Abstract
In 1853, as the Aiken/Howard/Purdy adaptation was moving toward its record-setting run of 325 performances, productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were staged by local stock companies in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco; at Rice’s Theatre in Chicago; and, in a version by Clifton W. Tayleure in Detroit, as well as those in New York. By the end of the year, New Yorkers could see a version of Stowe’s classic at the National; one at Barnum’s American Museum; another at the Franklin Museum; several months later, a fourth version in German by a Herr von Olfers at the Deutches or Charles Street Theatre; and subsequently, yet another at the Bowery Theatre. Of these, the most threatening to Purdy was the version at Barnum’s American Museum—a production dubbed the Compromise Uncle Tom. Barnum had “inherited” his production from his friend and show business collaborator, Moses Kimball, proprietor of the Boston Museum. For years, the two show business impresarios had been trading acts and shows, the most notable being the temperance classic, The Drunkard, which had debuted at Kimball’s establishment in 1844 and subsequently was mounted at Barnum’s theatre in 1850. Kimball’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been written by house playwright H. J. Conway who, after being urged by Kimball and his stage manager Henry Sedley Smith (one of the coauthors of The Drunkard) to temper the “crude points” and “objectionable features” of Stowe’s novel, crafted an adaptation.
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Notes
Brooks McNamara, “‘A Congress of Wonders’: The Rise and Fall of the Dime Museum,” Emerson Society Quarterly 20 (3rd Quarter 1974): 218.
Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & U. S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 2; Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 21.
Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 13.
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusement (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 15.
Bruce McConachie, “Museum Theatre and the Problem of Respectability for Mid-century Urban Americans.” The American Stage. Ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 69.
William W. Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage (New York: Greenwood P, 1969), p. 469; Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc., 1940), p 29.
Kate Ryan, Old Boston Museum Days. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1915), p. 2.
All information for this paragraph is taken from John Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and John Frick, “Not From the Drowsy Pulpit: The Moral Reform Melodrama on the Nineteenth Century Stage,” Theatre Symposium 15 (2007): 41–51.
Howard Malcolm Tichnor, “The Passing of the Boston Museum,” The New England Magazine 28 (June 1903): 384.
Ibid.
Bruce A. McConachie, “A Dramatization of H. J. Conway’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A Previously Unpublished Letter.” Theatre Journal 34 (May 1982): 149–54; Edward Kahn, “Creator of Compromise: William Sedley Smith and the Boston Museum’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Theatre Survey 41: 71–82.
David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre & Culture, 1800–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 146–47.
Ibid.
Emmett C. King, “The Great American Drama,” Metropolitan Magazine 30 (December 1909): 328.
Ibid.
Parker Pillsbury, “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ at a Boston Theatre.” The Liberator 24 (December 1852). {*}
David Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 143–45.
Sarah Meer, “Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy & Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s” (Athens [GA:] University of Georgia Press, 2005), p. 123. A breakdown, as defined by Dale Cockrell (Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World) refers to “any dance in Negro style, usually associated with minstrelsy; “not a step at all but a generically fast, energetic dance” performed by an African-American. (pp. 87–88).
Bruce McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and into the Marketplace: Normalizing Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Antebellum Stage,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3 (Winter 1991): 10–11.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 214.
Information in this paragraph is from Gerald Bordman, The Concise Oxford Companion to the American Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 431; Obituary, William Warren, Harvard Theatre Collection; Clapp, “Passing of an Historic Playhouse,” p. VI.
Tableaux Vivants, also called Living Statuary, involved the display of scantily clad women in supposedly “artistic” classical poses. As long as the women did not move, they were regarded as art, but if they moved, the statuary became pornographic and the models could be arrested. See Jack McCullough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1983).
Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 148. This phenomenon is sometimes called “benevolent entrepreneurialism.”
Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport [CT]: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 68–69.
A. H. Saxon, P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 82–83; Letter from P. T. Barnum to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, cited in Saxon, P.T. Barnum, p. 83.
A. M. Drummond and Richard Moody, “The Hit of the Century: Uncle Tom’s Cabin: 1852–1952.” Educational Theatre Journal 4 (December 1952): 318; Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947), p. 87.
George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage. 15 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–41): VI: 317.
David Grimsted, “Uncle Tom from Page to Stage: Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Drama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (October 1970): 239.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Writing History: Language, Class and Gender.” In John Hartley and Roberta E. Pearson. American Cultural Studies: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 201.
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© 2012 John W. Frick
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Frick, J.W. (2012). “A Play to which No Apologist for Slavery Could Object”: The Conway/Kimball/Barnum Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In: Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56645-4_3
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