Punch Ltd., http://www.punch.co.uk.

inquiry and as a remedy for the problems that are revealed in the process. Imperial service is here construed as a decidedly masculine endeavor that promises to reinvigorate mid-Victorian manhood. Highland Jessie Brown extends The Drapery Question’s interrogation of gender, economy, and military service. Licensed for performance at the Queen’s Theatre in March 1858, the script reflects the venue’s association

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with the sorts of graphic melodramatic sensations that drew local audiences to this small, somewhat down-market theatre off Tottenham Court Road in the west of London.9 Very much a neighborhood theatre, the Queen’s catered primarily to the laboring classes, though it was located within easy distance of a more fashionable population of urban professionals. In 1858, W.B. Donne, the Examiner of Plays at the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, issued an unfavorable report on conditions at the Queen’s, citing inadequate ventilation and general dirtiness. Though conditions at the theatre had improved by 1860, at the time of the play’s licensing the Queen’s was in a fairly low state of disrepair, unable to attract the slightly more fashionable audiences it had long tried to court (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 136–52). Alone of the Mutiny dramas considered here, Highland Jessie Brown; or, Lucknow Rescued represents the massacre of British women directly, perhaps a reflection of its less fastidious, down-market audience. The fifth scene ends with Nana Sahib’s order to execute the female prisoners and to stuff their bodies into the well. The stage directions describe a panicked rush of women across the stage, falling down dead as shots are fi red. Before the scene drops, Nana Sahib snatches a baby from one of the women and throws it to its death (1858: 22). This bloody spectacle brings the play’s fi rst act to a close. Like The Drapery Question, Highland Jessie Brown debates the deployment of British masculinity in the service of the nation’s mercantile and military needs. In the latter play, this negotiation is carried through the opening dialogue between Sall Saucebox (named Bell Bounceabout in the Dramatis Personae) and Kit (originally listed as Izit) Canteen. Kit complains that Sall has been undermining his business by selling her own supply of rum to the soldiers he travels with. In her defense, Sall accuses Kit of overcharging the men for an inferior mixture of sour wine. Her own offering, in contrast, is “the stuff that’ll make you all as frisky as lambs and as bold as lions . . . the real Rum-down-your-throat . . . a drop of the beauty” (1858: 4–5). Sall markets her drink as a sort of masculine potion, a drink fit for Britain’s fighting forces. But Kit claims the competition is unjust, “a blessed thing indeed! Here a military licensed victualer, to have my custom taken away, and defied in my own proper sphere by a smuggler, a woman” (1858: 5). Echoing Selby’s earlier play, which was intended for a more middling audience of shopkeepers and clerks, Highland Jessie Brown considers economic and military service in terms of gender roles and strongly endorses a realignment of the proper orbits of the separate spheres, though these roles are given to characters lower on the social scale and rougher in manner, qualities they would have shared with the audience at the Queen’s. Once again, the Mutiny play does not merely dramatize a distant conflict: it brings that confl ict home by illustrating its immediate relevance to its spectators. Sall claims to be “a better man” than Kit, ready to march “at the head of the column” rather than “the tail,” where Kit is most generally found. After

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questioning Kit’s masculinity, Sall hails herself as “a true born Briton,” ready to follow the “fi fe and drum” wherever they may lead. She volunteers to spy on the enemy and report back with the Sepoy’s position and plans for attack. Captain Westland orders Kit to go with her. Kit shrinks from this command, but Westland insists: “No matter, Sir, you must go. Shorted as we are, men are of consequence. You must go and protect Sall” (1858: 5). Westland’s statement articulates contradictory presumptions of masculine behavior and marks Kit as simultaneously man and no-man. On the one hand, Kit is suited for Sall’s mission because he is expendable. The Captain distinguishes between men, defi ned as essential in this moment of crisis, and Kit, who seems notably less valuable: “I think Sall’s an admirable plan. If an attack is meditated we shall want every man—for we are not too numerous” (1858: 5). Sall agrees with Westland’s assessment of Kit’s usefulness: “He’s of no use—and if he gets murdered, it’s of no consequence” (1858: 5). Although “Men are of consequence,” Kit can be spared. Close on the heels of his dismissive evaluation, however, Westland elevates Kit to the status of Sall’s protector, thus reinscribing Kit’s masculinity while restraining Sall’s potential to challenge the prevailing model of female passivity which traditional models of masculinity require. The metamorphosis into manhood occasioned by the Mutiny is similarly enacted in Nana Sahib, a play licensed in 1863 for the Royal Victoria Theatre, a south of the Thames venue that catered to a predominantly local, working-class audience (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 14, 39). This script borrows heavily from George Conquest’s The Fugitives (Grecian, 1858), demonstrating how the earliest Mutiny dramas could be kept alive and fitted to new audiences and cultural contexts. In adapting this earlier script, the unknown playwright of Nana Sahib accentuates issues of class through the representation of the effete aristocrat Sir Thomas Watson, who spends much of the play complaining about the discomforts and inconveniences of India. He threatens to faint unless sprinkled with lavender water, worries about the state of his collar, and is carried across India on his back, “as helpless as a tortoise in Leadenhall market” (1863: 17, 41, 67). While the rebellion rages around him, putting women and children in harm’s way, Sir Thomas frets that his hair needs to be dyed and that his honey soap and razors have gone missing (1863: 67). Initially reluctant to put himself at risk, he ultimately casts aside his self-obsessed foppery when responsibility for the lives of the women and children is placed in his hands (1863: 85). Called upon to do his duty as a man and a Briton, Sir Thomas Watson is transformed from an effeminate aristocrat into a masculine hero, a protector of English womanhood (1863: 102). In Nana Sahib, the Mutiny crisis not only requires but inspires the reinvigoration of British masculinity through the acceptance of a self-sacrificial, martial imperative. Although his claims to aristocratic privilege make Sir Thomas an insufferable prig for much of the play, the working-class audience that frequented the Royal Victoria is encouraged to identify with him on the grounds of a shared ethnicity and

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to applaud the redemptive transformation that comes via a recognition of his duty to protect his countrywomen, a duty that transcends class barriers, being rooted in British masculinity. The conclusion of the military crisis in India in 1858 did not eliminate theatrical interest in the Mutiny. A series of colonial crises in the 1880s spawned increased anxieties about the security of the empire, creating new audiences for historical fiction and drama featuring the Mutiny of 1857 (Tosh 2005: 194). Though the Mutiny dramas of the 1880s and 1890s differ in many ways from their mid-century predecessors, featuring more complicated character motivations and multi-layered plots, the interrogation of masculinity remained a core component of Mutiny-themed plays. This thematic continuity is not surprising if we consider the centrality of masculinity within the prototypical Mutiny plays of the 1857/58 theatrical season as well as the widespread anxieties regarding masculine identities that captured so much cultural attention in the 1890s. Across four decades, dramatic representations of the Mutiny thus foregrounded the crises in British masculinity that were both occasioned by and resolved through the empire’s military needs.

10 Forging a Greater Britain The Highland Soldier and the Renegotiation of Ethnic Alterities The Campbells they are a’in arms, Their loyal faith and truth to show. Wi’ banners rattling in the wind, The Campbells are comin, Oho! Oho! –“The Campbells are Coming”

As we saw in Chapter 9, Victorian dramatists cast British manhood into the spotlight in plays that figured colonial rebellion as an assault upon British masculinity. But masculinity is a complicated concept, a category of identity that simultaneously informs and is inflected by social categories such as class and ethnicity. There were, in other words, a number of different “masculinities” available to Victorian men, which is perhaps why the theatre so urgently tried to articulate which precise variety of masculinity would best serve the nation’s needs in its moment of crisis. This may help explain why the dramas produced in the months immediately following the Mutiny of 1857 addressed the crisis in colonial control by exploring the boundaries of national character and the potential assimilability of Britain’s peripheral ethnic alterities.1 John MacKenzie has argued that by demonizing eastern culture, drama celebrated imperialism as “a great struggle with dark and evil forces, in which white heroes and heroines could triumph over black barbarism” (1986: 45). This dynamic is clearly evident in the Mutiny plays, which countered colonial insurrection with images of solidarity across the divides of class and ethnicity. Licensed for the Grecian, an Islington theatre that catered to a local audience of respectable tradesmen, clerks, and merchants, George Conquest’s The Fugitives (1858), to take one example, is filled with images of loyalty and union, the obvious antitheses to rebellion and the pursuit of localized autonomy. As an Irish officer in the Company army, Sir Thomas Watson represents the successful incorporation of peripheral cultures by the mechanisms of empire, a symbolic function confi rmed by his greeting of Frank Leonard: “There is no one here who can introduce us, so we’ll introduce ourselves. You are an Englishman, well I’m an Irishman. If we’re not exactly copatriots by birth, we are in arms, for I find you fought in the Crimea. So did I” (Conquest 1858: 8). Not “copatriots by birth,” Leonard and Watson’s patriotic identifications, at the local level, are discordant: one is Irish; the other

Forging a Greater Britain 189 is English. Yet both are British, a nationalist nomenclature admittedly not employed by Sir Thomas in this speech yet which resonates on the rhetorical borders of this exchange. Although they claim separate ethnic descriptors, a military threat to the larger national entity to which both men owe allegiance brings them together as “copatriots . . . in arms.” Because Britain’s imperial consciousness, as Douglas Peers (1997) has explained, was rooted in the military establishment, the military crisis that the Victorians knew as “the Mutiny” did more than cast doubt on the nation’s ability to maintain expansive territorial boundaries and to permanently subdue a foreign population. Britain’s status as an imperial power was at stake, raising broader questions about the nation’s identity and destiny, as Don Randall argues: [I]t is difficult to see something other than a moment of cultural condensation, a moment that consolidates and congeals a particular assembly of notions that previously have been only bruited and circulated, debated, upheld or rejected, pushed toward or away from the resonant centres of public speech. On that autumn afternoon in 1857 the midVictorian era engaged in defi ning its world, in forging its truths—about Englishness, about Indianness, about the relationship between England and India. These newly authorized truths were then bequeathed to the later nineteenth and even twentieth century, fi nding their way, as traces and as larger structures of thought and vision, into the many subsequent writings of the meaning of the British Empire and, more particularly, of those events known as the “Mutiny.” (2003: 15) Randall’s conclusions arise from his reading of the “fast-day sermons,” public orations delivered as part of the national day of fasting and prayer ordered by the Queen as a means of coping with the shocking news coming out of India in early October 1857. Yet his analysis of the broad cultural effects of the Mutiny and the British public’s response thereto applies equally well to the theatrical productions under consideration here. In place of foreign political concerns—i.e., India and the structures of imperial rule— the Mutiny plays focus on more domestic cultural agendas: masculinity, ethnicity, and social class. More to the point, the Mutiny plays exhibit a singular interest in exploring each of these issues as a condition of Britishness, so that theatrical representations of the Mutiny become investigations of British masculinity, British ethnicities, and British class identifications. Having examined, in Chapter 9, the Mutiny plays’ interrogation of gender norms and their patriotic mobilization of a martial model of masculinity, I now turn to a consideration of the plays’ deployment of ethnicity as an expression of both gender identities and national affi liations. Specifically, my focus in this chapter is on a trio of plays based on the legendary Jessie Brown, a young Scottish woman popularly heralded as the emblem of courage at the siege of Lucknow. My discussion will uncover not only why Jessie

190 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Brown loomed so large in the popular imagination, but how the theatre used this figure to resituate the “Celtic fringe” within a broader “British” identification: weaving a British banner from the threads of nationalism and gender, the three Jessie Brown plays mobilize a hyper-masculinized Scottishness that in turn represents an idealized Britishness, in character both martial and masculine. Scottish characters in the Mutiny dramas embrace a cultural and political duality that their Indian counterparts are either unwilling or unable to maintain. Although these characters proudly self-identify as Scots, they are very closely aligned with British interests. Immersed in their unique ethnicity, they nonetheless champion British value systems; they love their nation but are loyal to their empire. Simultaneously British and Other, the Scots characters in these plays challenge the very binary they affi rm: [T]he figure of the Highlander ultimately derives its power to resonate from its exotic quality, its unique ability to register as ‘other’ in the service of voicing the ideal British ‘self.’ . . . [T]he unique aspects of Highland masculinity are framed in a colonial/racial script that codes the rebellion as a struggle between Anglo-Saxon civility and native barbarity. Yet . . . the logic of colonial discourse seems to place the Highlander on the wrong side of the colonial binary. Neither ‘cool,’ ‘steadfast,’ ‘calm,’ nor ‘workmanlike’ (characteristics of the British fighting man), the Highlander character seems to have more in common with that of the ‘wild,’ ‘fanatic,’ ‘half-crazed’ native Sepoy. (McNeil 2000: 91) Rife with contradiction, the Scots soldier in the Mutiny dramas performs the same role he does in the Mutiny novels. He embodies ethnic alterity yet stands in stark opposition to Britain’s truly colonial Other: Indian sepoys who rebel against imperial authority, disregard western codes of “civilized” behavior, and violently embrace an independence that appears both myopic and barbarous in comparison to the Scots’ unwavering commitment to a Greater Britain.

THE CELTIC FRINGE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF BRITISHNESS Cultural critics Benedict Anderson (1983) and Homi Bhabha (1994) have compellingly argued for an understanding of “the nation” as a protean concept, its boundaries perpetually transgressed and its essential characteristics regularly redefi ned in the face of oppositions both within and without. From this perspective, the myth of national cultural homogeneity is in constant tension with the heterogeneous population that inhabits the

Forging a Greater Britain 191 nation. Although Anderson and Bhabha are working primarily from a narrative tradition, their analysis of the nation’s mutable nature is applicable to the theatrical context. Indeed, we can see this dynamic rearticulation of the nation at play in many of the Mutiny dramas, which explore the relative assimilability of divergent ethnicities beneath a British cultural banner in many ways defi ned by its capaciousness. The plays under consideration here do more than merely represent the Mutiny; they interrogate the limits of Britain’s cultural heterogeneity and reassert the boundary between the British subject and its colonial Other. The close cultural ties uniting such apparently disparate discursive categories as gender and ethnicity are especially apparent at sites of East-West contact. Alongside the “effeminate Bengali” identified by Mrinlani Sinha and the “theatrical nabob” I discuss in Part II stands the Scottish soldier as an exemplar of the multi-dimensional dynamics of empire. Even as he occupies a colonial position, the Scots soldier embodies British values. To quote Kenneth McNeil, the Highlander “is simultaneously weirdly exotic and reassuringly familiar, an image of the ‘other’ as an ‘ideal’ self” (2000: 77–9). Or, as Maureen Martin explains in reference to the English enthusiasm for Scottish deerstalking, Englishmen did not want to lose their identity as Englishmen, members of the nationality that dominated much of the globe, including Scotland. The point was not literally to be Scots, but to be Englishmen asserting their right to a Scottish persona that they could discover within themselves by virtue of their status as Englishmen, members of a nation that had incorporated Scotland. (2009: 72) At once Self and Other, Colonizer and Colonized, British and Barbarian, the Highland soldier of the Mutiny dramas is the emblematic conjunction of savagery and civility. To understand the complex and contradictory significations of the kilt—the defi nitive, traditional dress of the Highland soldier—we might consider the peculiar evolution of the garment’s cultural associations. Following the unsuccessful Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the kilt was symbolically transformed “from a functional, lower-class Highland garment into an emblem of national Scottish patriotism and antiquity” (FriedmanRomell 1998: 28). Over time, this sign of Scottish cultural distinctiveness and political independence lost its anti-English associations, and a fi nal tailoring of the kilt at the hands of the British army’s Black Watch regiment eventually made this one-time sign of anti-English sentiment a powerful symbol of British valor (Maloney 2003: 161–80; G. Morton 1999: 19). Moreover, as Maureen Martin has explained, Highland dress was available to all in the nineteenth century, allowing the middle and lower segments of the socio-economic spectrum to mimic their social superiors (Martin 2009: 70–1). As it marked a distinct ethnic Otherness and

192 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter indicated aristocratic prestige, Highland dress had the potential to elide cultural and class distinctions. As this condensed history makes clear, the cultural significations of the kilt are rather complex, but the ongoing renegotiation of the symbolic import of this very simple garment indicates its evolving associations with barbarity, rebellion, and allegiance: [T]he kilt’s incorporation into the uniform of Highland regiments in the British army merely signals a natural and effective “re-direction” of masculine Highland energy, from rebellion and Jacobitism to loyal service to the British state. . . . The Highland kilt fascinates because it exposes that which should be concealed, the male body, and, even more provocatively, hints at exposing the male genitals and therefore the “heart” of masculine potency. In rebellion accounts, the kilt subdues and contains the “wild masculinity” of the Highland male beneath an outward show of military discipline. Yet these accounts often emphasize that underneath the Highland kilt lies a Highland wildness and uncontrolled virility that reveals itself in battle. (McNeil 2000: 81) Multiply suggestive, the kilt reveals as it conceals and restrains as it releases. It simultaneously suggests Scottish and British nationalisms, resolving the tensions between the two by pointing to the rebellious spirit of the past as well as the political unity of the present. Thus is this simple piece of costuming perfectly suited to the task of stitching together the seemingly disparate threads of masculinity, ethnicity, nationalism, and imperial unity. 2 Before we can understand how and towards what end the Mutiny plays deploy a distinctly martial Scots masculinity in the service of British imperial interests, we must fi rst situate Scotland in its relationships with two overlapping yet non-synonymous political, cultural, and geographical entities: England and Britain. The history of England’s relationship with Scotland is a long and complicated series of aggressions and agreements that ultimately led to the Act of Union in 1707. Yet even after this formal act of political incorporation, a new and distinctly “British” identity still needed to be forged and refi ned (Robbins 1998: 3–71; L. Davis 1998: 1–8; G. Morton 1999: 6–7). Theatres, both north and south, helped to negotiate this integration of Scots and English into a broader British entity by celebrating, on the one hand, the unique characteristics of the Scots and of traditional Highlands culture while, on the other hand, symbolically enacting the subordination of an independent Scots identity to the service of a larger British state (Cameron and Scullion 1996: 57). This contrapuntal task of cultural recognition and national consolidation was still underway two hundred years after the Act of Union, as the Scots continued to defi ne their relationship to their kingdom, their nation, and their empire.

Forging a Greater Britain 193 Though the Act of Union circumscribed Scotland’s independent nationalist ambitions, it revealed new horizons of opportunity within Britain’s expanding overseas realms, the imperial periphery providing Britain’s Celtic constituencies room to renegotiate their relationship with the nation’s English center of power (A. Thompson 2000: 31–2; Robbins 1998: 209–13; Hanham 1973: 163). By the mid-nineteenth century, Scotland was wellrepresented in the East India Company’s mercantile, military, and administrative units, so that building the empire—and defending it—became the “common work” of the British Isles (Fry 2001: 83–5; Colley 1992: 127–32; G. Morton 1999: 14–7; Maloney 2003: 167; Kiernan 1992: 97). As Linda Colley has argued, empire served as an ideological leveling ground for the Scots, who could realize true integration in a composite nation only through participation in global expansion: If Britain’s primary identity was an imperial one, then the English were put fi rmly and forever in their place, reduced to a component part of a much greater whole, exactly like the Scots, and no longer the people who ran the whole show. A British imperium, in other words, enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the English in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. (Colley 1992: 130) Empire, in short, was the arena in which a composite British identity was forged and the vehicle through which divergent local nationalisms were reconsolidated to serve larger British interests (S. Cook 1987; Bryant 1985; MacKenzie 1993; Buettner 2002: 212–3).

COMPARATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY IN DION BOUCICAULT’S JESSIE BROWN The Mutiny crisis inspired a reappraisal of the possibilities for integrating local nationalisms within a larger imperial identification, an explosive rupture in the relationship that bound the Indian periphery to its metropolitan center (Attridge 2003: 141–4; Peers 1997: 133–4). For many observers, the Mutiny represented a spectacular demonstration of Britain’s failure to achieve the social and political cohesion required by empire, the ability to negotiate multiple, competing identities being one of the component processes of empire-building: [A]nother paradox of colonial discourse [is that] the desire to emphasize racial and cultural differences as a means of establishing authority takes place alongside the desire to efface difference and to gather the colonized into the fold of an all-embracing civilization. . . . [T]he ultimate aim of colonial discourse is not to establish a radical opposition between colonizer and colonized. It seeks to dominate by inclusion and

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Spurr calls this impulse “appropriation,” a term that illuminates the ties of solidarity that bind together the disparate parts of the imperial state. It is precisely for this reason that Aryanists, whose work traced the common racial and cultural antecedents of Europe and South Asia and configured British imperialism as “a ‘family reunion’ among long-lost Aryan cousins,” were challenged by the reported savagery of 1857 (Ballantyne 2002: 4, 44–8). Mutiny dramas frequently use the figure of the colonial rebel to throw the defining characteristics of Britishness into high relief, an ethnographic technique that affirms Edward Said’s understanding of Orientalist ideologies based upon discourses of difference. Though Said’s theoretical model has been called into question by scholars such as David Cannadine (2001), who argues that the relationship between the British metropole and its imperial periphery required the recognition and replication of sameness, the Saidian framework better accounts for the insistent “Othering” impulse of the Mutiny plays, which carefully construct a racial dichotomy that exhibits in high relief the defining differences between British and Indian. In turn, the theatrical archive poses a serious challenge for the applicability of Cannadine’s model across cultural forms. This racially contradistinctive approach echoes much contemporary writing—both literary and journalistic—about the Mutiny, which expresses British values and traits in opposition to those exhibited by the Indian rebels (Metcalf 1995: 66–112; Peers 1997: 110–1; Easthope 1999: 19–21). Phillip Mallett sums up this antithetical articulation of racial identifications in his characterization of Rudyard Kipling’s constructions of Englishness: “the English are what the Indians are not” (1997: 259). This comparative Orientalist articulation of Britishness is the overriding dynamic of the most famous of the Mutiny dramas: Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow (Brantlinger 1988: 206). 3 Opening at the end of February 1858, Jessie Brown was well-received by its first audiences in New York, where it ran for six weeks. The play then moved on to a short, lackluster run in Boston before fi nding new popularity in Philadelphia (Fawkes 1979: 99).4 It was not until the 1862 productions at Drury Lane (in October) and Astley’s (in December) that Jessie Brown would receive substantial notice in England, by which time the play had become a dramatic retrospective five years removed from the events it chronicles.5 Before turning to my analysis of the role of the Scot in Jessie Brown’s imaginative realization of a greater British imperium, I would like to pause for a moment to provide a short plot summary that will help guide readers unfamiliar with this most famous of the Mutiny plays. When the Mutiny breaks out, Mrs. Campbell, an army widow residing outside Lucknow, fi nds her home surrounded by rebel troops. A figure of imperiled womanhood, Mrs. Campbell represents broader British interests on the frontier, her widowed status and dependence on both native servants and British

Forging a Greater Britain 195 soldiers betraying the vulnerability of her country’s presence in India (Metcalf 1995: 163; Peers 1997: 127–8). Fortunately, the widow is not alone. In addition to her two children, Mrs. Campbell shares her bungalow with Jessie Brown, the play’s heroine; brothers Geordie and Randal MacGregor, Scottish soldiers; Cassidy and Sweenie, two additional soldiers; Alice and Mary, two girls whose presence in India and, indeed, the play itself remains a mystery through the closing curtain; and the Reverend Blount. Although the group mounts a brave defense of Mrs. Cambell’s bungalow in act one, Geordie and Jessie fi nd themselves the rebels’ captives at the opening of the second act. Nana Sahib, the rebel leader, orders Geordie to write to his brother Randal, who is now in charge of the Cawnpore garrison, encouraging him to surrender the fort. At Jessie’s urging, Geordie composes instead a letter in Gaelic, a language none of the rebels can read, warning Randal not to trust Nana Sahib’s promises. When Nana leaves the room, Sweenie and Cassidy miraculously appear through a hole in the floor just in time to save the lives of their countrymen. The curtains open for the third and fi nal time inside “The Redan, a fort commanding a certain part of the City of Lucknow. . . . The scene generally bears the marks of a severe attack, both of musketry and cannonade. Groups of Ladies with Children, wounded soldiers on guard, and some asleep.” Several weeks have passed since the close of act two. Jessie, exhausted by the long siege, has slowly slipped toward dementia, her fevered mind fi lled with memories of her Scottish home. Though starving, men, women, and children rush into action when the rebels attack: BLOUNT advances to the back. The two wounded Soldiers rise, and crawl to the guns. JESSIE runs to a bombshell that lies left, and finding Cassidy’s pipe where he has thrown it, still alight, she lights the fuse, and carries it with great difficulty to the breastwork, toppling it over. BLOUNT, standing on a disabled gun, deals ponderous blows right and left with the rammer, and knocks over the Sepoys as they appear. The wounded Soldiers, JESSIE, ALICE, and MRS. CAMPBELL draw in the other gun, load it, and run it out again. The bomb is heard to explode outside, followed by cries and hurrahs. MRS. CAMPBELL applies a port fire to the gun, and fires it. Another shout. JESSIE leaps on the gun. The Children bring hand grenades, and roll in a cannon ball. RANDAL and GEORDIE re-appear, right and left, leading back their men, some wounded. Groups are formed. The ladies tear their dresses and make bandages for the wounded soldiers. Tableau. (Boucicault 1858: 128) Though they mount a brave effort, the fort’s defenders are overwhelmed by the rebel force. As they prepare to meet their fi nal doom, the sound of bagpipes is heard in the distance; marching to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne,”

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the Highlander relief regiment arrives.6 Like The Storming and Capture of Delhi, Jessie Brown ends with the promise of a British victory, but this time it is a victory heavily overlaid with Scottish emblems: the bagpipes, “Auld Lang Syne,” and memories of the Highlands. In this fi nal fusion of sound, sense, and spectacle, we witness the composite triumph of masculinity, ethnicity, and the martial spirit. From the play’s very fi rst moments, the contrast between India and Scotland that informs so many of the play’s preoccupations is evident. Jessie Brown opens on “The exterior of the bungalow of Mrs. Campbell,” the widow of Colonel Campbell, who was killed at the Siege of Sebastopol (Boucicault 1858: 103–4). In the distance, visible above the low wall of the terrace at back, lies Lucknow. Attended by servants, Geordie MacGregor enters with Alice and Mary: GEORDIE. Here we are at last. What can induce Mrs. Campbell to live a mile from Lucknow? ALICE. You’re a pretty soldier—you cannot march a mile without a murmur. GEORDIE. On my own native hills in bonnie Scotland, with my hound by my side, I have walked a dozen miles before breakfast; but under this Indian sun—(1858: 103) Although this fi rst scene’s visual backdrop is the Indian city of Lucknow, its discursive registers point to a highly romanticized Scotland as the spiritual and moral center of the play. Geographically distant, Scotland is nevertheless compellingly present in the words and memories of the play’s Scottish characters. Mrs. Campbell calls Randal MacGregor, “one of the noblest men that ever breathed the Scottish air and made it purer,” but even his symbolic pretensions are eclipsed by the play’s eponymous heroine, who is the very embodiment of the land and spirit of Scotland. Geordie describes Jessie as “a sprig of heather from the Highland moors . . . a slogan on the Scotch pipes that nature has put into the prettiest throat that ever had an arm round it” (1858: 105). Where Randal “breathes” the Scottish air, Jessie is the very air itself. More than merely reminiscent of the Highland moors, Jessie is a “sprig of heather,” a piece of Scotland transported to India. This glorification of the Scots serving in India appears alongside, and is thus sharply contrasted against, the debasement, often self-imposed, of India’s native population (Brantlinger 1988: 206). An impassioned exchange between Geordie and Achmet, Mrs. Campbell’s Indian servant, echoes the popular press coverage of the Mutiny, much of which assumed the inherent superiority of the British soldier (Peers 1997: 133–8). In response to Mrs. Campbell’s request for news from Delhi, Geordie replies, “Oh, the siege continues; but it will be taken, of course—these black rascals are mere scum.” Achmet, Mrs. Campbell’s servant, overhears Geordie’s comment and—surprisingly—reinforces this condemnation of his countrymen:

Forging a Greater Britain 197 ACHMET. Allah Akbar! It is so—we are scum. Lady, in Hindoostan there are one hundred thousand such as you; yet for a century you have had your foot on our necks; we are to you a thousand to one—a thousand black necks to one white foot. Allah is great, and Mohammed is his prophet. We are scum! (Boucicault 1858: 103) Already somewhat silly, the dialogue takes a turn towards the ridiculous, as Geordie and Achmet calculate the martial prowess of scum: GEORDIE. I can’t answer for the truth of your calculation, but I agree in the sentiment—you are scum. (Drinks) ACHMET. Sometimes the scum rises. GEORDIE. Yes, Dusky, and when it does, the pot boils over and puts the fi re out; so the scum extinguishes the element that made it rise. ACHMET. I cannot reason with a European. GEORDIE. No, nor fight with one; by your own calculation, it takes one thousand of you to do either one or the other. (1858: 104) This conversation, which strikes the modern reader as more absurd than dramatic, also showcases significant differences between the British soldier and his Indian counterpart, not coincidentally a servant. While Geordie’s job is to protect Mrs. Campbell, it is Achmet’s job to serve her. Beyond the mere reflection of contemporary colonial “master/servant” analogies, this oppositional placing of the two men in relation to the play’s feminine domestic center divides the empire’s subjects into two orbits: those who protect and those who serve (Peers 1997: 129–35).7 The play thus begins by establishing a contrast between the Scots and the Indians, in terms not only of their mental and verbal capabilities but also their respective relationships to a domestic core, a microcosmic rendering of the differential positions occupied by the Scottish and Indian peripheries in relation to the imperial center. The exchange between Geordie and Achmet takes place in the fi rst few minutes of the play, and in its representation of the attitudes that characterized contact between the British and the native Indian on the eve of the rebellion it bears closer examination. British interests are here represented by the soldier, proud and brave, yet perhaps too confident of his own strength and too readily, even ignorantly, dismissive of the Indians’ capabilities. He is full of the rhetoric of victory even though, as he admits to Mrs. Campbell, he has never seen actual battle: “But when I’m on parade, and hear the drums and see the uniforms, I feel like the very devil” (Boucicault 1858: 104). Geordie is a theatrical soldier, inexperienced in battle yet a proud participant in the military spectacles that display a heroism bestowed rather than won. Achmet, on the other hand, appears rhetorically and logically ensnared, verbally outpaced by the overly confident Geordie. Readily acceding to Geordie’s racist dismissal of his own people, Achmet

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adds only the prescient warning that the “scum” will have its moment, if not its ultimate victory. This too-willing acceptance of white superiority, this confused aping of Geordie’s arrogant condemnation of the entire native population of India, seems a peculiar, even disturbing, act of selfabnegation. It is certainly an important moment in the play, for it accomplishes two tasks simultaneously. First, it transfers the racist utterance from Geordie to Achmet, making the object of the condemnation its agent as well. It is by Achmet’s “own calculation” that his people are destined to be ruled by Europeans. Achmet’s subjectivity is thus affi rmed in the very moment it is denied. Achmet’s words have the additional effect of reinforcing popular notions that the rebellion was a senseless, baseless, eruption of violence against order and reason. As Steve Attridge has argued, from the viewpoint of those at the center, the rebellion of native troops was perceived, popularly and tenaciously, as a mutiny against the British imperium precisely because it seemed a spontaneous and violent rejection of an otherwise prosperous imperial unity (Attridge 2003: 142). According to this view, the sepoys were a part of the British imperial machine, having sought membership in the Company’s military regime. They were not so unlike the Scots, a people once subjugated and defeated but ultimately incorporated, given a new role within, instead of against, the imperial order. This attitude informs both the construction of character and the orchestration of the rebels’ defeat in Jessie Brown, whose Scottish characters are devotedly loyal, even to the point of self-sacrifice. They work together to ensure the collective good, though it may mean disregarding romantic fulfi llment or volunteering one’s own life. In comparison, the play’s Indian characters are motivated primarily by self-interest, and they betray no real sense of unity.8 In ascribing this fundamental “character flaw” to the Indian subject, the play delegitimizes the rebellion and comparatively champions both the British character and the British imperial cause. While for some of its participants the events of 1857 may have represented a protonationalist rejection of Britain’s colonial domination of India, most contemporary metropolitan observers considered the Mutiny little more than the chaotic eruption of violent energies, an unreflective and fundamentally savage assault on imperial law and order. On stage, any underlying real-world ideology of Indian national independence was deflected through a highly idealized representation of kilted Highlanders as the steadfast and patriotic antitheses of India’s rebellious sepoys. Scottish characters in these plays are the very embodiment of loyalty, remaining true to their families, their regiments, their Highland homes, and their imperial British banner. In comparison to these kilted paragons of British virtue, the Indian rebels are portrayed as treacherous, self-serving, and fundamentally disobedient to any and all fi gures of authority. The rebels, in short, are shown to be incapable of patriotic duty. Consequently, these plays deny the possibility that the military insurrection in India

Forging a Greater Britain 199 might represent the germination of an independent national consciousness. More than simply denying the legitimacy of colonial independence, the performance of a hyperbolic Celtic loyalty provides a reassessment of the boundaries of Britain’s ethnic heterogeneity. While a certain politically or economically dispossessed segment of the audience might on some level have inclined towards an affi nity with the rebels, the rebels are depicted as morally debased and utterly without either conscience or compassion; they are thoroughly demonized and Othered, a characterization that militates against the formation of an easy identifi cation between themselves and the play’s metropolitan spectators, regardless of their social position. Romantic relationships among the Scots characters exemplify the virtues of fidelity and self-sacrificial service, offering further opportunities to perform Celtic (and by extension British) fidelity in the face of Indian rebelliousness. Reports of the revolt of Nana Sahib, the Rajah of Bithoor, starkly contrast the many expressions of romantic fidelity and the proper restraint of passion exercised by the Scots. Although the Mutiny remains the play’s central dramatic interest, the audience’s perception of the rebellion is inflected by these carefully placed invocations of romantic fidelity and sexual restraint: the Scots are faithful and in control of their passions; the Indians, by implied contrast, are not. To further emphasize this contrast, Boucicault—who initially cast himself in the role of Nana Sahib—explicitly sexualizes the rebellion’s energies. After Randal goes in search of reinforcements, Nana Sahib breaks into the bungalow to declare his love for Mrs. Campbell, promising to call off the Mutiny if she agrees to enter his now-empty zenana: NANA. Listen! I saw you at Benares—your soul entered mine through my eyes into my heart, and thrust out my own. I followed you, until like the sun you passed away where I could follow no more; I went to Bithoor, and my wives offended your soul in me. I gave them riches and sent them away—my zenana is cold! I am there alone; it awaits the form to which it belongs. MRS. C. You would murder my children and dishonour their mother. NANA. Your children shall be mine, princes of the Mahratta; follow me, and no blood shall flow. I will withdraw my men. Lucknow shall be spared. (1858: 113) This exchange implicates Nana Sahib’s undisciplined sexual desires as the driving force of the rebellion, as Nana’s lack of sexual restraint, though couched in the promise of monogamous fidelity, engenders the violence of the Mutiny (Brantlinger 1988: 206).9 Nana Sahib’s declaration of unrestrained passion further demonizes him as it starkly contrasts with the selfless devotion of the play’s Scottish

200 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter characters. Unlike Nana Sahib’s distinctly Oriental sexual possessiveness, romantic relationships among the Scottish characters celebrate the virtues of fidelity and self-sacrificial service. Mrs. Campbell is a prime example, for her heart is torn between her deceased husband and Randal MacGregor, the man who “became [her] husband’s most devoted friend, and watched over him like a brother.” When Colonel Campbell was struck down at the Siege of Sebastopol, it was Randal who “carried [Campbell] in his arms, at the head of the regiment, into the redoubt, so that none of the glory of that day should be lost to his rival” (Boucicault 1858: 104). Rivals in love, the two men were nevertheless brothers in arms. His service to Campbell at Sebastopol and to Campbell’s widow and children at Lucknow testify to Randal’s devotion to higher duties and stand in stark contrast to Nana Sahib’s violent and acquisitive passions. Randal’s self-effacing willingness to suppress his own desire in the service of others is echoed in the Sweenie-Jessie-Cassidy love triangle: MRS. C. Jessie is a good girl, as honest and true as steel; she is betrothed to Sweenie Jones, a private in the 32nd. GEORDIE. An ugly, wiry little fellow, but a smart soldier, and as brave as a terrier. MRS. C. But she is also followed by a soft, good-natured Irish corporal named Cassidy, the bosom friend of Sweenie, and to see the two men so devoted to each other, and yet so fond of the same girl, is a picture too like my own history not to fi ll me with interest and emotion. (1858: 105) Cassidy is Irish, which makes this display of devotion a celebration of a broader Celtic (if not British) fidelity. Rivals in love, Sweenie and Cassidy are—as Randal and Colonel Campbell had been—comrades in arms, and their sense of duty to the empire disperses any potentially violent eruption of jealous passions. Unlike Nana Sahib, whose sexual possessiveness ignites a colonial rebellion, the humble Scots soldiers suppress their own romantic desires and remain true to their martial duty. This celebration of Celtic fidelity is momentarily interrupted—then reinforced—by Geordie’s own jealous declaration of love for Jessie. While Sweenie and Cassidy are offstage engaging the rebels, Geordie, Randal MacGregor’s younger brother, steals a private moment with the play’s titular heroine: JESSIE. Geordie, you have been drinking. GEORDIE. And if I have? Wine lets out the truth, Jessie; and the truth is—I love you. JESSIE. Eh! didna ye always loov me? GEORDIE. No, I love you as you deserve to be loved, and I can’t bear to see such a pretty girl as you have grown throw yourself away on those common soldiers, like Sweenie and his comrades.

Forging a Greater Britain 201 JESSIE. Oh, Geordie! Sweenie loves you—he would dee for you or for Randal. GEORDIE. Oh, devil take Sweenie! all our mess says you are too good for him. You are the prettiest girl in Lucknow. (1858: 111) Ignoring the commands of friendship, Geordie makes his own claim for Jessie’s affections, a claim arising from a sense of class propriety. Anticipating Nana Sahib’s assertion of desire for Mrs. Campbell, Geordie aggressively lays claim to a woman who is romantically unavailable. Later in this scene, Geordie will crouch in fear while Sweenie volunteers to undertake his dangerous mission to Cawnpore, thus proving that beneath the veil of Sweenie’s humbler class status lies a deep reservoir of superior moral attributes and strength of character. But before Sweenie has the chance to so prove himself, Jessie must reply to Geordie’s declaration. In an attempt to reaffi rm the boundaries of virtue, honor, and fidelity, Jessie reminds Geordie of the greater bonds that unite the three of them: GEORDIE. Look up, Jessie. JESSIE. I canna, I canna. GEORDIE. Why can’t you look up into my face? JESSIE. I’m lukin far awa—far awa, upon craigs of Duncleuch; ‘tis the days of auld lang syne, and the arm of wee Geordie MacGregor is round the waist of Jessie Brown, for he is saving her life in the sea. Na, don’t tak yer arm awa, Geordie dear. I’m lukin still. Geordie is a laddie noo, and he chases the deer on the craigs of Duncleuch; beside him is poor Sweenie—poor faithful Sweenie, that follows the MacGregor like a dog; Geordie drives a stag to bay; the beastie rushes on him and throws him doon—anither minit and Geordie will na see Jessie mair—but Sweenie’s dirk is quicker than that minit! the brute fell dead, but not before he gored poor Sweenie sorely. We watched by his bedside—d’ye mind the time, Geordie? your arm was round me then—na, dinna tak it awa noo. GEORDIE. Oh, Jessie! oh, Jessie! JESSIE. Luk up, Geordie. GEORDIE. I cannot. JESSIE. Why canna you luk up into my face? GEORDIE. Because I’m looking far away, far away into the days of auld lang syne, and they make me ashamed of what I am. (1858: 111) Jessie’s rhetorical move here is critically important, for it demonstrates the play’s invocation of what Ian Baucom refers to as “the identity-endowing properties of place” (Baucom 1999: 4–6). The image she recalls works both temporally and geographically, reminding Geordie of a more innocent time and of a place that inspired honor and loyalty among its inhabitants. Her

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memory forces Geordie to “look far away,” in both time and space, back to “the days of auld lang syne” and “the craigs of Duncleuch.” This geotemporal journey forces Geordie to recognize, ashamedly, the person he has become; he is not now the person of honor he once was. What restores him to that position of honor is the memory of Scotland, an imagined invocation of innocence and moral purity that contrasts starkly against the violence and treachery that surrounds him in Lucknow. Geordie rediscovers himself through a longing for a Scottish past, a process quite similar to the “disciplinary and nostalgic discourse on English national identity” Baucom has described (1999: 4–5). Thus do the play’s Scottish characters exhibit a commitment to honor and fidelity that is itself rooted in the soil of Scotland and kept alive in memories of their far-away home. Character, geography, and culture are tightly woven together, making it possible for the play to essentialize ethnic traits and distinguish between British and Indian. Indeed, the past is itself an instrument of cultural consolidation, spiritually uniting and reinvigorating the Scots characters. Nostalgia reconnects Jessie and Geordie with the Scottish Highlands, which the play’s dialogue repeatedly identifies as the source of all things pure and good. Memories of a shared past thus serve a martial as well as a spiritual function, providing the weary defenders with the strength to continue. This nostalgia further helps to differentiate the besieged Scots from the Indian rebels attacking them by establishing a rigid boundary between Scot and Other: memories of the Highlands being available only to the Scots, they alone can exhibit honor and loyalty. In the spirit of John Ruskin, Jessie Brown accounts for the difference between the valiant Scottish soldiers and the Indian mutineers in spatial terms, grounding Scottish virtue in the peat cottage and locating Indian treachery in the ivory palace (Baucom 1999: 76).

THEATRICAL ECHOES: THE THREE JESSIES BROWN Boucicault was not the fi rst to dramatize the story of a plucky young Scot named Jessie Brown, the brave young girl who heard the wailing of the Highlanders’ pipes in the midst of blood and battle, a figure who stood next to Wheeler and Havelock in the triumvirate of mythical heroes that animated the Mutiny within the popular imagination. That there was a wider cultural distribution of images confi rming the loyalty of Britain’s Celtic periphery in this moment of colonial rebellion is evident when we consider the two other plays that shared the title character of Boucicault’s script: William Seaman’s Jessie Brown (Britannia, 1858) and the unsigned Highland Jessie Brown (Queen’s, 1858). Beyond their title characters, the three Jessie Brown plays exhibit a number of significant similarities, including a celebration of Scottishness, a portrayal of masculinity weakened and then buoyed, and a strong call

Forging a Greater Britain 203 for retributive justice. Even the emotional centerpiece of Boucicault’s Jessie Brown—Jessie’s nostalgic invocation of self-sacrifice and romantic fidelity—has its echo in a script that shares the title of Boucicault’s play: Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow. Licensed for production at the Britannia Theatre in January 1858, this play predates Boucicault’s Jessie Brown by just a month.10 Debates over influence aside, this fi rst attempt at dramatizing the Jessie Brown story offers further evidence of the Victorian theatre’s employment of the Scot in its articulation of Britain’s cultural values, political identities, and imperial mission. Following its first scene, set in “The home in the highlands,” Seaman’s Jessie Brown moves, geographically and temporally, to “The banks of the Jumna [with a] view of Cawnpore” twelve months on, a scenic shift that graphically juxtaposes the Scottish cultural center with the chaos of colonial rebellion. The play’s opening scene focuses on a disagreement between Sandy and Logan, both of whom are in love with Jessie. But Jessie has set her eyes on Geordie, a humble soldier who has rescued her from drowning (Seaman 1858: 1a–6b). When Geordie’s regiment is shipped to India, Jessie finds a way to go with him. Although they are disappointed rivals for Jessie’s hand, Logan and Sandy make their own way to India in order to be close to, and to protect, the woman they love, even though she is married to another. The echoes between this script and Boucicault’s are unmistakable: the two men vying for Jessie’s affection; a near-drowning; the selfless devotion of the rejected lovers to Jessie. Some of the details differ, but the two plays are startlingly similar. Most notably, both plays situate Scotland as distant from India in terms of both space and time, and they similarly use a love triangle as a way of exploring the larger implications of loyalty and rebellion. We can see an example of the theatre’s strategic repositioning of nationalist loyalties in the central scene of this fi rst of the Jessie Brown plays, which differs from Boucicault’s version by its more direct representation of the Cawnpore massacre and its portrayal of revenge rather than selfdefense as the primary motive for military action. In response to the mutineers’ massacre of English women, the play calls forth the blood-lust of the Scots, whose passions are inflamed by the sight of hair, soaked in blood: GEORDIE. Behold these tresses (Bus.) I cut from the head of a dear murdered girl. First I will distribute them among you, that one and all who hold a single hair shall vow upon his sword, to take for every hair a life of the accursed Sepoys. ALL. Propose the oath. GEORDIE. That while we have this martyr’s tresses next to our hearts, we swear for every hair a life. ALL. A life, a life. (Seaman 1858: 7b–8a) To borrow Jenny Sharpe’s phrase, these locks of hair function in the play, as they do in Mutiny novels, as “fetish objects in a pornographic nightmare”

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(Sharpe 1993: 65). United by the bloody remnants of the dismembered body of an English girl, “Scotland’s hardy sons” respond to England’s call for justice (Seaman 1858: 8b). Notably, the Scottish general in charge of these relief forces talks of “our rule” and “our vengeful feelings,” aligning himself and his men, Scots all, with pro-imperialist British sentiments. Echoing its counterparts in the world of narrative fiction, the play introduces the spectre of massacred Englishwomen as a way of generating public support for the nation’s retributive mission in India (Brantlinger 1988: 202–6; Sharpe 1993: 66–7). In Rule of Darkness, Patrick Brantlinger argues that “Melodrama reduces social and moral complexities to simplistic oppositions between good and evil, victims and villains; these polarities readily lend themselves to the white/black patterns of racist fantasy.” Brantlinger goes on to identify as the primary ideological thrust of Boucicault’s Jessie Brown the assertion of “British racial superiority and Indian inferiority” (1988: 206). But if the fi nal curtain of most Mutiny plays neatly separates British from Indian, good from evil, and victor from vanquished, it falls only after the play has carefully sorted the primary figures into these convenient oppositional groupings. Although Brantlinger sees a simplistic two-tiered ordering of unidimensional characters, the plays that I have been discussing participate in a more complicated interrogation of national identity. While the dramas differentiate between the good British and the evil Indians, they also disclose the internal complexities of these two seemingly self-evident categories. It is not by sheer accident that the “British” characters in these plays are all Scots or that so much dialogue is devoted to reminiscing about their Scottish home. If Jessie Brown and its sister plays insist on the heroic goodness of the British, it can do so only if the audience acknowledges the essential Britishness of the Scots. In each of the Jessie Brown plays, the title character is a paragon of British virtue. She is brave, loyal, and true, qualities that are notably absent in the rebel sepoys. By way of comparison, the plays illustrate the differences between two subject peoples: the faithful Scots and the disloyal Indians. In Highland Jessie Brown (Queen’s, 1858), a play I discuss at greater length in Chapter 9, Jessie describes India as a “treacherous land,” peopled by “cunning chiels” and “wily serpents” (1858: 7). This broad moral condemnation of India and its inhabitants emphasizes by way of contrast the praise Jessie receives from Mrs. Trevor, a prefiguration of Boucicault’s Mrs. Campbell: “I heard you Jessie, you brave good girl, who through sorrow and sickness have clung to me so faithfully” (1858: 7, emphasis added). Jessie’s reply extends this implicitly comparative racial evaluation: “I have done nae more than my duty. I am a Christian woman, reared in a Christian country, wherefore then should you be surprised that I act like one, and not like a black devil of a Sepoy” (1858: 8, emphasis added). Both speeches emphasize Jessie’s faithful service and devotion to duty, qualities that are ultimately connected to a concept

Forging a Greater Britain 205 of western Christian civilization shared by both Scotland and England though completely absent from India, abode of “black devils” to whom such values are utterly foreign. Moreover, the play invites its audience to identify with the religious faith and moral values of the Scots: even the politically and economically dispossessed are encouraged to see armed rebellion as immoral, un-Christian, and unjustifi able.

CONCLUSION: FROM “AULD LANG SYNE” TO “RULE, BRITANNIA” In their investigations of the shaping of public self-perception and patriotic sentiment in nineteenth-century Scotland, Paul Maloney, Alasdair Cameron, and Adrienne Scullion have shown that national identifications and patriotic mandates were commonly articulated in venues of popular entertainment, such as the theatre, fi nding expression through rhetoric and characterization (Maloney 2003: 158–82; Cameron and Scullion 1996: 45–57). Within this context, Beth Friedman-Romell notes that the “Recuperation of the native virtue of the hardy Highland warrior was an essential component” of Scotland’s nationalist project, the early nineteenth-century prototypical Highlander of story, stage, and song finding himself transformed from a “lawless backward barbarian” into a “proud, independent warrior” (1998: 25–8). So how did this figure of Scots pride and independence come to embody a broadly inclusive, trans-national British sensibility? As we have seen, it was through a careful realignment of ideological and ethnic differences that drama managed to celebrate both an independent Scottish patriotism and British national solidarity. In Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850–1914, Paul Maloney (2003) comments on the musical negotiations between the competing interests of Scottish nationalism and British jingoism in the late nineteenth century, noting how two concurrent consolidations in Scottish music hall entertainments reconciled tensions between urban lowland and rural highland traditions by creating a trans-regional figure who could represent Scotland’s unique culture within a larger British identification. From this complicated integration of apparently antithetical Scottish and British patriotisms emerged the Highlander as the archetypical Scot. Within the Mutiny dramas, the Highlander undergoes a further evolution, assuming an even broader symbolic figuration as the embodiment of British culture, values, and identity. With plot, character, spectacle, speech, gesture, and music all at its disposal, the theatre was particularly well-equipped to encourage the extrapolation of British patriotism from images of Scottish pride. Unlike the individual and internal experience of reading a Mutiny novel, the theatre offers shared participation in a communal celebration of Britain’s victory over the rebels. In its closing moments, Boucicault’s Jessie Brown appeals to both ear and eye to promote the broad patriotic realignment of

206 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter its spectators. In the fi nal scene, we see the interior of the fort at Lucknow. Hopelessly outnumbered by the rebel forces, Lucknow’s defenders meet to decide how they can secure the lives and honor of the women under their protection. Speaking for her sisters-in-arms, Mrs. Campbell begs Randal to protect them from dishonor by killing them before they fall into the rebel sepoys’ hands. Randal reluctantly concedes, ordering his men “to free your countrywomen from the clutches of the demons. One volley to their noble and true breasts, and then give your steel to the enemy” (Boucicault 1858: 130). As the soldiers lift their muskets to discharge their fi nal duty, Jessie leaps up and cries, “Hark—hark—dinna ye hear it? Ay! I’m no dreamin’, it’s the slogan of the Highlanders! we’re saved—we’re saved! (1858: 131). Gradually, the faint wail of “Auld Lang Syne” grows steadily stronger, until everyone, including the play’s audience, can hear it: The back scene is covered with a red glow; explosions as from mines are heard, through all of which the bagpipes continue, now very loud and near. The Sepoys appear fighting, and driven in at the back. They fall over the breastwork. GENERAL HAVELOCK (who remains on breastwork, centre, till end) and the Highlanders, with their pipes, charge up the breastwork, and crown it in every direction, bearing down on the Sepoys with the bayonet. (1858: 132) Reviewing popular stories about Jessie Brown, many versions of which circulated in the period immediately following the rescue of Lucknow, Kenneth McNeil explains the significance of the musical gradient that closes this play: It is only because Jessie is a Highlander that she can hear them from such a long way off, even when no one else can. As one eyewitness to the scene remarks of the company surrounding Jessie: ‘Our dull Lowland ears heard nothing but the rattle of musketry.’ Thus, the story of Jessie re-emphasizes Highland alterity as it strategically deploys the ‘sound’ of that alterity in a narrative that underscores the moral and military superiority of the British in India. (2000: 85) Initially, only Jessie—the spiritual embodiment of the Highlands—hears the bagpipes that signal the arrival of Havelock’s relief force; the rest hear only the sound of the rebel guns. As Havelock’s Highlanders move closer, the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” become audible to the rest: whether Scot or English, all the fort’s defenders eventually share in the awareness of impending salvation—and victory. But this instrumental epiphany does more than merely unite Lucknow’s fictional defenders; as the music swells, it expands to fill the space beyond the stage, incorporating the audience itself into this shared sentiment. Thus does the sound of the Scots’ national instrument unite actor and audience in a celebration of British victory over India’s rebel

Forging a Greater Britain 207 forces, who vanish—as the curtain falls—in a cacophony of bagpipe, cannon, and rifle. Each spectator shares in the victory, becoming—if only for a moment—a player in the imperial drama. The potential political significance of the audience’s sentimental identification with Lucknow’s imperiled—but ultimately victorious—Scottish defenders is increased when we consider the venue in which Jessie Brown was performed in October 1862. Though it had by this time lost its status as London’s premier theatrical venue, Drury Lane still clung to its former position as England’s “National Theatre.” As a socio-economically inclusive, popular venue, Drury Lane fostered a sense of community among its patrons, while its West End location and venerable history elevated the theatregoing experience, tinted it with a nationalist consciousness borne of the theatre’s cultural pretensions (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 201–2). In Jessie Brown—and in the Mutiny dramas more generally—the threat of imperial disintegration is countered with images of a strong, enduring nationalism based on a carefully delineated vision of martial masculinity. That all of these things come together on stage in 1857–58 reflects the integral part played by empire in popular conceptualizations of Britain and its people. Writing about the nexus between fi lm and British national identity, cultural historian Jeffrey Richards has argued for the centrality of empire in the formation of a British national character: Empire was one of the major component elements of British national identity and its principal justification was the superiority of British character. Good conduct and sound character were more than just desirable, they were essential. They were the Empire’s raison d’etre. It was British character which set the British, and particularly their imperial administrators and soldiers, apart from other peoples and justified their ruling a quarter of the globe. . . . It is impossible to overestimate the significance of character for nineteenth-century Britain. . . . It was more than an ideal; there was a religion of character. (1997: 31–2) In The Drapery Question, The Storming and Capture of Delhi, and Jessie Brown (and the rest of the Mutiny dramas), the “British character” is exhibited, and national identifications are reinforced: what occupies most of the stage and what captures our attention is not the spectacle of war but the precise and persistent articulation of Britishness. Moreover, this national character is imagined in consistent terms across these plays, so that Britishness is defi ned as brave, masculine, and rugged. The bravest, most masculine, most rugged of the British characters in the Mutiny dramas tend to be, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Scots, who don their kilts and carry into victory the British flag while their minds remain fi xed on memories of their beloved Highlands. Certainly the Scots characters in these plays exhibit their own unique ethnic and national associations; their Scottishness is unmistakable. But although characters like Jessie

208

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

and Geordie revel in their Scottish past and find strength in their Highlands culture, they identify with British value systems and with Britain’s military mission in India. Gillian Russell observes a similar endorsement of crosscultural identification at work on the late eighteenth-century stage: Certain recognizable stereotypes are distinguished from the crowd— the Scotsman, the Irishman, the veteran tar, the sweetheart, the citizen and his wife, the tailor—some of these types representing elements whose loyalty was particularly in question in 1797. The heterogeneity of the British nation is thus acknowledged, but only to reinforce the idea that differences in the community can ultimately be subsumed in the great cause—the war against France. (1995: 65) A resuscitated emphasis on unity across historically divided entities is not unique to the Mutiny dramas, being also, as J.S. Bratton has revealed, present in the Crimean War plays of 1854–55: There were from the outset certain modifications which obviously had to be made to the established popular attitudes, to meet the new circumstances of war. The most pressing of these was the revision of the character of the French, who, it was constantly pointed out, were now [Britain’s] allies for the first time in four hundred years. There was a whole play, The United Service of England and France, at the Strand in July, about how difficult it was to shed ingrained attitudes to people whom forty years ago one was taught to think of as cannibals. (1980: 123) Together, Russell and Bratton confi rm an underlying premise of my own thesis: at critical points in the history of the British Empire, the theatre helped to forge new alliances among old enemies and subsumed political and ethnic differences into a greater national identification. The mid-century crisis that the Victorians called “the Mutiny” was thus met with a theatrical realignment of the nation’s ethnic boundaries. Implicit in these performances of a hyperbolic Celtic loyalty was the denial of the legitimacy of colonial independence. While the rebels fought to free themselves from imperial oppression through a violent demonstration of their unassimilability, dramatic celebrations of the Scots’ heroic fidelity reaffi rmed the loyalty of Britain’s Celtic periphery, reconstructing the nation through a precise realignment of ethnic alterities.

Conclusion The Imperial Encounter from Stage to Screen

In theatrical spectacles that brought to dazzling life the dark and distant corners of the Empire—Australia, India, and South Africa—Victorian playwrights thrilled audiences with dramas of diamond thieves and villainous soldiers, hardy emigrants and fortunes both lost and found, humanitarian intervention in indigenous societies, and crusades against moral corruption. Like those plays I have already catalogued and commented upon, there are dozens upon dozens of dramas whose invocation of imperial themes, characters, and spaces highlighted, critiqued, and reaffi rmed the identity of Britain and its people. These are, alas, plays that must remain confi ned—for now—in the archive that has quietly held them for so long. But before I close the book on that archive, there is one last gasp of imperial theatrics begging for its moment in the limelight. It is, however, a moment that marks a beginning as well as an end, and is thus less a conclusion than notes toward a further, future discussion. So much of this project has involved connections: connections among different cultural forms (plays and exhibitions), connections between historical events and phenomena (dramatic representations of the Indian Mutiny, Great Exhibition, and Australian gold rush), and connections between the nineteenth-century theatre’s stock characters and their eighteenth-century predecessors (Robinson Crusoe and the nabob). It is this last series of connections that I fi nd most compelling, for it is these points of thematic and generic contact that reclaim Victorian drama as indispensable to scholarly schemes of literary and theatrical development. The Victorian theatrical Robinsonade, to take just one example, completely transformed the Crusoe story, turning the defi nitive tale of one man’s introspective solitude into a spectacular drama of interpersonal confl ict and pointed cultural critique. This, as we have seen, is the tradition out of which J.M. Barrie created The Admirable Crichton and which, in other hands and through other media, produced those surprisingly unique—though generically determined—television sensations, Gilligan’s Island, Survivor, and Lost.1 My reader may perhaps fi nd the move from Pretty Polly Perkins to Mark Burnett to be too great an intuitive leap. As a scholar committed to archival research, I am certainly sympathetic to such skepticism.

210 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Although I do not have the space in these fi nal pages to trace the development of the Robinsonade from Cataract to Gilligan, by way of Crichton, I do have just enough room to suggest another, more important connection between Victorian imperial theatrics and modern entertainment. For though the Victorian theatre was displaced from its cultural throne by early cinema, it bequeathed to the usurper many of the characters, plots, techniques, and topical interests it had itself appropriated and developed. Those familiar with Nicholas Vardac’s classic study of the transition from stage to screen will not be surprised by this assertion, but what Vardac’s account overlooks is an intriguing intersection between the technological revolution that produced motion pictures and the revolutionary confl ict that shook the foundations of the British Empire and heralded modern methods of war. This defi nitive moment in the history of the Empire coincided with the end of two long-term reigns: that of Victoria, the iconic Queen of England, and that of the theatre, the supreme institution of Victorian popular culture. It is this singular nexus of culture and politics, of endings and beginnings, that makes the Boer War an appropriate conclusion to my study, for this new kind of armed confl ict found representation through a new visual medium: fi lm. Like the Indian Mutiny, the Boer War challenged popular assumptions of British invincibility and, like that earlier confl ict, the Boer War inspired theatrical production (Attridge 2003: 24–6). 2 As was the case with the Indian Mutiny, the Boer War was quickly translated to the stage, in plays that celebrated British valor, mourned the nation’s lost heroes, and reminded its audiences of the personal price of empire. Britain’s adoption of scorched-earth policies, and the troubling realization that this “colonial” war was being waged against people of European descent and in support of private commercial interests, made the Boer War problematic in the public mind. The war called into question the rhetoric of patriotic militarism and posed serious challenges to those who sought to include war within traditional visual and literary forms (Hyam 2002: 240–7; Krebs 1999; Peck 1998: 164–87). This new kind of war required new kinds of representation, which were in fact made possible through contemporary technological innovations. Furthermore, this war waged largely against civilians of European descent necessitated ideological innovations capable of marshaling public sentiment in support of the confl ict. We will consider, briefly, both of these issues as we look at the turn-of-the-century evolution of imperial theatrics. John Peck intriguingly concludes his book-length study of militarism in Victorian literature with what he identifies as the “confused” Boer War poetry of Hardy and Kipling. Noting how this last of the nineteenth century’s wars challenged conventional perceptions of war—being less “gentlemanly” and “professional” than its predecessors—Peck argues that fiction could not effectively capture the spirit of the conflict:

Conclusion

211

[N]ovelists at the time cannot meet the challenge of responding to this new state of affairs. In poetry, however, the picture is different, perhaps in part due to the fact that the brevity of a poetic lyric is well suited to the task of expressing a sense of bewilderment, of being lost in a world that no longer makes sense. But whatever the reason, the fact is that, whereas Boer War novels are without exception disappointing, a great deal of the poetry prompted by the war is not only impressive but often startling and genuinely new. (1998: 179) Peck’s logic here intrigues me, for it insists that the Boer War, generally hailed as a new kind of war (anticipating the devastation of the World War that would soon follow), resisted representation through traditional narrative forms. The question, then, is whether it similarly resisted representation through traditional visual forms and, if so, which visual media were best suited to the task of capturing and expressing the unique nature of the conflict. It is my contention that the Boer War did in fact exceed the theatre’s representational capacity and that the cinema compensated for the inadequacies of the stage.3 This is not to say that the theatre completely ignored the war or that Boer War plays are completely anomalous in form and content. There are indeed several readily identifiable Boer War dramas in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays archive, most of which clearly extend the cultural affi rmation project that I have identified as a central preoccupation of Victorian dramas of empire. In Parts Two and Three, for example, we saw how the animation of the qualities that defi ned the (masculine) national character was an essential component of imperial theatrics. Figures like the nabob whose behaviors violated the national norm were consistently disciplined through the plays’ nationalist scripts. In Vermuh Kareeda (1857) we saw a slightly different version of cultural reintegration, one focused on racial—rather than cultural—hybridity. Kareeda’s crisis involved identification with his British heritage and his consequent loyalty to the British cause. In each case, the socially disciplinary dynamic of imperial theatrics seeks to realign rogue figures with the nation’s core cultural identity and overseas objective, an objective evident in Boer War plays, whose central dramatic energy frequently emanates from the betrayal of the British garrison by a soldier of the Crown. Treason, motivated by material gain, threatens British security from within and thus represents the ultimate act of national violation. The problem that plays such as J.P. Lallen’s ‘Midst Shot and Shell (1899) and W.J. Mackay’s For England’s Glory (Sadler’s Wells, 1898) face is how to account for and to eliminate those whose primary loyalty is to personal wealth rather than national interest.4 This tension is reinforced by the plays’ South African background, with the region’s promises of ready wealth and the temptations of its diamond and gold mines. Consequently, the Boer War dramas must be considered in the context of mid- to late-century plays about gold miners

212 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter and diamond thieves. An example would be Paul Merritt and George Conquest’s 1896 play, The Raid in the Transvaal (Drury Lane), which condemns the treachery of those who would sell out British interests to the “freedom-hating” Boers. 5 As with the theatrical nabob, there are associations between the colonial South African cultural milieu and the kinds of challenges that characters pose to metropolitan behavioral norms. Certainly the betrayal of one’s own people to the nation’s enemies was of signifi cant concern during the war—and consequently within plays about the war—but the archival evidence suggests that the corrupting influences of diamond-derived wealth and the incitement to treason had long been a part of theatrical representations of the South African frontier. Boer War plays thus extended already existing representational associations. A complete picture of Boer War plays must also consider the larger tradition of Victorian war dramas, for theatrical military reenactments were quite popular throughout the century and operated according to their own set of generic conventions. Even as they struggled to meet the unique representational demands of this unusual confl ict, Boer War plays relied upon a rich tradition within imperial theatre. One tradition in particular, the large-scale battle scene, would prove to be better suited to cinematic representation. Film’s appropriation of this theatrical tradition marks the most significant turn-of-the-century transition of imperial theatrics and sets the stage for a new course of imperialist play production, one focused on smaller-scale dramas of character development and class interaction: J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (Duke of York’s, 1902) and the George Bernard Shaw dramas—John Bull’s Other Island (Royal Court, 1904) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (Queen’s [Manchester], 1902; Royal Court, 1906)—for example.6 In the silence of the cinema auditorium, mass troop movements and military parades—themselves emanations of imperial theatrics, as I discuss in Chapter 1—could still be powerful spectacles of Britain’s imperial might. In place of the theatre’s nightly recreation of troop departures and victory celebrations, film offered those actual events. When we look to the early film archive, we see that, as J.H. DeLange observes, there is a heavy emphasis on representations of large-scale troop sequences: One is struck by the proliferation of fi lms of troop movements, embarking at Southampton, disembarking at Cape Town, marching out to the front. To us, a stationary camera fi xed on a line of helmeted troops striding single file up a gangplank appears at first glance to have little interest. But for the Victorian public, such images held a deep attraction. The succession of the various Colonial regiments underscored the solidarity of the Empire. The uniforms, the generals, the very physical bearing of the men, served as an expression of Imperial confidence. (1991: xxiv)

Conclusion

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We can hear in DeLange’s analysis of the interest in filmed sequences of troop movements echoes of the ideological preoccupations of imperial theatrics: confidence in imperial power, celebration of the nation’s martial capabilities, and the display of imperial unity.7 The fi lms that DeLange catalogues resemble, in effect, the Indian war dramas I discuss in Part III, but with the added element of reality: these are real troops embarking on real ships for the real theatre of war. The spectacle of their movement is entertaining, certainly, but it is also a riveting documentary of current events (Attridge 2003: 25). Contemporaneity had, of course, long been a feature of the theatricalized imperial encounter. Plays about the Crimean War, for example, represented the most recent events from the front, animating the news reports from which they took their direction (Bratton 1980: 119–21). The difference lies in what the public saw on stage versus on the screen. Plays offered only an imaginative recreation of events, while film offered the event itself and was better positioned, therefore, to deliver on the documentary promise of the Victorian visual media. Thus, unlike the theatre, which can at best carefully reenact or imaginatively replicate foreign and historical events, film can at least claim to capture the event itself and to replay this frozen—and “real”—moment over and over again. That many of the Boer War films that appeared in 1899–1901 were completely staged—shot on local golf courses using locals as extras—was a fact unknown to most of the films’ viewers, who thought they were watching footage taken on location in South Africa (Attridge 2003: 27; DeLange 1991: xv–xxiv). Put most simply, even when it was faking images, film came close to delivering the realism that the theatre had long promised and so, in the end, became the preferred vehicle for imperial representation. And so, in bringing this project to a conclusion, I must return to its beginning, for the turn-of-the-century technological revolution that transferred visual representations of empire from the stage to the screen curiously involves its willing surrender of the third dimension and a return to the flattened perspectives of the panoramas and photographs I discussed in Chapter 1. Like the theatre before it, cinema remained faithful to its origins in popular visual and exhibitionary forms, appearing alongside, and thus complementing, other pictorial representations of the war, such as photographs and magic lantern presentations (J. Davis 1996: 32). And like the Victorian drama of empire, Boer War fi lms were often shown embedded within a larger evening’s entertainment, the variety of which provided a comprehensive celebration of Britain’s imperial mission: The Boer War was the fi rst opportunity for fi lm to offer a mass audience the ‘actuality’ of war as part of a music-hall programme. . . . Sometimes the use of fi lm, even when it was pure documentation, was introduced by a carefully stage-managed use of spectacle and song as precursors to the film. The Daily Mail (16 October 1899) describes a music-hall pageant in which a troupe of soldiers sang ‘Up the Old Flag’,

214 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, followed by a biographic film of General Buller’s departure for South Africa—all to a standing ovation. . . . Pageant, the novelty of fi lm and the excitement of seeing Buller himself could provide a vicarious sense of being part of the embarkation for the war. (Attridge 2003: 27) More than a mere exhibition of spectacular images, Boer War-themed films fostered audience participation in the patriotic spectacle that supported the nation’s continued investment in its problematic South African enterprise. In some ways, film would replace theatre as the privileged medium for representations of empire, but the process was more evolution than revolution. Arising out of rich Victorian traditions of spectacular entertainments and hybridized visual forms, cinema adopted and modernized the theatre’s proven methods of imperial representation. The intermingling of theatricality and empire does not end with the death of Victoria, the decline of empire, or the replacement of the stage by a rival form of visual entertainment, for film helped to keep the encounter alive well into the twentieth century.

Notes

INTRODUCTION: AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY PLAYS 1. Robert Johnson breaks these rather monolithic figures into more precise categories: “There were 60 dependencies covering 3.2 million square miles, and British India consisted of a further 2 million square miles and 322 million subjects. In addition, Britain possessed five dominions covering 7.6 million square miles and 24 million people” (2003: 1). 2. For a discussion of how performance reflects and in turn reinforces cultural identity and community memory, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (1996). 3. This documentary function of the Victorian theatre is the subject of J.S. Bratton’s essay, “Theatre of War” (1980), which surveys ten different dramatic reenactments of the Crimean War, all of which appeared in London during the 1854–5 theatre season. Similarly, Patrick Brantlinger (1988) identifies seven plays which gave center stage to the Indian Mutiny in 1857–8. 4. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern argue that “It was not merely that imperial power, springing from many sources, classified, defi ned, and sought to dominate indigenous peoples, but that equally the identities of Britons themselves took shape in relation to the colonized ‘other’” (1999: 6). In “Who Needs the Nation” (2000) Antoinette Burton interrogates the presumptions of the primacy of “Britain” in discussions of empire, encouraging the reassessment of imperialism as a constitutive force in the formation of the British state and British identifications. Exploring the confluences of masculinity, nationalism, and imperial adventure stories, Graham Dawson (1994) argues that “The [Indian] Rebellion had a decisive impact upon popular imaginings of India and the ways in which Britishness was defi ned against Indian others, drawing colonial and national imaginaries into an increasingly close association” (80). In Bringing the Empire Home (2004), sociologist Zine Magubane explores the ways in which colonial contact with Africa produced discourses that defi ned metropolitan white identities. Steve Attridge’s descriptively titled Nationalism, Imperialism, and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (2003) investigates the ways in which class identifications within Britain were challenged and realigned by representations of imperial confl icts, most notably the music hall’s interest in the Boer War. Andrew Thompson, in Imperial Britain (2000), and Jeffrey Richards, in Films and British National Identity (1997), similarly contend that the empire played a key role in Britain’s self-image. 5. The scholar choosing to explore the world of Victorian drama will fi nd no comprehensive directories, indexes, or fi nding guides to guide his or her journey. Indeed, locating play texts appropriate to the current project has proven a persistent challenge. In the absence of such guides I relied on what is

216 Notes arguably an unreliable search strategy: scanning lists of play titles for empireresonant keywords. This strategy, born of necessity, proved quite effective, for although there were a few disappointingly misleading titles, my initial keyword searches turned up dozens upon dozens of plays that were substantively as well as titularly relevant. Thus I was able to locate, rather quickly, Sketches in India (1846), The Raid in the Transvaal (1896), The Bengal Tiger (1837), The Cape Mail (1881), and The Cataract of the Ganges (1823). The obvious problem with such a search strategy is that it completely overlooks plays whose content, characters, plots, or settings might directly engage with imperial themes that are obscured by unrelated title words. Consequently, I initially overlooked Charles Reade’s perennial blockbuster It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1865), Watts Phillips’s Not Guilty (1869), Arthur Law’s Gladys (1886), W.E. Morton’s Fallen Among Thieves (1888), Mrs. Bernard Wishaw’s Hilda (1892), C. Hill-Mitchelson’s Victims of Power (1895), W.H. Dearlove’s Little Lady Loo (1900), and Montague Turner’s Sister’s Sacrifice (1900). These examples further illustrate the difficulties with my third search strategy, which involved focused attention around key moments in the history of the British Empire: the Indian “Mutiny” (1857), the discovery of gold at Ballarat (1850), the fall of Khartoum (1885), etc. This temporal—rather than titular—approach led me to such non-obvious titles as Tom Taylor’s Barefaced Impostors (1854), George Conquest’s The Fugitives (1858), and Harris and Pettitt’s Human Nature (1885), yet it ignored plays that were produced long after the historical events they involved. With these obvious limitations, my research—though thorough—can never be claimed as exhaustive and must leave undiscovered, at least for the moment, any number of plays with an imperial interest. 6. Given the widespread popularity of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, it would be impossible to list here every production of Reade’s drama; indeed, it might be simpler to list the theatres that did not stage it. The play was fi rst produced in Leeds in 1865, after which it opened in Manchester. Its fi rst London production was at the Princess’s in 1865 (where it was revived in 1878). Other London venues which staged Never Too Late include the Surrey (1867, 1882, 1886), the Adelphi (1881), the Elephant and Castle (1884, 1887, 1897), the Standard (1890, 1895), Drury Lane (1891), the Marylebone (1892), and the Pavilion (1896). The play was popular in the provinces, as well, being performed in Liverpool (1865, 1883, 1892), Dundee (1870), Hull (1873), Dublin (1874), Belfast (1881), Edinburgh (1882), Glasgow (1882, 1886, 1893), Manchester (1891), Birmingham (1892), Sheffield (1895), and Aberdeen (1900). This is by no means a complete list of productions, but it does provide a sense of the play’s popularity and longevity. 7. Unfortunately, there is sparse evidence to tell modern critics what audiences thought about or how they responded to what they saw on stage. Theatre reviews tell us something, but the reviewer’s perspective is, of course, only one of many, and a privileged one at that. Limited thus to an analysis of scripts, reviews, and playbills, my discussion can speak to the general, intended effect of certain combinations of plot, character, dialogue, and design, but it does not claim to know the overall effectiveness of these elements as measured through audience reception. 8. By “disciplined” I mean the process by which Britons learned how to see and think about their empire and, perhaps more importantly, themselves as imperialists. Tony Bennett discusses the disciplinary effect of public spectacle in The Birth of the Museum (1995: 63–69). Peter Hoffenberg has similarly noted that “Unlike the private act of reading, participation at the exhibitions was a public and mass-oriented textual experience” (2001: xviii).

Notes

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CHAPTER 1: IMPERIAL THEATRICS: SPECTACLE AND EMPIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1. A number of scholars have described the British Empire as a calculated display of authority, its power vested in spectacle and pageantry rather than military and political institutions. See, for example, Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in British India” (1983) and Jan Morris, The Spectacle of Empire (1982). In Toward a Programme of Imperial Life (1982), H. John Field discusses some of the sites and techniques involved in constructing a national (masculine) character capable of sustaining Britain’s imperial ambitions. 2. The theatre’s disciplinary function was crucial to the nation in a period in which state celebrations were poorly staged and badly received by the public. According to David Cannadine (1983), for most of the nineteenth century, the British were not particularly adept at staging national celebrations. It is easy to see how the theatre, with its lavish productions and efficient transmission of community-forming affect, might have provided a professional, spectacular alternative to the lackluster official celebrations of moments of imperial success. From this perspective, Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown (1858) does more than merely represent the events of the Indian Mutiny; it celebrates, in a lavish and public way, the final British victory over the Indian rebels. 3. Felix Driver positions geographical exhibits such as the Stanley and African Exhibition within the “wider tradition of spectacular display through which the empire was consumed at home in a vast range of exhibitions, plays, pageants, dioramas and panoramas” (2001: 148). Edward Ziter theorizes that “the theatre and optical entertainments fed each other and . . . both fostered a growing taste for exotic spectacle” (2003: 54). 4. Bernth Lindfors, et al., consider several of these ethnological, imperialist spectacles in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (1999). Tony Bennett (1995) brings together various forms of visual spectacle in his formulation of “the exhibitionary complex” in the nineteenth century. 5. Historians Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern argue that “In contrast to older notions of the frontier as a fi xed geographic and temporal entity, the new scholarship views the frontier as a process of interaction between indigenes and Europeans taking place in ‘zones of contact’ that are spatially and chronologically flexible, and within which social, economic and military dynamics intersect and interact” (1999: 3). 6. In Orientalism, John MacKenzie explains how panoramas “contributed to the taste for spectacular theatre in which plot and dramatic device became less important than visual sensation” (1995: 191). 7. Ritvo’s description of how the zoo guidebook directed patrons through the taxonomically organized animal collection recalls Indepol Grewal’s (1996) analysis of the museum guidebook. 8. For further discussion of the zoo’s participation in the imperial project, see also Robert Jones, “‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime’: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic” (1997). Anthony Alan Shelton details the eclectic displays of Frederick Horniman’s late-century museum, which included Oriental artifacts as well as zoological specimens (2000: 165–67). 9. Animals trained for the stage could be readily procured from companies that specialized in procuring animals for the theatrical trade. Advertisements for these organizations can be found in theatrical journals. See, for example, the “Almanack Advertiser” section of The Era for 1879 and 1885. Although Fox’s Illustrated Catalogue lists a life-sized model of an elephant with movable trunk to be had for £2, an ad in The Era (1885) announces that “performing Indian elephants (a specialty) [are] always on hand at reasonable prices.” While it is

218 Notes

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

not clear what constitutes a “reasonable” price for an exotic animal in the mid1880s, the Dramatic Register listed the “salary” of the pachydermous star of The Elephant of Siam (Adelphi, 1829) as £20 per night. Mungo Parke; or, the Arab of the Niger! Surrey Theatre, July 1840. Playbill. The playbills for The Wise Elephants of the East (1854) and The Rajah of Nagpore; or, the Sacred Elephants of the Pagoda (1846), both at Astley’s, bear illustrations of elephants performing tricks: a headstand in the fi rst case, a tightrope walk in the second. The widespread use of live elephants in Victorian plays was remarked upon early in the century by an anonymous reviewer of Hyder Ali; or, the Lions of Mysore (Drury Lane, 1831): “Hyder Ali makes his entry into Mysore on an elephant. He was a fi ne, portly fellow, but as his race is to some degree naturalized among us by former spectacles, he was not so much the object of astonishment as the other animals” (National Omnibus 1831: 144). The panoramic journey is interrupted by plot and dialogue before being taken up again at the top of scene four. In a review of the play, the Theatrical Journal (1830) takes special note of the aesthetic effect of the panoramic journey, demonstrating the extent to which Victorian audiences appreciated the purely visual effects of theatrical entertainments. Apart from its insightful critical assessment of the interplay between realism and spectacle in the Victorian theatre, MacKenzie’s chapter on “The Theatre of Empire” (1986: 40–66) provides a very full bibliography of nineteenthcentury imperialist plays. Due to MacKenzie’s interest in articulating a larger argument about theatre and empire, these plays are treated only very briefly within his discussion, leaving much still to be done in terms of close readings of each of these texts. Ryan’s book focuses on photography, so my reference here is admittedly anachronistic from the perspective of the 1838 play. But because my intention in this chapter is to demonstrate the coalescence and continuity of various visual forms, it is not only relevant but important to consider the possible connections between early-century drama and late-century landscape photography. John Connolly observed that the “genuine character” of the Zulu performers “was sometimes more remarkably and more convincingly revealed to visitors admitted behind the scenes, after the close of the public performances” (1855: 8). This exhibition of human beings in their “natural” environments reached its culmination at the end of the century, with the full-sized replicas of native villages found in private exhibitions in London, such as Imre Kiralfy’s Empire of India Exhibition, constructed at Earl’s Court in 1898 (Gregory 1991). Joss Marsh identifies several other of the Egyptian Hall’s ethnographic displays (1999: 278). Z.S. Strother, Bernth Lindfors, and Shane Peacock identify and investigate other nineteenth-century ethnological exhibits of African peoples in Africans on Stage (Lindfors, et al. 1999). Felix Driver similarly notes how the inclusion of human subjects as well as models representing various African “types” was intended to authenticate the representation of darkest Africa at the Stanley and African Exhibition (2001: 157). Richard Altick confi rms that emphasis on the picture’s authenticity, supported by claims that it was based on drawings “made on the spot,” was common in panorama advertisements (1978: 186). Karp and Kratz similarly identify an authenticating effect created by experiential claims in nineteenth-century travel writing (2000: 204). And Breandan Gregory (1991) describes Kiralfy’s exhaustive efforts to provide an “authentic” recreation of India in the heart of London through his Empire of India Exhibition (1895–6).

Notes

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20. Colonel Ahmed Bey Arabi, leader of the 1882 Egyptian uprising against foreign intervention in Egyptian affairs. His revolt threatened British fi nancial interests in the Suez and prompted direct British military action and a permanent political presence in the country. 21. For a discussion of Human Nature and its engagement with popular imperialist sentiment, see Michael Booth, “Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism” (1996: 10–14). Hays notes that the play’s most powerful scene “was not the storming of [Khartoum], but the grand march-past of the victorious troops through Trafalgar Square . . . ‘in the presence’ . . . ‘of a vast stage crowd, who swarm upon Landseer’s lions and otherwise display a patriotic enthusiasm requiring to be restrained by the police’” (1996: 13). 22. Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe was a sequel to Mr. Buckstone’s Ascent of Mount Parnassus, which was so successful when it appeared in 1853 that it inspired not just this sequel, but a competitive imitation, as well. Robert Brough’s The Overland Journey to Constantinople, as Undertaken by Lord Bateman opened at the Adelphi on the very night Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage premiered at the Haymarket. 23. Reviewing a revival of Round the World in 80 Days at the Empire, The Athenaeum praised the visual effects of the piece: “While less stupid, from a literary point of view, than most works of its class, it is as spectacle inferior to none, and its processions, ballets, and dresses are brilliant and effective” (6 March 1886: 337).

PART I: RECASTING THE CASTAWAY: THE NINETEENTHCENTURY THEATRICAL ROBINSONADE 1. The Victorian practice of casting women to play Robinson Crusoe seems incongruous with the image of Crusoe as the embodiment of rugged, wilderness-taming masculinity, but making the role a breeches part turned the Victorian stage Crusoe into a more visibly legible emblem of civility. As this illustration of Lydia Thompson suggests, the cross-dressed costume of the female Crusoe signified neatness, refi nement, and a non-threatening (though subtly sexualized) physicality. Crusoe’s masculinity is invested in the phallic rifle, a sign of brute force counterbalanced by western technological ingenuity and civilized restraint. Firmly closed, her parasol might be a second symbolic phallus, but here it is unfurled, suggesting the protective cover of the colonial umbrella. 2. See John McVeagh, “Robinson Crusoe’s Stage Debut: The Sheridan Pantomime of 1781,” Journal of Popular Culture 24 (Fall 1990): 137–152; and David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (1969). Curiously, the Robinsonade seems to have been less popular outside England: John Spring (1977) identifies only one Robinsonade advertised in the Melbourne Argus across the 1860s. Levey and O’Rourke’s Annals of the Theatre Royal, Dublin (1880) similarly indicate the performance of only one recognizable Crusoe pantomime (1869) in that theatre between 1820 and 1879. 3. Even as they looked backwards to a textual antecedent, Victorian theatrical Robinsonades were intensely topical and very much rooted in contemporary social and political issues. The Haymarket’s Robinson Crusoe burlesque of 1868 (written by H.J. Byron, W.S. Gilbert, Tom Hood, Arthur Sketchley, and H.S. Leigh), for example, ends with Crusoe’s wedding to the cannibal princess Pocahontas interrupted by news of the hero’s marriage to Mrs. Brown, a twist that injects popular criticism of Queen Victoria into an already peculiar play.

220

Notes

4. Three of the plays are undated in the Lord Chamberlain’s card catalogue. Most Robinsonades bear the main title Robinson Crusoe, and are thus easily located in the alphabetical index. A few bear the main title Harlequin and Robinson Crusoe. Any Robinsonades falling under other main titles are not included in my count. The numbers of Robinsonades licensed for production, by decade, are as follows: 1860–1869: four 1870–1879: twenty-seven 1880–1889: thirty-six 1890–1899: forty-nine.

CHAPTER 2: THE NOVEL IS NOT ENOUGH: TEXT AND PERFORMANCE IN THE CATARACT OF THE GANGES 1. The Dramatic Magazine found Astley’s 1829 production of Cataract “not so splendid and gorgeous” as it might have been, but noted that “the drama was certainly got up in a very expensive and creditable manner” (1 September 1829: 206). 2. See review for The Cataract of the Ganges at Drury Lane in the Illustrated London News, 8 March 1873. Dutton Cook’s review of Drury Lane’s 1873 revival of Cataract was not particularly charitable, calling the play “a ‘one-horse’ spectacle,” praising its brevity, and concluding that “modern audiences, schooled in stage artifices, and familiar even to contempt with startling effects, will fi nd ‘Cataract of the Ganges’ a far less imposing production than did their grandsires” (1883: 262). In Nights at the Play, Cook identifies the public taste for spectacle as motivating Drury Lane’s original decision to produce The Cataract of the Ganges, a move that Cook argues led to the dismantling of the patent system: “The fact that [Drury Lane and Covent Garden] had appropriated the attractions of the minor theatres was employed as an argument for depriving them of their exclusive privileges, and establishing free trade in dramatic exhibitions” (1883: 260). 3. Drury Lane mounted a production of Cataract in 1873, just four years before Collins adapted The Moonstone to the stage (Sherson 1925: 60). Even if Cataract didn’t provide Collins with a prototypical Crusoe enthusiast, it would have informed many of the novel’s readers’ imaginative renderings of the character. 4. Although the French’s Acting Edition cites F. Kenney as the author of The Illustrious Stranger, Nicoll and Clarence both list James Kenney as the play’s author. The script was taken from a French original and in 1888 was further adapted as Mummies and Marriage (Clarence 1909). 5. Brown and the Brahmins (Globe) may also look backwards to plays such as The Law of Brahma; or, the Burning Sacrifice (Adelphi, 1838), which similarly depict British efforts to save Indian womanhood from Indian law and custom. 6. Moreover, The Cataract of the Ganges, The Illustrious Stranger, and Puck’s Pantomime all premiered at Drury Lane, the most prestigious of the patent houses and the symbolic home of British drama. This venue indicates something of the cultural significance of the theatrical appropriation of Crusoe. 7. Mokarra’s comment is echoed by Achmet’s surrender to Geordie MacGregor’s superior European verbal skills in Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown (1858). See Chapter 10. 8. Elsewhere, Bolton calls the play “incoherent” and “garbage” (2006: 478, 479). Though Bolton’s essay offers a historically grounded reading, her

Notes

221

casual dismissal of the play impedes any effort to read the script on its own terms or to understand its long-term and widespread popularity. The adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days premiered at London’s Princess’s Theatre in 1875. Of the 1886 revival, the Athenaeum noted that “it is as a spectacle inferior to none, and its processions, ballets, and dresses are brilliant and effective” (6 March 1886: 337). Further connecting this production with the tradition of the theatrical Robinsonade, the role of Fix, the detective, was played by Augustus Glover, who starred as King Hokypokywankyfum in the Covent Garden Crusoe pantomime the following year (Pascoe 1880: 151)

CHAPTER 3: ADAPTING A NATION TO EMPIRE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE CRUSOE PANTOMIME 1. John MacKenzie (1999) observes that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the theatre turned increasing attention to imperial developments. From Omai to Tipu Sultan, exotic characters from the East, associated with imperial expansion, were popular subjects for London theatres. 2. Mayer’s chapter on the harlequinade’s representation of the products and processes of the Industrial Revolution is an especially illuminating example of how sensitive the pantomime was to subtle shifts in its social milieu. See also Julia Swindells’s Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789–1833 (2001). 3. See Ronald Hyam (2002: 8–14; 145–66). Andrew Porter makes a claim for dating Britain’s emergence as the world’s premier imperial power to the period 1801–1805, the earlier date marking the Act of Union with Ireland, and thus the consolidation of Great Britain as a nation, and the latter date being the defeat of French naval forces at Trafalgar. Like Hyam, Porter notes the important confl icts that, at mid-century, changed the global environment and posed new challenges to British hegemony (Porter 2000: 135, 152–60). See also Trevor Lloyd, Empire: The History of the British Empire (2001: 63–88). 4. This is not to say that the settler societies ceased to exist or decreased in importance. The mid-nineteenth century saw the geographic expansion of Canada, Australia, and the Cape Colony, as well as the extension of selfgovernment to these areas. These “white settler colonies” all existed prior to the nineteenth century, and their developmental trajectory remained distinct from that of the majority of territories the British seized for strategic reasons, both military and economic. 5. David Blewett describes the image of a solitary Crusoe as a Romantic notion, and notes that by the 1840s, illustrators of Defoe’s novel had begun to replace scenes of Crusoe’s isolation with increasingly crowded vignettes that illustrated Crusoe’s domestic comfort and relationship with Friday (1995: 89–93). 6. Locke would go on to produce another Robinsonade for the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, a decade later (1894). 7. Although the script for Sheridan’s play has been lost, John McVeagh (1990) has ingeniously reconstructed the basic outline of action for Crusoe’s theatrical debut by pulling together the information provided by contemporary reviews, descriptions of scenery, and fragmentary records of stage directions. Pocock’s Robinson Crusoe; or, the Bold Buccaniers is not a pantomime, yet given its position in the evolution of the theatrical Robinsonade, I have included it in this chapter, which otherwise concerns itself with pantomimic iterations of Crusoe. Licensed for presentation at Covent Garden in 1817,

222

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Notes The Bold Buccaniers underwent a number of revivals, appearing for the last time in Edinburgh in 1851. The explosion of theatrical Robinsonades later in the century may reflect, to some degree, the vast expansion of competition within the theatrical marketplace following the dismantling of the patent system. Uniting the abolitionist movement with colonial politics, Thomas Morton’s play The Slave appeared on the same Covent Garden bill as Robinson Crusoe in 1817 (Swindells 2001: 69–74). For discussions of Robinson Crusoe as a novel of religious reform and personal development see Daniel Cottom, “Robinson Crusoe: The Empire’s New Clothes,” The Eighteenth Century 22.3 (1981): 271–86; MargaretAnne Hutton, “Getting Away from It All: The Island as a Space of Transformation in Robinson Crusoe and Tounier’s Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifi que,” Nouveaux Mondes from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard Maber (U of Durham P, 1994: 121–32); Eric Jager, “The Parrot’s Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth Century Studies 21 (Spr. 1998): 316–33; and Cameron McFarlane, “Reading Crusoe Reading Providence,” English Studies in Canada 21 (Sept. 1995): 257–67. W.T. Moncrieff’s The Cataract of the Ganges is an interesting exception to this general trend. Written in 1823 but popular among theatre audiences through the 1870s, it carried forward the earlier tradition of directly representing Defoe’s novel into the latter decades of the century. The Chiel describes such a scene in an 1885 pantomime at the Royal Princess’s Theatre, Glasgow (19 December 1885: 195). The figure of Crusoe’s father, named “Sloper” in Thorn’s 1886 play, is replaced by Will Atkins (the pirate) as Crusoe’s step-father in two 1894 Robinsonades: Geoffrey Thorn’s Rollicking Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday, Who Kept the House Tidy, and Pretty Polly Perkins of Wapping Old Stairs (which also played at the Grand Theatre, just north of Sadler’s Wells in Islington, a somewhat scruffy suburb of London) and Fred Locke’s Robinson Crusoe: A Christmas Story of a Good Friday (produced at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham). The name “Sloper” is perhaps a reference to Ally Sloper, a popular character in illustrated comics. This reference would suggest that Thorn’s pantomime was pitched to the same working- and lower-middle-class audience that read Ally Sloper (Banville 2008; Sabin 2003). I discuss Reade’s play in the context of dramas inspired by the Australian gold rush in Chapter 7. In Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, Jane Goodall (2002) investigates Darwin’s impact on the performing arts. Byron’s play appeared in 1868, the year before Mill’s On the Subjection of Women was published. Thorn’s play represents the beginning of a gradual increase in more overt patriotism in the Crusoe pantomimes, as later playwrights take pains to insert more references to the British fl ag, British military valor, and the formal mechanisms of imperial conquest and administration. Thus, George Conquest fi lls his 1885 play with comments about how “an Englishman never says die,” or how the British “fought like lions” at Khartoum (21, 28). Crusoe’s fi nal assault on the natives is accompanied by a martial medley of tunes that include “Union Jack” and “Don’t Want to Fight,” the song that introduced the term “jingoism” (31). The patriotic flavor of these plays may reflect the working-class audiences of their venues (the Grand Theatre, Islington, and the Surrey Theatre, on the south side of the Thames).

Notes

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18. Rollicking Robinson Crusoe mentions inverted gender norms among Britain’s cultural flaws, updating the metropolitan critique of Thorn’s Robinsonade of a decade earlier (Thorn 1894: 60). In the wake of the 1885 Criminal Law Act, which outlawed homosexuality and sought to regulate prostitution, Will Atkins hailed divorce and sexual scandal as chief among the blessings of civilization (Thorn 1886: 39; Arata 1996: 54–5). 19. The cannibal king’s speech indicates the character’s affi liation with the blackface minstrel tradition and Charles Matthews’s “At Homes” (Waters 2007; Goodall 2002: 118–22). 20. Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen traveled to Britain in September of 1895 to prevent the transfer of their territories from the government-operated Bechuanaland protectorate to the private control of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Neil Parsons’s book follows the three kings on their tour of England, where they divided their time almost equally between public speaking engagements and sightseeing. When they weren’t addressing audiences of their own, they sampled London’s entertainments, including Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, the Somali village, and Imre Kiralfy’s India Exhibition.

CHAPTER 4: IN CRUSOE’S CLOTHES: PERFORMING AUTHORITY IN THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON 1. First produced in 1902, The Admirable Crichton underwent a series of revisions at the hand of its author. The stage directions quoted above were added to the script in 1928. My in-text citations to Barrie’s play in this chapter are keyed to the 1999 Oxford reprint of the 1928 script and so bear the 1999 date. 2. The play’s title was inspired by the story of James Crichton, a sixteenth-century Scottish prodigy renowned for his intelligence, eloquence, and bravery (Geduld 1971: 113; Jack 1991: 105). According to Harry Geduld, the play’s key event was inspired by a remark casually dropped by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle while he was staying with the Barries: “If a king and an able seaman were wrecked together on a desert island for the rest of their lives, the sailor would end as king and the monarch as his servant” (qtd. in Geduld 1971: 114). 3. Some of the material in this chapter appears in Marty Gould, “Caste and the Castaway in The Admirable Crichton,” Modern Drama 54.2 (Summer 2011). 4. During the 1902–1903 theatre season, The Admirable Crichton ran concurrently with Quality Street (T. Young 2005: 47). H.M. Walbrook records that owing to a carpenters’ strike, the play’s premiere at the Duke of York’s Theatre (4 Nov. 1902) began late, inspiring some harsh words from its fi rst critics (1922: 67–68). For a list of some of the earliest productions and film adaptations of The Admirable Crichton, see Geduld (1971: 113). 5. In her doctoral dissertation on the Robinsonade (1985), Susan Maher provides a fairly full account of Peter Pan but affords The Admirable Crichton only a passing mention. 6. R.D.S. Jack somewhat surprisingly traces The Admirable Crichton’s affi nities with The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, and even David Copperfi eld, but says nothing about Robinson Crusoe (1991: 118–20). 7. Where his contemporary George Bernard Shaw produced plays more overtly political and philosophical, Barrie couched his social critique in a less unsettling—and in the case of Crichton, more familiar—fantasy world. Shaw was more radically Modernist in his sensibilities, while Barrie’s comedies were more conservatively subversive of prevailing social structures.

224

Notes

8. Timothy Young notes that “In early versions of the play, there is no argument against this restored order, but, in later revisions, Barrie injected speeches in which Crichton, the butler, rejects his return to servitude” (2005: 47). We might well think of Barrie’s continued refi nement of the script over time as an extension of the Robinsonade’s inherent generic evolutionary dynamic. 9. While I have elsewhere used “Britain” and “British” to denote larger composite nationalist concepts, in this chapter I adopt the more narrowly defi ned national terminology of The Admirable Crichton, which speaks strictly in terms of “England” and “English.” 10. Although Walbrook cites contemporary critics’ assessments of The Admirable Crichton as revolutionary and politically charged, he questions the legitimacy of such serious claims for a light comedy (1922: 73). It is hard to see how he arrives at this reductive dismissal given the evidence that he himself cites and the play’s placement within a highly politically charged theatrical tradition. 11. Like Shaw and the other playwrights of the New Drama movement, Barrie imagined the theatre as less “popular” and more socially serious, publishing his plays as a way of claiming for the drama a literary status it had lost in the nineteenth century. We might think of The Admirable Crichton as Barrie’s effort to retrieve Crusoe from the popular Victorian pantomime tradition, the very tradition that had made Crusoe available to Barrie as a critic of contemporary cultural issues. 12. First performed in 1902, The Admirable Crichton underwent a series of revisions as Barrie reworked the ending and inserted lengthy stage directions. I am working from Peter Hollindale’s reprint of the 1968 “Defi nitive Edition” of the play, itself a reprinting of the authoritative edition published in 1928. This is the version considered the most authoritative and stable, and my citations to the play thus reference the modern reprint of the revised text rather than Barrie’s fi rst rendering of the script. For discussions of alternate endings to the play, see Grace Lamacchia, “Textual Variations for Act IV of The Admirable Crichton,” Modern Drama (1970): 408–18. R.D.S. Jack also provides an interesting catalogue of variant endings (1991: 125–126).

PART II: THEATRICAL NABOBERY: IMPERIAL WEALTH, MASCULINITY, AND METROPOLITAN IDENTITIES CHAPTER 5: THE STAGE NABOB’S EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS 1. The term “Anglo-Indian” carries multiple meanings. Although it eventually replaced “Eurasian” as the preferred designation for individuals of mixed race, in the nineteenth century it was most frequently used to denote Englishmen who had been living in India for an extended period of time, as well as British communities in India. It can thus indicate either racial blending or cultural segregation. In the present discussion, I use “Anglo-Indian” to mean white, British individuals or communities associated with or residing in India. 2. A chillumjee (or chillumchee) is “A basin of brass (as in Bengal), or tinned copper (as usually in the West and South) for washing hands.” A huccabadar (alternately hookerbedar or hooka-burdar) is “a servant whose duty it was to attend to his master’s hooka, and who considered that duty sufficient to occupy his time.” The houcca (or hooka) is “the Indian pipe for smoking through water, the elaborated hubble-bubble. That which is smoked in the

Notes

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

225

hooka is a curious compound of tobacco, spice, molasses, fruit, &c.” (Yule and Burnell 1886). Antony Wild identifies these portraits as the “dour Scotch ancestors” of Sir David Ochterlony, the subject of the painting (2000: 105). The nabob continued to be a recognizable fi gure in British society into the twentieth century. As late as 1906, Punch’s poetic tribute to “A Modern Nabob” celebrated the nabob’s distinguishing characteristics (25 July 1906: 55). Renu Juneja cites The Mogul Tale as an example of a dramatic reversal “of the expected designation of the English as civilized and the conquered races as savage” (1992: 185). The Drury Lane production of The West Indian received a lengthy review in The Stage vol. I (9 March 1815): 380–3. The Dramatic and Musical Review, vol. I (23 April, 1872): 43. Twenty Minutes with a Tiger was a popular farce with a record of production spanning three decades. Venues which staged this play included the Lyceum (1870), the Prince of Wales’s (1872), the Olympic (1873–1875), and the Haymarket (1881, 1884). Outside London, Twenty Minutes was performed in Liverpool (1857), Manchester (1862), Belfast (1862), Dublin (1868), and Edinburgh (1881). For a concise summary and critical assessment of My Uncle, see Dramatic Notes III (July 1889): 88–89. My Uncle premiered at Terry’s Theatre, which had opened just two years earlier on the Strand. Citing Mayhew, Stoler characterizes bourgeois values as property ownership, rootedness, and an orderly family life (2000: 106–7). Clarence (1909) lists the first performance of The Nabob at the Haymarket in June 1772, which date Nicholl confirms (1959: III.260). Lawrence James claims the play debuted at Dublin’s Theatre Royal in 1773 (1997: 45). W. MacQueenPope records an Anglo-Indian backlash against the play when it premiered: “A party of them went to Foote’s home to beat him up. They were let in, and Foote was all smiles. . . . He was sorry they should be so mistaken. He confused them with his glibness and his quick wit,” claiming that it was not the nabobs but the Indians he was jabbing at in the play. Their tempers soothed, the “gentlemen who had come to whip, stopped to dine” (1948: 107–8). Keith Robbins argues that although “‘National character’ is a term which makes a modern historian either timid or angry . . . we must acknowledge that it stood for an attempt to grapple with the total culture of a society, such as now would be attempted by social anthropologists using more complex language. ‘Character,’ both individual and national, was of huge interest to the Victorians and observations upon it could range from the crude to the sophisticated” (1988: 10). In Staging Governance, Daniel O’Quinn complicates traditional readings of The Nabob by tracing its debts to the 1772 Alexander Fordyce scandal and the Scottish banking collapse (2005: 43–73). From this perspective, Mite figures not only colonial misconduct but also deceptive domestic credit practices, the play’s conclusion confi rming the triumph of English nationalism via bourgeois fi nancial and sexual self-regulation. In addition to The Nabob, Foote wrote two other plays—The Maid of Bath and The Bankrupt—dealing with “the acquisition and abuse of wealth, and with the connection between money and marriage” (Chatten 1980: 98). An intriguing adaptation of the reintegration of Anglo-Indian alterity into the familiar middle-class marriage plot can be seen in My Son Diana (Haymarket, 1857), which features an eccentric East Indian grocer, who has brought up his daughter as though she were a boy. The play’s comedic

226

Notes challenge is the refeminization and marriage of this unfortunate girl. For plot summary and a short review of the performance of this play, see The Thespian and Dramatic Record (3 June 1857): 43.

CHAPTER 6: “THE YELLOW BEAMS OF HIS ORIENTAL COUNTENANCE”: THE NABOB AS RACIAL AND CULTURAL HYBRID 1. The Athenaeum records the fi rst performance of The Bengal Tiger at the Olympic—a fashionable, up-market, “minor” theatre in the West End, at that time under the management of Madame Vestris—in late December, 1837. The Olympic revived the play in 1854. Clarence records an 1870 revival at the Princess’s (1909: 43), a West End theatre that had prospered under Kean’s management in the 1850s but had become fi nancially troubled by the 1870s, when it was known for melodramas such as It Is Never Too Late to Mend and After Dark. The Bengal Tiger was revived at the Marylebone in March 1888, where it played alongside Boucicault’s Arrah-na-pogue. Other London productions include the Adelphi (1859–60), St. James’s (1861), the Haymarket (1863), and the Criterion (1894). Outside London, The Bengal Tiger was performed in New York (1856), Edinburgh (1856 and 1867), Brighton (1858), Liverpool (1862), Bombay (1861), and Dublin (1865). Despite the shared titular “tiger” references, The Bengal Tiger bears no substantive resemblance to Dance’s 1835 script, The Tame Tigers. 2. Other evidence confi rms the nabob’s successful transition into the early years of the twentieth century. Uncle Ruppershaw of the 1900 farce In the Soup, for example, disrupts his nephew’s home in ways that are consistent with theatrical nabobery: he talks about pig-sticking, complains about the temperature, eats curry, and treats his English relatives like servants in their own home. 3. In the 1867 Edinburgh production, the actor (Odell) playing Sir Paul delivered his lines “not in a mock furious style, but with a tragic earnestness that seemed quite inappropriate in a farce” (The Era, 17 February 1867). 4. Allardyce Nicholl (1959) lists the play as My Home Is Not My Home, a title which better captures the contested domesticity at the center of this play (as well as other nabob plays). According to Nicholl, it premiered at the Olympic Theatre, a respectable West End establishment located near Drury Lane and Covent Garden, still the offi cial patent theatres when The Nabob’s Return was performed 26 February 1840. The Olympic, incidentally, had been the venue for the premiere of The Bengal Tiger three years earlier. 5. The window and view onto the Thames is depicted in the cover engraving of the Dick’s Standard Plays edition of The Bengal Tiger. See figure 5.1. 6. Clarence (1909) records revivals of The West Indian at the Lyceum in 1822 and Drury Lane in 1814. This latter play was reviewed in The Stage, 9 March 1815 (380–83). The Dramatic and Musical Review also favorably reviewed a performance of the play in April 1842. 7. Henry Pettitt’s The Nabob’s Fortune of 1881 is the obvious exception to this developmental division. 8. The licensing of Edwin Keene’s play A Saucy Nabob (Alhambra, 1886), another play that draws on the theatrical nabob tradition, similarly coincides with the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. 9. The racist connotations of this name are so unmistakable as to be beyond comment.

Notes

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10. Unlike most of the nabob plays I discuss in this chapter, which were intended for West End theatres with reliably middle-class audiences, My Sister from India was performed at the more down-market Punch’s Playhouse: the play’s more overtly racist rhetoric and its similarity to plays about budget lodging houses may reflect its particular audience demographic. 11. I discuss theatrical treatments of the social anxieties occasioned by the Great Exhibition at greater length in “‘Rational, National Show!’: The Theatrical Career of the Great Exhibition,” Victorian Review 29.2 (Winter 2003): 19–39. 12. In June 1851, the Edinburgh Adelphi offered Apartments under the main title, London in 1851. The play appeared on a bill alongside Ramah Droog; or, the Hill Fort of the Khyber Pass, a military docudrama celebrating British successes in Afghanistan. 13. In its review of the piece, Thallis’s Dramatic Magazine quite tellingly reported that the play’s premise was based on a popular, though completely unfounded fear (June 1851: 250). 14. The Era printed a favorable review of My Sister from India, noting the “spirit of its dialogue” and giving special consideration to the “tact and energy” of Mrs. Selby, who played the titular character (The Era, 11 January 1852). 15. Horace was licensed in 1895. Clarence records its initial performance at the Strand, where My Sister from India had played three decades earlier, under its subtitle, A Man with a Past. Its author, Henry Paulton, was at that time the theatre’s manager. The comedy was revived at the Worthing Theatre in May 1901 (Clarence 1909). 16. Because the pagination in the licensing script restarts with each scene, I have indicated scene numbers in my citations. 17. The fear that England is well within the reach of a colonial assault is also evident in The Nabob’s Pickle (Aquarium, 1883), whose title character worries that even in London he is not safe from the Thugs he once hired to kill him: I turned my back upon Naggerapore And sailed back over to England’s shore A healthy, wealthy, bachelor. But though I shall dwell here evermore I can never feel my life secure, For the faithful black assassinator Whom I hired some forty years before Will some day open the parlour door And strangle me here upon the floor To earn the money received of yore From the nabob of Naggerapore. (Corder 1883: 1–2) 18. C.J. Collins comically links similarly exaggerated claims of Anglo-Indian despotism with suspicions of mental instability in City Friends (1855), which played, like My Sister from India and Horace, at the Strand Theatre. 19. In addition to the examples cited here, plays in this category include C. and F. Corder’s The Nabob’s Pickle (Aquarium, 1883), Edwin Keene’s A Saucy Nabob (Variety, 1886) and W. Lestocq and Henry Du Souchet’s My Friend from India (Garrick, 1896). 20. According to a review in The Theatrical Times, in October 1846 Poole’s farce played at Belfast’s Theatre Royal alongside The Illustrious Stranger and Richard III (17 October 1846: 193). In August of that year, The Theatrical Times noted that despite the stifling heat, A Nabob for An Hour attracted a large audience to London’s Adelphi Theatre (15 August 1846: 78).

228

Notes

21. The Athenaeum was not kind in its review of The Cousin from Australia, calling it “a farce of primitive design and workmanship, wholly unsuited to the London public [and] acted with more energy than success.” After just two performances, the play was withdrawn (16 April 1898: 512). Despite the brevity of its run, George Bernard Shaw managed to catch the fi rst act of The Cousin from Australia, calling it “a harmless pleasantry for very simpleminded folk” and noting that it “has plenty of harmless fun in it for the right sort of audience” (Shaw 1932: 383). 22. For a discussion of the disciplinary function of the theatrical, see Joseph Litvak (1992).

CHAPTER 7: AUSTRALIAN GOLD RUSH PLAYS AND THE ANGLO-INDIAN NABOB’S ANTIPODAL ANTITHESIS 1. For George Bernard Shaw’s review of The Cousin from Australia, see Chapter 6, Note 21. 2. Margaret Williams describes the impact of the gold craze on the Australian theatre, noting that in addition to imported British plays (Wanted! One Thousand Young Milliners for the Gold Diggings, The Golden Fiend, etc.), Australian playwrights found inspiration in the local gold rush phenomenon, creating a bustling and respectable entertainment industry in the rapidly growing cities of Melbourne and Sydney (1983: 43–56). 3. “Hugo Vamp” was the pseudonym for playwright J.R. O’Neill. 4. A similarly competitive spirit can be seen in Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the World (in Leicester Square). See Chapter 1. 5. For more on dramatic treatments of the Great Exhibition of 1851, see Marty Gould, “‘Rational, National Show!’: The Theatrical Career of the Great Exhibition,” Victorian Review 29.2 (Winter 2003): 19–39. 6. Haunting the margins of the modern literary canon, Charles Reade was one of the more popular and highly regarded authors of his day, at one time favorably compared to George Eliot (N. Thompson 1995: 194, 204–6). Published in 1856, It Is Never Too Late to Mend was “one of the nineteenth century’s best-selling and most critically esteemed novels” (N. Thompson 1995: 193). An adaptation of his 1853 Drury Lane melodrama, Gold!, the novel was itself adapted to the stage in 1865. For a sketch of the play’s performance history, see “Introduction,” fn. 6. 7. Keen on mining its own bit of theatrical gold, the Grecian Theatre under George Conquest’s management advertised Better Late than Never!, no doubt hoping to capitalize on the popularity of It Is Never Too Late to Mend. Reade fought a long battle with copyright violators—including Conquest, who would later star as Crawley in the Surrey’s 1882 production of Never Too Late—denouncing them in the pages of The Era and other newspapers. 8. The Queen’s Theatre was a large hall, used for meetings and lectures as well as theatrical entertainments (Mander and Mitchenson 1968: 361). It catered primarily to a local (somewhat rowdy) audience in the neighborhood of St. Pancras (Emeljanow and Davis: 2001: 140–1). 9. Our Colonial Relative was fi rst performed at the Tyne Theatre, Newcastle. Though Reid does not refer to the “colonial relative” of the title as a nabob, the term “nabob” is used to denote a wealthy Australian in Sydney Blackburn’s The Cousin from Australia (Olympic, 1898). 10. The 1881 Grecian drama Australia, for example, concludes with the deaths of a family of dangerous Bushrangers, which makes the region safe for the

Notes

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

229

industrious cattle rancher. In Henry Pettitt’s Hands across the Sea (Theatre Royal [Manchester], 1888), crime is associated with the French colony of New Caledonia, while Australia is celebrated as a land of freedom and justice. Cannadine describes India’s social hierarchy as analogous to that of England, and uses this claim to support his argument that the British readily perceived India as a familiar extension of their own social world (2001: 134–5). There is, however, a vast difference between analogue and copy, and as we have seen in the theatrical representations of Indian nabobs and Australian miners, these two colonies looked very different in the popular imagination. Located on the south side of the Thames, the Surrey attracted a socio-economically diverse audience from its own immediate neighborhood and from across London. At this time, the Princess’s was a struggling concern (Mander and Mitchenson 1968: 356). The development of South Africa’s gold and diamond industries was welldocumented by the periodical press, topical panoramas, and illustrated lectures designed to educate the public and inspire emigration. The British public would have been fairly familiar with the unique character of the South African diggings, an awareness that, when combined with the demand for topically current drama—a demand I trace in Chapters 3 and 8—would have rendered it necessary—or at least fiscally wise—for playwrights to represent the gold diggings accurately, particularly in plays destined for theatres with working-class audiences, who might be expected to be more aware of the lack of opportunity for individual fortune hunting in South Africa as opposed to the wider field of opportunity offered by Australia earlier in the century. Compared to the archive of plays chronicling Britain’s involvements in India, there are few nineteenth-century dramas set in Africa. The theatre didn’t take much notice of the scramble for Africa in the 1880s, for example, and it produced only a handful of dramas inspired by the Zulu War (including Alfred Cook’s War in Zululand, The Zulu Chief, and Cetawayo at Last) and the Sudan campaign (The Fall of Khartoum). South Africa is the setting for Harris’s Cheer Boys, Cheer! (1895) and the 1888 H. Rider Haggard dramatizations, She and The Fire of Life, while northern Africa is invoked in George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899). If we consider only the settings of The Diamond Rush (Day 1895) and The Kimberley Mail (Longden 1892), we can see how the theatre worked to retrospectively connect South Africa to England by way of the diamond trade. Both plays include scenes at the Cape, but the bulk of the action unfolds in England. Both plays merge plots of murder and marriage, with the exchange of diamonds closely following—and occasionally directing—the transfer of women from one man to another. These plays, like The Raid in the Transvaal (Merritt and Conquest 1896), connect colonial wealth not with decadence, as in the nabob plays, but with violence. This growing reliance on the figure of the explorer/settler to embody British masculinity in an imperial context may partly account for the late-century explosion of theatrical Robinsonades. See Chapter 2. Australia’s brand of rugged masculinity is contrasted with effeminate English dandyism in Tom Taylor’s Ups and Downs; or, the Antipodes (Holborn, 1887). In The Binbian Mine (Margate, 1888), the marriage plot requires the self-sacrifice of the Australian millionaire, who kills himself so that his estranged wife may marry the man whom she loves and to whom he owes a debt of honor.

230 Notes PART III: STAGING THE MUTINY: ETHNICITY, MASCULINITY, AND IMPERIAL CRISIS 1. For the sake of readability, I have chosen to disengage from quotation marks the word “Mutiny” and its variations. My adoption of the term used by contemporary British commentators to describe the actions of the Sepoy regiments in rebellion in 1857 should not be construed as a personal condemnation of those actions or an endorsement of Britain’s retaliatory response. My purpose here is not to evaluate, criticize, condemn, or celebrate the motives and behaviors of those directly involved on either side of the confl ict but to explore the representations of the event on Britain’s theatrical stages. In that performative forum, the war in India was consistently characterized as a military insurgency or mutiny. 2. Contemporary British commentators largely dismissed the notion that the Mutiny represented a widespread nationalist revolt, insisting instead that the event was a localized expression of dissatisfaction within the Anglo-Indian military organization. For the continuing debate over the extent to which the Mutiny constituted a nationalist rebellion, see C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988: 169–99); Niall Ferguson, Empire (2002: 146–7); Alison Blunt, “Embodying War,” Journal of Historical Geography (2000: 403–4); and Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (2005: 22–32). 3. According to Robert Druce’s estimate, “More than eighty novels the sole purpose of which was to rehearse the events of the Mutiny of 1857 were published between 1858 and 1960. In the forty years between 1880 and 1920 alone, at least fi fty-six such ‘Mutiny’ novels were published, six of them appearing in the ‘peak’ year, 1896” (1997: 197). 4. The Lord Chamberlain’s copy of the script indicates that the play was licensed for the Victoria Theatre on 10 November 1857. Nicholl (1959) also places the play at the Victoria. The Times, however, advertises the play under its subtitle, The Fall of Delhi, and places the production at the Marylebone. Both theatres—the Marylebone in east London, the Victoria south of the Thames—catered to working-class audiences in their immediate neighborhoods. 5. A similar racially oriented plot can be found in The Indian Mutiny, performed in Scotland in 1893. Reviewing the play for The Quiz, the “Cantankerous Critic” describes “the fortunes of Ghuz-na, the supposed daughter of a Hindoo, but in reality the child of Major Ingleby, Commander of the Garrison of one of the Hill Forts.” The critic found “The character [to be] rather a curious mixture, and by no means easy to be made to seem a possible or even a probable one” (13 April 1893).

CHAPTER 8: INDIA IN THE LIMELIGHT: EMPIRE AND THE THEATRE OF WAR 1. My attribution of the play to C.A. Somerset is based solely on the evidence of the playbill, which announces “an entirely new grand military spectacle in 3 acts, written expressly for this Theatre by Mr. C.A. Somerset (Author of ‘The War in China,’ ‘Affghanistan War,’ &c., Founded upon the present events in India . . . ).” 2. My discussion of The Affghanistan War relies on two playbills (1843 and 1850). Though printed seven years apart, the bills are identical in their wording.

Notes

231

3. For discussions of the imperialist implications of music in the nineteenth century, see Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music (2001) and Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment” (1986). 4. The double signification of this word should not be overlooked, for the mock battle sequences I am discussing here were recreational (that is, they entertained people) and were designed as authentic recreations of actual armed engagements. 5. In his discussion of Flora Annie Steel’s Mutiny novel, Patrick Williams offers one potential explanation for the atypical setting of The Storming and Capture of Delhi: On the Face of the Waters is rare among novels of the Mutiny in not having the Cawnpore massacre as an important focus of the narrative. . . . At the same time, it could be that the action takes place in Delhi because this is the site of British male heroism (daring sorties, blowing up the arsenal, the siege and capture of the city, etc.) and it is this, rather than the female martyrdom at Cawnpore, which the text wants to highlight. (1995: 61–2) For more on the portrayal of masculine heroism in Mutiny melodramas, see Chapter 9. 6. In June and July of 1857, a large army of mutineers gathered at Delhi, which by August hosted between thirty and forty thousand rebels. Against this force were set some seven thousand British troops who were stationed around the city out of range of the rebels’ artillery and smoothbore muskets. Their new Enfield rifles enabled the British troops, vastly outnumbered, to besiege the city. A full British assault on Delhi did not begin until reinforcements arrived in early September. Fighting was fierce, but within two weeks, the city was recaptured by British forces. Once Delhi had been secured, the indiscriminate massacre of sepoys and civilians began. The fall of Delhi, which had been occupied by the mutineers for symbolic rather than strategic reasons, struck a decisive blow against the spirit of revolt all over the country. Further British victories at Lucknow and Cawnpore between November 1857 and February 1858 reinforced this turning of the tide against the rebels (Lawrence James 1997: 258–62). 7. In Realizations, Martin Meisel explores the tableau’s role in pictorial dramaturgy (1983: 38–49).

CHAPTER 9: THE EMPIRE NEEDS MEN: MUTINY PLAYS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF MASCULINITY 1. In keeping with the prohibition against theatrical representations of living persons, a note in the Lord Chamberlain’s Daybook indicates that the specific references to General Wheeler and his daughter were to be omitted in performance. 2. Matilda’s vocal assertiveness echoes that of her theatrical predecessor, Jessie Brown, a figure I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 10. In his review of The Girl I Left Behind Me (Adelphi, 1895), George Bernard Shaw comments on the ubiquity of such female heroics: “It is, of course, usual on stage for all army commanders to be superseded at critical moments by their daughters” (100). 3. Matilda’s fainting spell recalls Jessie Brown’s descent into delirium at the conclusion of Boucicault’s play. See Chapter 10. 4. Following its premiere on 28 October 1857, the play ran nightly until 23 December, for a total of fi fty-five performances.

232 Notes 5. It was among the last plays to be performed in the old Adelphi; the structure was demolished in the following year to make way for an expanded and improved theatre. The Drapery Question was also produced in Bristol and in Edinburgh in 1857. 6. J.S. Bratton observes a similar form of social protest embedded within Crimean War dramas (1980: 124). 7. “The Campbells are Coming” is a traditional Scotch jig, associated with the loyalist Campbell clan, who marched against the Jacobite rebels in the early eighteenth century. Selby’s comic lyrics are thus accompanied (and colored) by music long associated with honor and loyalty in the face of rebellion. The song would become closely associated with the Mutiny and the Scots soldiers who would feature so prominently in the British relief efforts. 8. See, for example, “The Shopman’s Adieu to the Ladies” (3 October 1857: 144); “Patterns for Drapers’ Young Men (24 October 1857: 176); and “Heroes and Haberdashers” (17 October 1857: 164). 9. I have been unable to determine whether this graphically violent play was actually performed. However, even if this script did not participate actively in public discussions of these issues (that is, if it never had an actual audience), Highland Jessie Brown reveals the pervasiveness of the public’s preoccupation with gender norms in both economic and military spheres, and is thus a vital piece of evidence in the present discussion.

CHAPTER 10: FORGING A GREATER BRITAIN: THE HIGHLAND SOLDIER AND THE RENEGOTIATION OF ETHNIC ALTERITIES 1. An early version of this chapter appears in “Victorian Representations of War,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 66 (October 2007): 391–414. 2. Although we may be tempted to see the kilt as a feminine garment, Maureen Martin argues that the Victorians would not have confused the short Highland skirt with the long dresses worn by women in the period (2009: 166, fn. 2). That the Indian rebels in the Mutiny plays frequently make this error further highlights their barbarity and cultural Otherness. 3. According to Jeffrey Richards, Boucicault’s play was the source material for the 1915 Francis Ford fi lm The Campbells Are Coming (1997: 244). 4. Though Allardyce Nicholl (1959) records two productions of the play in England in 1858—the fi rst at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, and the second at London’s Britannia Theatre—neither of these productions appears to have attracted critical attention and, indeed, may not have been based on Boucicault’s script. Nicholl may be confusing two different plays. A one-act drama entitled Jessie Brown and written by William Seaman was licensed for performance at the Britannia in January 1858, so the 1859 performance of Jessie Brown at the Britannia was most likely not Boucicault’s play. 5. Boucicault, who had played the role of Nana Sahib in New York, played the role of Cassidy in both London productions. In its review of the Drury Lane production, The Era noted the play’s spectacular effects: “the flight of the Scotch girl on horseback across the Cataract of the Ghoorka Pass, and the final charge of the 78th Highlanders, are stage effects which have never been excelled” (28 September 1862). The reference to Jessie’s flight across the cataract recalls the closing effect of The Cataract of the Ganges (see Chapter 2). Advertisements in The Era indicate that Jessie Brown was performed all over Britain (and abroad) through the end of the century: Bradford, Bristol, Brighton, Leicester, and Halifax (1857–59); Dublin (1867); Edinburgh

Notes

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

233

(1863), Dundee (1871), Aberdeen (1872 and 1877), Glasgow (1879), and Dumfries (1886); and New York (1865) and Montreal (1885). In London, the play was revived at the Standard (an East End theatre) in 1892 and 1896. This partial list of productions indicates the broad and enduring popularity of Jessie Brown. The Era’s review of Jessie Brown called attention to the comparative ethnography implied by the contrast between the play’s Scottish music and the dance performance of the Beni-Zoug-Zoug Arabs that accompanied the play (28 September 1862). While modern critics may speculate about the possibility of working-class identification with the oppressed servant here and with the rebels more broadly, reviews of Jessie Brown provide no evidence for such identifications. Reviewers invariably comment on the patriotism of the piece and the audience’s enthusiastic reception. Again, these representational practices are consistent with historical and fictional accounts of the Mutiny. See Bayly (1988: 183–8); Peers (1997: 133–7); and Brantlinger (1988: 203). Mrs. Campbell’s location at the colonial boundary is consistent with the positioning of women in the typical Mutiny narrative, which demonstrates a lurid obsession with threats to white feminine sexuality, highlighting the symbolic role of English womanhood within the imperial imaginary. See Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj (1999); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (1993); Claudia Klaver, “Domesticity under Siege: British Women and Imperial Crisis at the Siege of Lucknow, 1857” (2001); Alison Blunt, “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defi lement in the Indian Mutiny, 1857” (2000). Although its clientele was of a humbler class—a group Dickens found to be dirty but attentive—the Britannia was a popular and apparently prosperous theatre in the 1840s and 50s. In an article in Household Words, Dickens estimated that the theatre served 10,000 people a week (Emeljanow and Davis 2001: 73–8). It is impossible to tell the extent to which Boucicault knew about or borrowed from this play, though William Seaman—whom Richard Fawkes identifies as the author of the play at the Britannia—sued Boucicault for copyright infringement. While the lawsuit itself strongly suggests Boucicault’s (unacknowledged) debt to this play that preceded his own, the court dismissed the case, citing a lack of evidence (Fawkes 1979: 134). For treatment of the copyright case, see “The Dramatic Titles” (The Era, 9, June 1861) and “The Dramatic Copyright Act” (The Era, 23, August 1863.

CONCLUSION: THE IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER FROM STAGE TO SCREEN 1. In From Stage to Screen, Nicholas Vardac (1949) notes that early fi lm versions of Robinson Crusoe owe much to nineteenth-century theatrical productions. 2. Relevant titles include Sons of Empire (Britannia, 1899), The Heroine of Glencoe (Grand [Liverpool], 1899), Comrades in Khaki (Charles Brookfield; Garrick, 1899), For Queen and Country (Arthur Shirley; Princess’s, 1899), The Bugle Call (Louis Parker and Addison Bright; Haymarket, 1899), A Gentleman in Khaki (Preston Hope; Drury Lane, 1900), The War Special (Fred Wright; Gaiety, 1900), Kenyon’s Widow (Charles Brookfield; Comedy, 1900), Fortune of War (Cosmo Hamilton; St. James’s, 1901), and Boer Meisje (Henry Johnson; Great Queen Street, 1900).

234

Notes

3. For exhaustive lists of Boer War fi lms, see John Barnes, Filming the Boer War (1992), and J. H. De Lange, The Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, on Film (1991). This latter book is particularly valuable in that it includes short summaries of the action sequences of each of the listed fi lms. 4. The licensing copy attributes ‘Midst Shot and Shell to J.P. Lallen. Nicholl (1957) lists Walter Howard as the author. 5. Attridge labels The Raid in the Transvaal a Boer War drama although it was written and licensed a good two years before the war broke out. The play actually engages with the Jameson Raid of 1895, which would prove to be an early provocation for the later war. 6. Captain Brassbound’s Conversion was fi rst performed by the Stage Society in 1899 and published in 1900 as part of Shaw’s collection Three Plays for Puritans. It was fi rst commercially produced in Manchester in 1902, arriving in London in 1906. 7. Jim Davis (1996) argues that Australian theatrical representations of the war celebrated the participation of Dominion troops in the empire’s great military cause.

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244 Bibliography Ward, Andrew (1996) Our Bones are Scattered: the Cawnpore massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. New York: Henry Holt. Washbrook, D.A. (1999) “India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism.” Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century. Ed. Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 395–421. Waters, Hazel (2007) Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Richard (1981) Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Wild, Antony (2000) The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from 1600. London: Harper Collins. Williams, Margaret (1983) Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Patrick (1995) “‘No woman is worth it . . .’: Flora Annie Steel and the Indian Mutiny.” Gender and Colonialism. Ed. E. Tilley, L. Pilkington, and S. Ryder. Galway: University of Galway Press. Williams, Stanley (1920) “Richard Cumberland’s West Indian.” Modern Language Notes 35.7: 413–7. Wills, Adele (1997) “Witnesses and Truth: Juridical Narratives and Dialogism in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White.” New Formations 32: 91–8. Wilson, Kathleen (2000) “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720–90.” Cultures of Empire: A Reader. Ed. Catherine Hall. New York: Routledge, 157–186. . (2003) The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge. Wolfreys, Julian (1994) Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope. Albany: State University New York Press. Yearling, Elizabeth (1978) “Cumberland, Foote, and the Stage Creole.” Notes and Queries (February): 59–60. Young, Robert J.C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge. Young, Timothy (2005) My Heart in Company: The Work of J.M. Barrie and the Birth of Peter Pan. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yule Henry, and Arthur Burnell (1886) Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/index.html (Accessed 5 May 2009). Ziter, Edward (2003) The Orient on the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PLAYS, PLAYBILLS, AND REVIEWS All playbills and reviews are listed with their associated plays. Unsigned plays or plays with unknown authorship are listed following plays whose authors are known. Manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection are indicted by the notation “LCP ms.” Manuscript numbers and date of license are included, where available. Ackhurst, W.M. (1876) Gulliver on His Travels; or, Harlequin Robinson Crusoe, His Man Friday, and the Wonderful Spirit of Romance. London: E. Rimmel.

Bibliography 245 Almar, George (1843) The Affghanistan War! or, the Revolt of Cabul! and British Triumphs in India. Playbill (1843) for The Affghanistan War! at Astley’s (17 April). Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Playbill (1850) for The Affghanistan War! at Astley’s (20 May). Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Barrie, J.M. (1999) The Admirable Crichton. Peter Pan and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrymore, William (1818) El Hyder. London: Dicks, n.d. Blackburn, Sydney (1898) The Cousin from Australia. LCP ms. 53657-B (May) British Library, London. Review (1898) of The Cousin from Australia. The Athenaeum (16 April): 512. George Bernard Shaw (1932) Review of The Cousin from Australia. Our Theatres in the Nineties. London: Constable and Co, 383. Blanchard, E.L. (1881) Robinson Crusoe. Review (1881) of Robinson Crusoe. Drury Lane Christmas Annual: 42. Review (1881) of Robinson Crusoe. Dramatic Notes: 68–69. Boucicault, Dion (1858) Jessie Brown: The Relief of Lucknow. Plays by Dion Boucicault. Ed. Peter Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Review (1862) of Jessie Brown. The Era (28 September): 10. Brookfield, Charles (1899) Comrades in Khaki. LCP ms. 53698-R (December) British Library, London. . (1900) Kenyon’s Widow. LCP ms. 1900/8 (June) British Library, London. Brooks, Shirley (1851) The Exposition: A Scandinavian Sketch. London: Lacy. Brough, Robert. (1854) The Overland Journey to Constantinople, as Undertaken by Lord Bateman. London: Lacy. Brough, William (1851) Apartments, Visitors to the Exhibition May Be Accommodated. London: Lacy. Review (1851) of Apartments. Thallis’s Dramatic Magazine (June): 250. Buchanan, Robert (1889) The Old Home. LCP ms. (June) British Library, London. Byron, Henry. (1868) Robinson Crusoe; or, Friday and the Fairies! London: J. Miles. . (1872) Haunted Houses. LCP ms. 53107-B. British Library, London. Collins, C.J. (1855) City Friends. London: Lacy. Conquest, George (1858) The Fugitives. LCP ms. 52976-O (September) British Library, London. . (1885) Robinson Crusoe, the Lad Rather Loose O’, and the Black Man Called Friday, Who Kept His House Tidy. London: Phillips Brothers. Conquest, George and Henry Spry (1887) Dead Man’s Gold. LCP ms. (November) British Library, London. . (1889) The Gold Craze. LCP ms. 53439-I (November) British Library, London. Cook, Alfred (1879) War in Zululand. LCP ms. 53225-K (July) British Library, London. Corder, C. and F. (1883) The Nabob’s Pickle. LCP ms. 53297-J (July) British Library, London. Courtney, J. (1852) Off to the Diggings. LCP ms. 52935-H (October) British Library, London. Coyne, J. Sterling (1838) The Conquest of Mysore. LCP ms. 42949–7, ff. 155–63. British Library, London. . (1852) Wanted, 1,000 Spirited Young Milliners for the Gold Diggings! London: Lacy.

246 Bibliography Cumberland, Richard (1771) The West Indian. London: Dicks, n.d. Review (1815) of The West Indian. The Stage I (9 March): 380–3. Review (1872) of The West Indian. The Dramatic and Musical Review I (23 April): 43. Dance, Charles (1837) The Bengal Tiger. London: Dicks. Review (1837) of The Bengal Tiger. The Athenaeum (23 December): 932. Review (1867) of The Bengal Tiger. The Era (17 February): 11. Daventry, George (1887) An Idol’s Eye. LCP ms. 53379-K (May) British Library, London. . (1892) The Indian Mutiny. LCP ms. 53315-C (December) British Library, London. Day, George (1895) The Diamond Rush. LCP ms. 53569-N (March) British Library, London. Dearlove, W.H. (1900) Little Lady Loo. LCP ms. 1900 (June). British Library, London. D’Ennery, A. and Jules Verne (1875) Round the World in 80 Days. London: W. Brettell. Review (1886) of Round the World in 80 Days. Athenaeum (6 March): 337. Foote, Samuel (1772) The Nabob. London: Lowndes and Bladdon, (1795). Fyles, Franklin and David Belasco (1893) The Girl I Left Behind Me. Review (1895) of The Girl I Left Behind Me. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (4 May): 308. Glover, Edmund (1860) The Indian Revolt. Review (1860) of The Indian Revolt. The Era (15 April): 13. Hale, William Palmer and Francis Talfourd (1851) The Mandarin’s Daughter; or, the Willow Pattern Plate. London: Lacy. Hamilton, Cosmo (1901) Fortune of War. LCP ms. (June) British Library, London. Hand, Thomas William and Walter Teale (1895) The Relief of Lucknow: An Original, Outdoor, Military Spectacle, Designed to Exhibit New Pyrotechnic, Scenic, and Spectacular Effects. Canada: n.p. Harris, Augustus (1893) Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday and Pretty Polly Perkins. London: n.p. . (1895) Cheer Boys, Cheer! LCP ms. 53583-I (October) British Library, London. Harris, Augustus and Henry Pettitt (1885) Human Nature. LCP ms. 53342-H (August) British Library, London. Review (1885) of Human Nature. Theatre 4.4 (June–December): 334–35. . (1886) A Run of Luck. LCP ms. 53364-C. British Library, London. Hill-Mitchelson, C. and C.H. Longden (1895) Victims of Power. LCP ms. 53569E. British Library, London. Hope, Preston (1900) A Gentleman in Khaki. LCP ms. (June) British Library, London. Inchbald, Elizabeth (1784) The Mogul Tale. London: F. Powell, 1796. Johnson, Henry (1900) Boer Meisje. LCP ms. 1900/13. British Library, London. Jones, Henry Arthur (1906) The Hypocrites. London: Chiswick. Keene, Edwin (1886) A Saucy Nabob. LCP ms. 53356-I (April) British Library, London. Kenney, James (1827) The Illustrious Stranger. London: Samuel French, n.d. Kiralfy, Imre (1895) India: An Operatic-Historical Production in Two Acts. London: n.p. Lallen, J.P. (1899) ‘Midst Shot and Shell. LCP ms. 53691-K (September) British Library, London. Lander, George (1888) The Land of Gold. LCP ms. (February) British Library, London.

Bibliography 247 Law, Arthur (1886) Gladys. LCP ms. 53369-D. British Library, London. Lee, Harold (1878) On the Indian Ocean. Liverpool: Lee and Nightingale. Lestocq, W. and Henry Du Souchet (1896) My Friend from India. LCP ms. 53614-J (November) British Libary, London. Locke, Fred. (1885) Robinson Crusoe. Review (1885) of Robinson Crusoe. Quiz (25 December): 158. . (1894) Robinson Crusoe; a Christmas Story of a “Good Friday.” London: n.p. Longden, Charles (1892) The Kimberley Mail. LCP ms. 53496-B (March) British Library, London. Mackay, W.J. (1898) For England’s Glory. LCP ms. 53655 (April) British Library, London. Merritt, Paul and George Conquest (1896) The Raid in the Transvaal. LCP ms. 53595-E (March) British Library, London. Moncrieff, William Thomas (1823) The Cataract of the Ganges; or, the Rajah’s Daughter. London: Samuel French, 1856. Playbill (1824) for The Cataract of the Ganges at the Theatre Royal, Worcester (20 August). Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Review (1829) of The Cataract of the Ganges. Dramatic Magazine (1 September): 206. Review (1873) of The Cataract of the Ganges. Illustrated London News 8 March). Cook, Dutton (1883) Review of The Cataract of the Ganges. Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage. London: Chatto and Windus, 183–6. . (1830) Van Dieman’s Land. London: John Cumberland. Review (1830) of Van Dieman’s Land. Theatrical Journal: 58–9. Morton, Thomas (1846) Sketches in India. London: Samuel French. Morton, W.E. (1888) Fallen Among Thieves. LCP ms. 53398-E (March). British Library, London. Nie, John (1892) Robinson Crusoe; or the Good Friday That Came Before Saturday. London: J. Gotobed. Parker, Louis and Addison Bright (1899) The Bugle Call. LCP ms. 53696-J (December) British Library, London. Paulton, Harry and Edward (1895) Horace; or, a Man with a Past. LCP ms. 53580-K (August) British Library, London. Review (1895) of Horace; or, a Man with a Past. The Athenaeum (14 September): 364. Peake, R.B. (1840) The Nabob’s Return. LCP ms. 42954, ff. 567–619 (February) British Library, London. Pettitt, Henry (1881) The Nabob’s Fortune. LCP ms. 53256-D (July) British Library, London. . (1888) Hands across the Sea; or, Advance, Australia. LCP ms. 53408-J (July) British Library, London. Phillips, Mrs. Alfred (1853) Life in Australia from our own correspondent. LCP ms. 52938-B (February) British Library, London. Review (1853) of Life in Australia. Theatrical Journal (13 April): 115. Phillips, Watts (1869) Not Guilty. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing. Planche, J.R. Mr. Buckstone’s Ascent of Mount Parnassus (1853) London: Lacy. . (1854) Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square). London: Lacy. Playbill (1854) for Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the World (in Leicester Square) at the Haymarket Theatre (June) Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982.

248

Bibliography

Review (1854) of Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe. Theatrical Journal (26 April): 130. Pocock, I. (1817) Robinson Crusoe: The Bold Buccaniers. London: Cumberland, 1829. Poole, John (1832) A Nabob for an Hour. London: Samuel French. Review (1846) of A Nabob for an Hour. The Theatrical Times I (15 August): 78. Review (1846) of A Nabob for an Hour. The Theatrical Times I (17 October): 193. Reade, Charles (1853) Gold! London: Lacy. . (1865) It Is Never Too Late to Mend. Plays by Charles Reade. Ed. Michael Hammet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Review (1881) of It Is Never Too Late to Mend. Academy (1 October): 266. Review (1884) of It Is Never Too Late to Mend. Quiz (6 June): 128. Reece, Robert (1869) Brown and the Brahmins; or, Captain Pop and Princess Pretty-Eyes! London: Lacy. . (1886) Robinson Crusoe. Review (1886) of Robinson Crusoe. Dramatic Notes (December): 120–21. Reid, Phillip (1885) Our Colonial Relative. LCP ms. 53360-K (June) British Library, London. Rhoades, Walter (1898) The Nabob. LCP ms. 53672-B (December) British Library, London. Scott, Clement (1881) The Cape Mail. London: Samuel French. Seaman, William (1858) Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow. LCP ms. 52971-J (January) British Library, London. Selby, Charles (1852) My Sister from India. London: Samuel French. Playbill (1852) for My Sister from India at the Strand Theatre (12 January) Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Review (1852) of My Sister from India. The Athenaeum (10 January): 58. Review (1852) of My Sister from India. The Era (11 January): 11. . (1857) The Drapery Question; or, Who’s for India? London: Lacy. Review (1857) of The Drapery Question. The Daily News (29 October): 3. Review (1857) of The Drapery Question. The Era (8 November): 11. Shaw, George Bernard (1899) Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Three Plays for Puritans. New York: Penguin, 1946. . John Bull’s Other Island (1904) New York: Penguin, 1957. Shirley, Arthur (1899) For Queen and Country. LCP ms. 53696-F (December) British Library. London. Sims, G.R. and Arthur Shirley (1896) The Star of India. LCP ms. 58598-H (April) British Library, London. Archer, William (1897) Review of The Star of India. Theatrical World of 1896. London: Walter Scott, 82–86. Somerset, C.A. (1857) The Storming and Capture of Delhi. LCP ms. 52969-K (October) British Library, London. Playbill (1857) for The Storming and Capture of Delhi at Astley’s (14 December) Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982. Review (1857) of The Storming and Capture of Delhi. Times (30 November): 4f. Review (1857) of The Storming and Capture of Delhi. Punch (26 December): 259. Steinberg, Amy (1889) My Uncle. LCP ms. 53432-H (July). British Library, London. Review (1889) of My Uncle. Dramatic Notes III (July): 88–89. Stephenson, C.H. (1868) Pindee Singh, the Pearl of Oude. Bristol: C.T. Jefferies and Sons. Stoqueler, J.H. (1849) Mooltan and Gujerat.

Bibliography 249 Playbill (1849) for Mooltan and Gujerat at Astley’s (18 June) Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Sullivan, Arthur and B. Rowe (1887) The Zoo. LCP ms. 53149-M. British Library, London. Taylor, Tom (1854) Barefaced Impostors. London: Lacy, 1860. . (1860) The Overland Route. Plays by Tom Taylor. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. . (1887) Ups and Downs; or, the Antipodes. LCP ms. (June) British Library, London. Thorn, Geoffrey (1886) Robinson Crusoe; a Christmas Story of a Good Friday; or, Harlequin Pretty Polly Perkins and the Cruise of the “Saucy Sarah.” London: n.p. . (1894) Rollicking Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday, Who Kept the House Tidy, and Pretty Polly Perkins of Wapping Old Stairs. London: Lightning Dispatch. Thorne, George and F. Grove Palmer (1886) Old King Cole; or, Harlequin the Girl, the Churl, and the Enchanted Pearl. London: Keble’s Gazette Office. Tickell, Richard (1781) The Carnival of Venice. British Library, London. Turner, Montague (1900) Sister’s Sacrifice. LCP ms. 1900/13 (August). British Library, London. Vamp, Hugo (1853) In for a Dig; or, Life at the Diggings. LCP ms. 52939-N (April) British Library, London. Whitbread, J.W. (1896) The Victoria Cross. LCP ms. 53611 (October) British Library, London. Wishaw, Mrs. Bernard (1892) Hilda. Review (1892) of Hilda. Dramatic Notes IV: 85. Wright, Fred (1900) The War Special. LCP ms. 1900/8 (June) British Library, London.

Plays with Unknown Authors Anaconda! The Terrific Serpent of Ceylon (1826) Playbill. Adelphi Theatre (31 January) Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Australia (1881) LCP ms. 53251-C (April) British Library, London. Binbian Mine, The (1888) LCP ms. (October) British Library, London. Cetaweyo at Last (1882) LCP ms. 53275-L. British Library, London. Compromising Case, A (1888) London: Samuel French. Conquest of Lahore, The (1847) Review. The Theatrical Times I: 6. Conquest of Scinde, The (1845) LCP ms. 42986–38, 971–96 (July). British Library, London. Review (1845) of The Conquest of Scinde. The Clown of London 25: 5–6. Diamond Queen, The (1889). LCP ms. 53433-I (July) British Library, London. Elephant of the Pagoda, The (1846) LCP ms. 42991, ff. 298–350 (December) British Library, London. Elephant of Siam and the Fire Fiend!, The (1829) Playbill. Adelphi Theatre (7 December). Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Extraordinary Performances of the Great Siam Elephant, at the Adelphi Theatre, The (1823) London: Cowie and Strange. Fall of Khartoum, The (1885). LCP ms. British Library: London. Fire of Life, The (1888) LCP ms. 53655 (September). British Library, London. For the Term of His Natural Life (1886) London: Richard Bentley and Son. Golden Nuggett; or the Fatal Treasure, The (1853) LCP ms. 52943-J (November) British Library, London.

250 Bibliography Goldfi elds of Australia; or, Off to the Diggings, The (1853) LCP ms. 52937-G (January). British Library, London. Heroine of Glencoe, The (1899) LCP ms. 53698-E (December) British Library, London. Highland Jessie Brown; or, Lucknow Rescued (1858) LCP ms. 52972-L (February/ March) British Library, London. Hyder Ali: the Lyons of Mysore (1831). LCP ms. (October) British Library, London. Review (1831) of Hyder Ali. National Omnibus and Entertaining Advertiser: 144. Indian Mutiny, The (1893) Review. Quiz (13 April): 49. In the Soup (1900) LCP ms 1900/13-K. British Library, London. Law of Brahma; or, the Burning Sacrifice, The (1838) LCP ms. 42948 (September) British Library, London. Mungo Park; or, the Arab of the Niger! (1840). Playbill. Surrey Theatre (13 July). Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982. My Son Diana (1857). Review (1857) of My Son Diana. The Thespian and Dramatic Record (3 June): 43. Nana Sahib; or, a Story of Aymere (1863) LCP ms. 53026-F (September/October) British Library, London. New Tontine; or, the Goldseekers of Carpenteria (1853) LCP ms. 52941-E (June). British Library, London. Pembertons, The (1890) LCP ms. 53446-L (July). British Library, London. Puck’s Pantomime; or, Harlequin and Robinson Crusoe (1844) LCP ms. British Library, London. Rajah of Nagpore; or, the Sacred Elephants of the Pagoda (1846) Playbill. Astley’s Theatre (16 February) Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Ramah Droog; or, the Hill Fort of the Khyber Pass (1851) Playbill. Adelphi Theatre [Edinburgh]. Scottish Theatre Museum, University of Glasgow. Revolt in the East; or, the Fugitives and Their Faithful Steed (1858) LCP ms. 52978-L (November) British Library, London. Robinson Crusoe (1885) Review. The Chiel (19 December): 195. Sepoy Revolt, The (1858) Review (1858) of The Sepoy Revolt. The Era (31 January): 11. She (1888) LCP ms. 53404-D and 53404-G. British Library, London. Sikh Invasion of the Punjab, The (1846) LCP ms. 42994, 887–920 (May) British Library, London. Review (1846) of The Sikh Invasion. Theatrical Times I: 20. Sons of Empire (1899) LCP ms. 53695-Q (December) British Library, London. Spectacle of the Desert (1847) Playbill. Drury Lane (6 April). Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Twenty Minutes with a Tiger; or, Taming a Tiger (1855) London: n.p. Two Lands of Gold, The (1853). Review. Theatrical Times (20 April): 123–4. Vermuh Kareeda (1857)or, The Fall of Delhi: LCP ms. 52969-G (October/December) British Library, London. Voyage to, and Travels in Australia, A (1852) Review. Theatrical Journal (17 November): 363. Wise Elephants of the East, The; or, the Magic Gong (1854) Playbill, Astley’s Amphitheatre. Theatre Playbills from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1982. Zulu Chief (1882) LCP ms. 53275-I. British Library, London.

Index

A Ackhurst, W.M., 68–69 Afghanistan, 164–65 Africa: civilizing mission and, 70–71; exhibitions of, 18–21, 22–23, 25–26; gold and diamond rushes, 139–40, 148–50, 152, 148–52, 209; as theatrical subject, 2, 3, 229n15. See also Boer War Almar, George, 164 alterity: British vs. Other, 6, 16, 42–44, 89–90, 188–91, 193–205; hybridity and, 115–18; Indian Mutiny and, 188–208; nabobs and, 96–97, 102–3, 109–13, 114–38; Robinson Crusoe and, 40–47, 66–72. See also Britishness; hybridity America (Central and South), 4, 14 Anderson, Benedict, 16, 190–91 Anglo-Indian: cultural hybridity and, 114; definition of term, 224n1; images of, 8, 99–104; indolence and, 99–100, 116–19, 125, 132–33. See also nabob animals, 19, 26, 119–25, 131. See also zoos Arata, Steven, 126, 136 Archer, William, 9, 17 Attridge, Steve, 16, 155, 198, 210, 213, 214, 215n4, 234n5 “Auld Lang Syne,” 195–96, 201, 202, 205, 206. See also Scots Australia: Aborigines, 141–42, 144–45; economic opportunity and, 114, 139–52, 209; exhibitions of, 21, 24; federation of, 68; gold miners unlike Indian nabobs,

139–40, 142–48, 150–52; gold rush as dramatic subject, 2, 5, 9, 12, 114, 209, 228n2; popular associations with, 3, 8, 9, 144; South African gold rush and, 148–52; unlike India 114, 139, 144–48, 150–52; World War I and 234n7

B Barrie, James: as author of The Admirable Crichton, 11, 12, 73–90, 209–10, 212, 224n12; comparison with Shaw and Wilde, 74, 212, 223n7, 224n11. See also Robinsonade Barrymore, William, 16 Bennett, Tony, 216n8, 217n4 Bhabha, Homi, 16, 115–16, 190–91 Blackburn, Sydney, 137, 139, 146, 228n9, 228n21 Blanchard, E.L., 50, 65 Boer War, 12, 166, 210–14, 233– 34nn2–3, 234n5. See also Africa; empire, anxieties about; film Boucicault, Dion: as author of Jessie Brown, 177, 193–208, 232n5; copyright lawsuit, 233n10. See also Jessie Brown Bratton, Jacky, 2–3, 10, 164, 165, 168, 173, 208, 213, 215n3, 232n6 Britishness: colonial wealth and, 95–113, 114–38, 150–52; defined in opposition to Indianness 42–44, 89–90, 162, 188–90, 194, 198–205, 229n11; hybridity and, 115–18; Indian Mutiny and, 162, 168, 173–76; Scotland and, 159, 188–93,

252 Index 203–8; See also alterity; empire; Great Britain; hybridity; nabob; nationalism; Scots Brookfield, Charles, 233n2 Brooks, Shirley, 21 Brough, Robert, 219n22 Brough, William, 128–30, 143 Brougham, John, 34 Buchanan, Robert, 151 Buckstone, John, 23–27 Burton, Antoinette, 110, 126, 215n4 Byron, Henry, 61, 66–67, 141

C “Campbells are Coming, The,” 181, 188, 232n3, 232n7. See also Scots Cannadine, David, 137–38, 146, 194, 217n2, 229n11 civilizing mission: Cataract of the Ganges, The and, 44–49; as motive for empire, 27, 109, 209; Robinson Crusoe and, 32–33, 39, 52–53, 56, 58, 60–61, 67–72. See also empire; Robinsonade; savagery Clarke, Marcus, 148 Colley, Linda, 109, 193 Collingham, E.M., 96–97, 99, 132 Collins, C.J., 227n18 Collins, Wilkie, 31, 38–39, 42–43 colonization: imperialism and, 3, 4; in the Robinsonade, 40–41, 46–49, 52–53, 55–57 commodities and consumer culture, 122–24, 126–28, 135, 178–84 community formation: as function of the theatre, 6, 9–10, 43–46, 48–49, 112–3; Indian Mutiny and, 162, 168, 173–74, 199, 205–7; shared sympathies of theatre audiences, 142, 156–58, 173–74, 199. See also Britishness; nationalism; patriotism and propaganda Conquest, George: as author of The Fugitives, 177, 186, 188–89; as author (with Paul Merritt) of The Raid in the Transvaal, 149, 212, 229n16, 235n5; as author of other plays, 61, 148, 149; Charles Reade and, 228n7 contact zone: stage as, 3, 15–17; Great Exhibition as analogue, 126–29;

in theatrical Robinsonade 33, 52, 63–72. See also Pratt, Mary Louise Cook, Alfred, 229n15 Cooke, T.P., 13. See also theatres in London, Astley’s Corder, C. and F., 108, 227n17, 227n19 Courtney, J., 140, 147 Coyne, J. Sterling, 2, 140 crime and criminality: India associated with, 9, 42–43; nabobs and, 98, 104–6, 111–12; Australia and, 142, 144–45, 148 Crimean War, 26, 165, 182, 196, 208. See also Africa cultural intervention, 15, 44–49. See also civilizing mission; savagery Cumberland, Richard, 107, 123–24

D Dance, Charles, 91, 107, 116–21, 126, 132–33, 226n1 Darwin, Charles, 14 Daventry, George, 230n5 Day, George, 149, 229n15 Dearlove, W.H., 215n5 Defoe, Daniel. See Robinson Crusoe (novel); Robinson Crusoe (character); Robinsonade degeneracy, 96–100, 108. See also alterity; hybridity; savagery D’Ennery, A., 11, 26–27, 49, 219n23, 221n8 Dickens, Charles, 36, 93–94, 233n10 disciplinary function of theatre: definition of, 216n8, 217n2; nabob and, 95, 114–19, 128–38; war dramas and, 156–58, 210, 217n2. See also Britishness; community formation; empire, anxieties about; nabob; nationalism Disraeli, Benjamin, 106 documentary function of theatre: gold rushes and, 21, 140–41, 148–49; war dramas and, 156, 158–74, 212–14. See also Boer War; exhibitions; film; Indian Mutiny; spectacle domesticity: colonial wealth necessary to British, 143–48, 151–52; nabobs and domestic disruption, 108–9, 116–38; in Robinsonade, 62–63

Index E Egyptian Hall, 20–21. See also exhibitions; spectacle emigration, 7, 150–52. See also Australia; Robinson Crusoe empire: adventure and, 58–68; anxieties about, 11–12, 57, 94–97, 98–113, 114–38, 193–94; British nationalism and, 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 61–63, 161–74; criticism of, in plays, 68–72; as conquest, 15, 19, 66–72; history of British Empire, 52–53, 55, 56–57, 66, 148–49, 161–70; informal, 4–5, 56; public perceptions of, 14–15; metropolitan society and, 74–75, 83–84, 88–90, 95–97, 109–13, 114–38, 141–48, 150–52, 181–83, 193. See also alterity; Britishness; imperialism; nationalism exhibitions, 5, 11, 17–24, 209, 213; Empire of India, 11, 17, 168–69, 218n17, 218n19; ethnographic, 19–21, 25–26; Grand Cairo Panorama, 27; Great Exhibition, 25, 126–29, 140–41, 209; Stanley and African, 17–19, 218n19; Wylde’s Globe, 24–25. See also panoramas; museums; spectacle

F film, 12, 210, 212–14 Foote, Samuel, 98, 105, 108–13, 114–15, 126, 225n11, 225n13 Fyles, Franklin, 9, 160, 321n2

G Glover, Edmund, 170 gold rushes, 2, 5, 12. See also Africa; Australia Great Britain: defined by empire, 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 61–63; hybridity and, 115–18. See also alterity; Britishness; empire; nationalism; Scots Great Exhibition, 25, 126–29, 140–41, 209

253

Harris, Augustus: as author of Cheer Boys, Cheer!, 9, 229n15; as author (with Henry Pettitt) of Human Nature, 22, 219n21; as author of Robinson Crusoe, 62, 68, 71–72 Hastings, Warren, 104–6 Hays, Michael, 10, 112, 219n21 Hope, Preston, 233n2 hybridity, 12, 211; Briton as hybrid, 115–18; nabob and, 96–7, 109–10, 112–13, 114–38. See also alterity; Britishness; Great Britain

I imperialism: criticism of, 68–72, 114– 38; definitions of, 3–5, 16–17. See also empire Inchbald, Elizabeth, 107 India, 3, 7, 9, 213; associated with despotism, 42, 43; Britishness defined in opposition to, 43, 113–19, 129–38, 155, 194–205; culture of, 42–46, 49; East India Company and, 95, 104–6; Indian servants, 9, 93–94, 99–100, 102, 114–15, 125–33, 196–97; Mysore War, 162; Sikh Wars, 164–68; stereotypes of, 9, 42–44, 96–97, 165–66, 197–200. See also Anglo-Indian; Indian Mutiny; nabob Indian Mutiny, 2, 5, 7, 12, 66, 150; exhibitions and, 24, 155, 209; history of, 231n6; as imperial crisis, 155–57, 163, 176–77, 189, 193, 198–99, 210; masculinity and, 175–87; in plays, 161–63, 169–74; Scottish soldiers and, 188–208; as term, 230n1–2. See also India; Kiralfy, Imre

J Johnson, Henry, 233n2 Jones, Henry Arthur, 8–9

H

K

Haggard, H. Rider, 229n15 Hale, William Palmer, 127 Hamilton, Cosmo, 233n2 Hand, Thomas William and Walter Teale, 2

Keene, Edwin, 226n8, 227n19 Kenney, James, 41, 220n6, 227n20 Kingsley, Mary, 14 Kiralfy, Imre, 17, 168–9, 218n17, 218n19. See also exhibitions

254 Index L Lallen, J.P., 211, 234n4 Lawson, Philip, 107, 124, 139, 144, 145 Lee, Harold, 8 Lestocq, W., 227n19 Locke, Fred, 53–4, 68, 221n6, 222n13 Longden, Charles, 149, 229n15 Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 7, 31, 140, 160, 185, 211

M Macaulay, Thomas, 45–6 Mackay, W.J., 211 MacKenzie, John, 5, 7, 16, 19, 163, 188, 217n6, 218n14, 221n1 Mangan, J.A., 158, 175, 177 marriage: Australian wealth makes possible, 141, 143, 145–46; nabob and, 110,120, 128, 132–36; in Robinsonades, 36, 62–63, 67–68, 86–87 masculinity, 2, 3; appeals to universal concept of, 45–46; gold miners and, 150–51; in Cataract of the Ganges, The, 84–88; Mutiny plays and, 175–89, 202, 207–8; nabob and, 95, 99–101; in Robinsonades, 61–63; Scottish, 192. See also Scots; sex and sexuality; women Merritt, Paul, 149, 212, 229n16, 234n5 military docudramas, 3, 15, 17, 161–74 Moncrieff, William Thomas: as author of The Cataract of the Ganges, 9, 11, 33, 34–50, 59, 77 222n11; as author of Van Dieman’s Land, 19; Dickens and, 35–36 Morton, Thomas, 7–8 museums, 15, 17; See also exhibitions; spectacle

N nabob: Australia and, 139, 143, 148– 52; definition of term, 98, 107; and cultural contamination, 2, 3, 11–12, 89–90, 94–95, 98, 102–4, 108–10, 114–33, 144–48, 150–52; as eighteenthcentury figure, 89–90, 104–8, 139; and excess, 94, 101–2, 121–22, 125–32; false nabobs, 133–38; in fiction, 93–94; as

hybrid, 96–97, 109–10, 112–13, 114–38; political ambition of, 102–6, 145; as theatrical figure, 5, 8, 11–12, 89–90, 209. See also Anglo-Indian; India; Britishness nationalism, 5, 6, 12; empire and, 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 14–16, 61–63, 141; and masculinity, 175–78; and Mutiny plays, 156–59, 162, 189; and nabob, 109–13; in Robinsonades, 57, 60–61; Scottish 191–93, 203–8. See also community formation; Britishness Nie, John, 63–4

O Orr, Bridget, 94, 108, 163–64

P panoramas, 15, 21, 213; Fall of Delhi, The, 11; panoramic effects 19, 24–5. See also exhibitions; spectacle pantomime, 13; generic features of, 51–52; Robinson Crusoe and, 31–2, 50–5, 57–72 patriotism and propaganda, 165–74 Paulton, Henry and Edward, 133–37 Paxton, Nancy, 12, 158, 176 Peake, R.B., 108, 123, 132, 226n4 Pettitt, Henry, 108, 123–24, 148, 149, 226n7, 228n10,149 Phillips, Jim, 107, 124, 139, 144, 145 Phillips, Mrs. Alfred, 140–41, 144 Phillips, Watts, 8 Planché, J.R., 23–27 Pocock, I., 54–59, 62, 221n7 Poole, John, 107, 137 Porter, Bernard, 4–8 Pratt, Mary Louise, 15, 46 Punch, 70–1, 114, 117, 128–29, 155, 162, 171, 173, 177, 181–84

R Reade, Charles: as author of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, 9, 63, 73, 88, 112, 141–42, 145–46, 148, 226n1; copyright and, 228n7; popularity of, 228n6 Reece, Robert, 41, 53 Reid, Philip, 143–44, 146 Rhoades, Walter, 108, 137 Ritvo, Harriet, 18, 124, 217n7

Index Robinson Crusoe (novel), 7, 11, 79, 81, 233n1; in Cataract of the Ganges, The, 37–43, 46–9; changes in dramatic treatments of, 53, 56–72; civilizing mission and, 32–33, 66–72; as imperialist novel, 52–55; in Moonstone, The, 38–39; popularity of dramatizations of, 31–32, 50. See also Robinson Crusoe (character); Robinsonade Robinson Crusoe (character), 3, 5, 11, 209; adaptability of the Crusoe myth, 46; as adventurer, 23–24, 32–33, 58–68; as builder, 63–65, 63–66, 88; as discoverer, 50, 63–66; as emblem of empire, 32–33, 40–41, 52–53, 72, 88–89, 144–45, 175, 219n1; Friday and, 56, 221n5; See also emigration; masculinity; Pocock, I., Reade, Charles; Robinson Crusoe (novel); Robinsonade; Sheridan, Richard Robinsonade, 2, 3, 11, 12, 209–10, 219nn3–4; Admirable Crichton, The as, 11, 73–90, 209–10; Cataract of the Ganges, The as, 11, 33–72; and critique of empire, 68–72; evolution of theatrical Robinsonade, 50–75, 88–89; history of, 31–32; reviews of, 53–54 Russell, Gillian, 156, 161, 163, 208

S Said, Edward, 10, 194 savagery, 66–72, 162, 191. See also alterity; Britishness; civilizing mission; Robinson Crusoe (character); Robinsonade Scots, 3, 5, 225n3; as “British,” 188– 93, 198–99, 203–8; Highland dress, 191–92, 232n2; loyalty of, 198–204; in Mutiny plays, 12, 159, 188–208. See also “Auld Lang Syne”; Britishness; “Campbells are Coming, The”; Great Britain Scott, Clement, 215n5 Seaman, William, 202–4, 232n4, 233n10 Selby, Charles: as author of The Drapery Question, 159, 160, 175–87, 207; as author of My Sister

255

from India, 108, 117, 126–33, 227nn15–16 Sen, Sudipta, 96, 104, 117, 120, 121, 132 sex and sexuality: infidelity, 8–9; miscegenation, 115, 124, 199–200; in Robinsonades, 54; sexual desire and the nabob, 11, 94, 100–2, 114–15, 132–36. See also masculinity; marriage; women Shaw, George Bernard: as critic, 9, 160, 231n2, 234n6; as playwright, 74, 157, 212, 223n7, 229n15 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 31, 55–7, 62, 88, 105–6 Shirley, Arthur, 9, 17, 159, 233n2 Sims, George, 9, 17, 159 social class: in Admirable Crichton, The, 77–83; mobility, 8, 141–43, 145–47; in Mutiny plays, 178–80, 186–87; theatre audiences and, 9–10, 178, 186–87, 188, 222n17, 233n7 Somerset, C.A., 2, 156, 161–64, 169–74, 176–77, 180, 196, 207 spectacle: of authority in The Admirable Crichton, 76–83; of authority in Mutiny plays, 162; empire and, 5, 10–11, 51, 217n1, 217n2; exhibitions as, 14–27, 126–29; military reenactments as, 3, 15, 17, 161–74, 212–14; patriotism and war spectacles, 163–74. See also exhibitions; panoramas Steinberg, Amy, 108 Stephenson, C.H., 173 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 14 Stirling, Edward, 148 Stoler, Ann Laura, 95, 97, 99, 102, 109, 111–12, 225n10 Stoqueler, J.H., 166–67 Sullivan, Arthur, 18

T Talfourd, Francis, 127 Taylor, Tom, 8–9, 24, 148, 215n5, 229n18 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 13, 93, 94 theatres (London) Adelphi: audience and venue, 232n5; Bengal Tiger, The at, 226n1; Drapery Question, The at, 177,

256 Index 178; It is Never Too Late to Mend at, 142, 216n6; other plays at, 2, 19, 20, 160, 219n22, 220n5, 227n20, 231n2 Alhambra, 226n8 Aquarium, 108, 227n19 Astley’s, 13; elephants at, 19, 26; Storming and Capture of Delhi, The at, 2; Jessie Brown at, 194; other plays at, 140, 145, 156, 161, 164, 166–74, 176, 218n11 Britannia: audience and venue, 233n10; plays at, 2, 202–3 Covent Garden, 55, 67, 107, 137 Drury Lane: audience and venue, 13, 22, 105–6, 207, 220n6; Cataract of the Ganges, The at, 2, 9, 11, 16, 33, 59, 220n1, 220n3, 220n6; Crusoe pantomimes at, 50, 65, 68, 220n6; It is Never Too Late to Mend at, 216n6; Jessie Brown at, 194, 207, 232n5; other plays at, 9, 20, 107, 113148, 149, 212, 218n12, 220n6, 225n6, 226n6, 233n2 Duke of York’s, 11, 212, 223n4 Elephant and Castle, 63, 216n6 Garrick, 227n19 Grand, 68, 222n13, 222n17 Grecian, 177, 188, 228n7, 228n10 Haymarket: Bengal Tiger, The at, 226n1; Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe at, 23–27; Nabob, The at, 109–13, 225n11; other plays at, 8, 109, 219n3, 225n8, 225n14, 233n2 Holborn, 148 Lyceum, 107, 225n8, 226n6 Marionette, 21, 141 Marylebone: audience and venue, 230n4; plays at, 157, 216n6, 226n1 Olympic: audience and venue, 123, 226n1; Bengal Tiger, The at, 107, 116, 123, 226n1; other plays at, 108, 123, 140, 144, 225n8, 226n4, 228n9 Opera Comique, 137 Pavilion, 159, 216n6 Prince of Wales’s, 225n8 Princess’s: audience and venue, 128, 229n13; Around the World in 80 Days at, 26, 221n8; Bengal

Tiger, The at, 226n1; It Is never Too Late to Mend at, 73, 216n6; other plays at, 9, 17 128, 141, 148, 159, 233n2 Queen’s: audience and venue, 228n8; Highland Jessie Brown at, 2, 177, 184–85, 202, 204; other plays at, 8, 140, 142, 156, 227n12 Royal Coburg, 16 Royal Court, 212 Sadler’s Wells, 9, 211 St. James’s, 8, 18, 226n1, 233n2 Standard, 216n6, 232n5 Strand (Punch’s Playhouse): audience and venue, 227n10; plays at, 7, 108, 126–28, 134, 227n15, 227n18 Surrey: audience and venue, 222n17, 229n12; plays at, 18, 19, 140, 147, 216n6 Terry’s, 108, 225n9 Variety, 108, 227n19 Vaudeville, 151 Victoria: audience and venue, 186, 230n4; plays at, 2, 186 Worthing, 227n15 theatres (outside London): America, 34, 194, 226n1; England, 8, 63, 108, 123, 141, 148, 149, 212, 216n6, 222n13, 225n8, 226n1, 228n9, 232n5, 233n2, 234n6; India, 226n1; Ireland, 216n6, 225n8, 225n11, 227n20, 226n1, 227n20; Scotland, 53–54, 170, 216n6, 222n12, 225n8, 226n1, 227n12, 232n5 theatricality: authenticity and, 43–44; authority and, 42, 76–83; film and, 211–14; as integral to empire, 5–6, 10, 14–17, 23, 46; and textuality in The Admirable Crichton, 76–83; and textuality in The Cataract of the Ganges, 35, 38, 40–46; and textuality in Robinsonades, 58–60. See also exhibitions; spectacle Thorn, Geoffrey, 61–2, 68–71, 222n13, 2223n18 Thorne, George, 148 travel: playgoing as substitute for, 17, 23–27; travel writing, 13–14, 15.

Index See also Kingsley, Mary; Darwin, Charles.

V Vamp, Hugo, 140–41, 145 Verne, Jules, 11, 26–7, 49, 219n23, 221n8 Voskuil, Lynn, 4–5, 6, 10, 43, 137

W Whitbread, J.W., 2, 159

257

Wilde, Oscar, 74 women, 177, 179–86, 233n9. See also masculinity; sex and sexuality

Y Young, Robert, 115–16, 118

Z Ziter, 7, 15, 126–28, 217n3 zoos, 5, 18–19, 25–26, 124. See also animals

Index of Plays

A Admirable Crichton, The (J.M. Barrie), 11, 12, 73–90; costume in, 83–88; gender and sexuality in, 83–88; as Robinsonade, 73–75, 81, 88–90, 209–10; social class in, 75–76, 77–80, 82–83, 87, 212; textuality in, 76–83 Affghanistan War!, The; or, the Revolt of Cabul (George Almar), 164 Apartments (William Brough), 128–30, 143 Around the World in Eighty Days (A. D’Ennery and Jules Verne), 11, 26–7, 49, 219n23, 221n8 Australia, 228n10

B Bengal Tiger, The (Charles Dance), 91, 107, 116–21, 126, 132–33, 226n1 Binbian Mine, The, 229n19 Boer Meisje (Henry Johnson), 233n2 Brown and the Brahmins (Robert Reece), 41 Bugle Call, The (Louis Parker and Addison Bright), 233n2

C Cape Mail, The (Clement Scott), 215n5 Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (George Bernard Shaw), 157, 212, 229n15 Carnival of Venice, The (Richard Tickell), 107 Cataract of the Ganges, The (William Thomas Moncrieff): civilizing mission and, 46–49, 158;

cultural contact and, 16, 33, 158; popularity of, 9, 34; reviews of 220n1–2; and Robinson Crusoe, 11, 33, 36–43, 46–49, 59, 73, 222n11; and spectacle, 2, 34–35, 232n5 Cetaweyo at Last, 229n15 Cheer, Boys, Cheer! (Augustus Harris), 9, 229n15 City Friends (C.J. Collins), 227n18 Compromising Case, A, 8 Comrades in Khaki (Charles Brookfield), 233n2 Conquest of Lahore, The, 167 Conquest of Mysore, The (J. Sterling Coyne), 2 Conquest of Scinde, The, 166, 168 Cousin from Australia, The (Sydney Blackburn), 137, 139, 146, 228n9, 228n21

D Dead Man’s Gold (George Conquest and Henry Spry), 149 Diamond Rush, The (George Day), 149, 229n15 Drapery Question, The (Charles Selby), 159, 160, 175–87, 207

E East Indian, The, 107 El Hyder (William Barrymore), 16 Elephant of Siam, The, 19

F Fall of Khartoum, The, 229n15 Fallen among Thieves (W.E. Morton), 215n5

260 Index of Plays Fire of Life, The, 229n15 For England’s Glory (W.J. Mackay), 211 For Queen and Country (Arthur Shirley), 233n2 For the Term of His Natural Life (Marcus Clarke), 148 Fortune of War (Cosmo Hamilton), 233n2 Fugitives, The (George Conquest), 177, 186, 188–89

G Gentleman in Khaki, A (Preston Hope), 233n2 Girl I Left Behind Me, The (Franklin Fyles and David Belasco), 9, 160, 231n2 Gladys (Arthur Law), 215n5 Gold! (Charles Reade), 148, 228n6 Gold Craze, The, 148, 149 Golden Nuggett, The; or, the Fatal Treasure, 142–43 Goldfields of Australia; or, Off to the Diggings, 140 Great Siam Elephant and the Fire Fiend, The, 19 Gulliver on His Travels; or, Harlequin Robinson Crusoe, His Man Friday, and the Wonderful Spirit of Romance (W.M. Ackhurst), 68–9

H Hands across the Sea; or, Advance, Australia (Henry Pettitt), 148, 228n10 Hassan Pacha, 19 Haunted Houses (Henry Byron), 141 Heroine of Glencoe, The, 233n2 Highland Jessie Brown, 2, 177, 184–86, 204, 232n9 Hilda (Mrs. Bernard Wishaw), 215n5 Horace; or, a Man with a Past (Harry and Edward Paulton), 133–37 Human Nature (Augustus Harris and Henry Pettitt), 22, 219n21 Hyder Ali; or, the Lions of Mysore, 218n12 Hypocrites, The (Henry Arthur Jones), 8–9

I Illustrious Stranger, The (James Kenney), 41, 220n6, 227n20

India (Imre Kiralfy), 17, 168–69, 218n17, 218n19 Indian Mutiny, The (George Daventry), 230n5 Indian Revolt, The (Edmond Glover), 170 In for a Dig; or, Life at the Diggings (Hugo Vamp), 140–41, 145 In the Soup, 108, 226n2 It Is Never Too Late to Mend (Charles Reade): Australia and, 9, 112, 141–42, 145–46, 148, 226n1; performance history of, 216n6, 228n6; as Robinsonade, 63, 73, 88

J Jessie Brown (Dion Boucicault), 177, 193–208, 217n2, 231nn1–2, 233nn6–7 Jessie Brown (William Seaman), 202–4, 232n4, 233n10

K Kenyon’s Widow (Charles Brookfield), 233n2 Kimberley Mail, The (Charles Longden), 149, 229n15

L Law of Brahma, The; or, the Burning Sacrifice, 220n5 Life in Australia from Our Own Correspondent (Mrs. Alfred Phillips), 140–41, 144 Little Lady Loo (W.H. Dearlove), 215n5

M Mandarin’s Daughter, The; or, the Willow Pattern Plate (William Palmer Hale and Francis Talfourd), 127 ‘Midst Shot and Shell (J.P. Lallen), 211, 234n4 Mogul Tale, The (Elizabeth Inchbald), 107 Mooltan and Gujerat (J.H. Stoqueler), 166–67 Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square) (J.R. Planché), 23–27 Mungo Parke, 18 My Friend from India (W. Lestocq and Henry Du Souchet), 227n19

Index of Plays My Sister from India (Charles Selby), 108, 117, 126–33, 227n15–16 My Son Diana, 225–6n14 My Uncle (Amy Steinberg), 108

N Nabob, The (Samuel Foote), 98, 105, 108–13, 114–5, 126, 225n11, 225n13 Nabob, The (Walter Rhoades), 108, 137 Nabob for an Hour, A (John Poole), 107, 137 Nabob’s Fortune, The (Henry Pettitt), 108, 123–24, 226n7 Nabob’s Pickle, The (C. and F. Corder), 108, 227n17, 227n19 Nabob’s Return, The (R.B. Peake), 108, 123, 132, 226n4 Nana Sahib; or, A Story of Aymere, 2, 186 New Tontine; or, the Gold Seekers of Carpenteria, 140 Not Guilty (Watts Phillips), 8

O Off to the Diggings (J. Courtney), 140, 147 Old Home, The (Robert Buchanan), 151 On the Indian Ocean (Harold Lee), 8 Our Colonial Relative (Philip Reid), 143–44, 146 Overland Journey, The (Robert Brough), 219n22 Overland Route, The (Tom Taylor), 8–9

P Pembertons, The, 8 Pindee Singh, the Pearl of Oudh (C.H. Stephenson), 173 Puck’s Pantomime, 31, 38, 59–60, 220n6

R Raid in the Transvaal, The; or, the King of Diamonds (Paul Merritt and George Conquest), 149, 212, 229n16, 234n5 Relief of Lucknow, The (Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale), 2 Revolt in the East; or, the Fugitives and Their Faithful Steed, 156

261

Robinson Crusoe (E.L. Blanchard), 50, 65 Robinson Crusoe (Fred Locke), 53–54, 68 Robinson Crusoe (Robert Reece), 53 Robinson Crusoe (Richard Sheridan), 31, 54–55, 62, 75, 88 Robinson Crusoe: A Christmas Story of a Good Friday; or, Harlequin Pretty Polly Perkins and the Cruise of the “Saucy Sarah” (Geoffrey Thorn), 61–62, 68, 222n13 Robinson Crusoe: The Bold Buccaniers (I. Pocock), 54–59, 62, 221n7 Robinson Crusoe: A Christmas Story of a Good Friday (Fred Locke), 222n13 Robinson Crusoe; or, Friday and the Fairies! (Henry Byron), 61, 66–7 Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday and Pretty Polly Perkins (Augustus Harris), 62, 68, 71–21 Robinson Crusoe; or, the Good Friday that Came Before Saturday (John Nie), 63–64 Robinson Crusoe, the Lad Rather Loose ‘O, and the Black Man Called Friday Who Kept His House Tidy (George Conquest), 61 Rollicking Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Good Man Friday, Who Kept the House Tidy, and Pretty Polly Perkins of Wapping Old Stairs (Geoffrey Thorn), 69–70, 71, 222n13, 223n18

S Saucy Nabob, A (Edwin Keene), 226n8, 227n19 Sepoy Revolt, The, 156, 170 She, 229n15 Sikh Invasion, The, 166–67 Sketches in India (Thomas Morton), 7–8 Sons of Empire, 233n2 Star of India, The (George Sims and Shirley Brooks), 9, 17, 159 Storming and Capture of Delhi, The (C.A. Somerset), 2, 156, 161–4, 169–74, 176–77, 180, 196, 207

262

Index of Plays

T

W

Twenty Minutes with a Tiger; or, Taming a Tiger, 108, 113, 225n8 Two Lands of Gold (Charles Carter and Shirley Brooks), 21, 141

Wanted! 1000 Spirited Young Milliners for the Gold Diggings! (Stirling Coyne), 140 War in Zululand, The (Alfred Cook), 229n15 War Special, The (Fred Wright), 233n2 West Indian, The (Richard Cumberland), 107, 123–24 Wise Elephants of the East, The; or, the Magic Gong, 19, 26

U Ups and Downs; or, the Antipodes (Tom Taylor), 148, 229n18

V Van Dieman’s Land (W.T. Moncrieff), 19 Vermuh Kareeda; or, the Fall of Delhi, 157–58, 211 Victoria Cross (J.W. Whitbread), 2, 159

Z Zoo, The (Arthur Sullivan and B. Rowe), 18 Zulu Chief, The, 229n15