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

A study of the black presence on the Victorian English stage.

Hazel Waters (Author)

9780521862622, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 February 2007

252 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.54 kg

' … if you want detailed information on attitude towards and representation of Black characters and skin colour in the late 19th century and how this was arrived at, this is an ideal companion for wither lengthy study, or quick dips when you come over all academical.' Black Arts Alliance

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

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

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]