Abstract
In the Dance Collection of the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library, there exists a rare document of the history of advertising. It is a large piece of a lightweight and delicate silk, approximately 18 by 24 inches, containing printed black ink text and the vestiges of a gold-leaf filigree that identify it as a souvenir from the 1848 appearance of the African-American dancer Juba at Vauxhall Gardens, London, England (figure 1.1).2 The silk is impressive, first of all, because it is an unusually well-preserved example of this easily-degraded material, and one of the best of a number of extant silk souvenirs in the New York Public Library, printed for theatrical special occasions.3 Its survival is astonishing. In the rarified world of nineteenth-century popular performance, for which evidence is so scarce, its mere existence makes it valuable, and the fact that it is a physical document, handled by people who witnessed the performance, creates an almost fetishistic response to its examination.
Crucial research for this project was conducted by Diana Manole and Birgit Schreyer. For further information on early blackface minstrelsy in Britain, and the documentation and results of a research project on the subject, see The Juba Project at www.utm.utoronto.ca/~w3minstr/
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Notes
For information on the use of type during this period, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
See, for example, Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 93–113
Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About it,” Critical Inquiry 20, 1 (Autumn, 1993): 10–35.
Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930)
Harry Reynolds, Minstrel Memories: The Story of Burnt Cork Minstrelsy in Great Britain from 1836 to 1927 (London: A. Rivers, 1928)
Edward Leroy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, from “Daddy” Rice to Date (New York: Kenny Pub. Co. [c1911])
Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962)
Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
William Mahar’s Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)
W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Aside from the works already noted, Robert B. Winans’ work particularly explores the shift in audience through the corresponding shift in song repertory during this crucial first ten years. See Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Bean, Annemarie, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).
Hugh Cunningham’s Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–c. 1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980)
Bluford Adams’ E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U. S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997)
I am indebted specifically to Michael Sappol’s work on the nineteenth-century anatomical museum for the idea of the minstrel as a body out of control in a society for which this was both captivating and troublesome. He in turn cites Eric Lott’s work. See Sappol, A Traffic in Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Adams assesses Barnum’s rise through the “classes” of America through his writing. See Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, esp. xiii, 11 (on his letters from Britain to the New York Atlas); 16 (on his own increased “respectability” in New York society after his British tour); 76 (on a “respectable” culture that crossed class lines); and 94 (on the sometimes vulgar tastes of the so-called middle class). Bruce McConachie also discusses Barnum’s relationship with class and audience in “Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820–1900,” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47–70.
Lawrence W. Levine’s perhaps too-simple, but still strong, argument in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
From Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor v. 3 (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1862), 191
See Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 42–48
This is the full quotation used in numerous publications, and can be found in Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London; New York: Penguin, 2000), 91.
Charles Dickens, “Chapter XIV—Vauxhall Gardens by Day,” in Sketches by Boz and other early papers, 1833–1839, ed. Michael Slater (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 127–132.
Information on Vauxhall Gardens in the 1840s comes from a survey of London newspapers. See, particularly, the Globe and Traveler (June 2, 1846), and the Morning Advertiser (June 13 and 20, 1848), for descriptions. The Morning Chronicle (July 8, 1848) describes a fundraiser for the Distressed Needlewomen’s Society, attended by the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries and aristocrats. The same paper reported, August 30, 1848 and September 4, 1848, discounted tickets and large attendance figures (6,000 and 20,000 respectively, though these cannot be trusted). Other information may be found in a dedicated file on the Vauxhall in the Harvard Theatre Collection. See also Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1979 [London 1896])
Jonathan Conlin, “Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770–1859,” Journal of British Studies 45 (October 2006): 718–743.
See Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance,” in The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1980/1987), 99–111.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic,” in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
For documentation on the exhibition of race and the exotic in this period, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (London: Belknap Press, 1978).
Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
See Roland Marchand Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 96–99
For discussion of the ways in which print changes experience, see Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on America Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), esp. 209
Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1991), 10.
Jack Goody, in The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Carlo Ginzberg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
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© 2009 Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz
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Johnson, S. (2009). Testimonials in Silk: Juba and the Legitimization of American Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. In: Schweitzer, M., Moskowitz, M. (eds) Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101715_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101715_2
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