Entries tagged with “Barnum” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

Playing Drunk / Virtual Barnum

By Bryan on February 10, 2009 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We've been thinking about entertainment cultures in the 19c city lately. I mentioned in lecture last week what a significant role P. T. Barnum played in popularizing the theater among middle-class families by staging "moral" plays such as dramatic adaptations of H. B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin or, even earlier, extraordinarily popular temperance (anti-alcohol) plays such as W. H. Smith's The Drunkard -- which often featured an actual reformed drunk in the lead role, adding to the realism of the famous delirium tremens scene (when the drunk falls into a delusional fit on stage).

The Drunkard was, like Royall Tyler's The Contrast before it, a Boston play with a New York setting. The New York scenes contrast rural simplicity and come only when the protagonist, Edward Middleton, is at the lowest point of his alcoholism. The city is a symbol of vice, a lack of self-control. The municipal government's inability to govern its inhabitants (particularly in the notorious Five Points slum) mirrored the individual lack of self-control that could lead to alcoholism, or "dipsomania," at it was termed then. The play was orignally staged in a museum in Boston; museums in the nineteenth-century were a mixture of pop science and sheer sensationalism. They might offer natural history specimens, but they could just as easily offer freakish "curiosities" with spurious claims to authenticity. They also offered popular readings, or "lectures"--sometimes even scenes from Shakespeare's plays--to audiences that perhaps would not attend the theater.

The Drunkard aimed both for those morally high-minded audiences and for folks who were attracted to freakish displays. The combination must have worked: It played for an unprecedented 101 nights in Boston in 1844. Following its extraordinary success in Boston, Barnum, the owner of New York's famous American Museum, decided to expand his own "lecture room" not once, but twice, eventually accommodating 3,000 people. These renovations were undertaken largely to accommodate The Drunkard's extraordinary success. He hadn't taken such steps before because his museum neighbored the Park Theatre (on Park Row, just across the street from the southern tip of City Hall Park). But once the Park burned down (again) in 1849 and wasn't rebuilt, Barnum decided to venture into the theatrical business.

Barnum wasn't the inventor of the museum by any means, but he transformed the institution in significant ways and became one of the most successful and famous showmen in America as a result. In the early 1840s he bought an already existing museum and the stock of another and launched his own enterprise. Older museums had attempted to combine education, moral uplift, and amusement in order to refine their audiences and, of course, to make money. Barnum understood better than earlier museum owners that above all the public wanted novelty. He brought in trained dogs, performing fleas, jugglers, ventriloquists, fat people, giants, dwarfs, wax figures, scale models of the wonders of the world, Indians, and even the "Feejee Mermaid." Barnum also understood the power of print: his advertisements literally papered the town; his illustrated museum guide a bestseller; and he pioneered the celebrity autobiography. Barnum also opened special hours for black patrons, which means two things: his audiences were still carefully managed in important ways (in this case, segregated by race), but he also recognized blacks as a potential paying audience.

Reform melodramas were the primary theatrical genre on stage at museums like Barnum's. This made their spaces safe for some Protestants who would not attend the more established theaters. These plays drew on sentimental and gothic elements in a way that bridged the gap between traditional theater and the freak shows on display in museums. In this way you can think of the delirium tremens scene in The Drunkard--reportedly one of its biggest draws--as something like a freak show. People would pay good money to see someone insane with liquor, just like they would pay to see the Quaker Giantess. One of the motivations would have been to make themselves feel normal.

Reform plays had been popular at least since the 18th century, but became much more common with the explosion of reform movements and the rise of melodrama in the nineteenth century. William Dunlap, the original manager at the Park, had a play called Thirty Years, or The Gambler's Fate. Another such play had the enticing title, Wine, Women, Gambling, Theft, Murder, and the Scaffold. Just in case you got hooked by the first part of the title, it wanted to let you know where that would lead you. A number of other temperance plays were produced in The Drunkard's wake. These include The Bottle, Another Glass, Life, or Scenes of Early Vice, The Curate's Daughter, Aunt Dinah's Pledge, The Drunkard's Warning, The fruits of the wine cup, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, an adaptation of the era's most famous temperance novel.

Following a fire in the mid-1860s, Barnum gave up his famous museum enterprise and turned his energies to the traveling circus--a form that still bears his name. But he's important to us not only because he stands, in New York and American history, at the crossroads between popular entertainment and dramatic literature, but because he illustrates a conception of celebrity he shared with the stars of the stage: As one theater critic of the day put it, "Barnum himself is one of the curiosities [on display in his museum] and we scarcely know which people would go further to see--Barnum, the sea serpent, or a real mermaid."

For more on Barnum: The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in collaboration with The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, maintains the excellent Website "The Lost Museum," which offers, among other things, a virtual tour of Barnum's Museum and a "temperance archive."

My favorite recent book on Barnum is Benjamin Reiss's The Showman and the Slave, which examines in detail Barnum's early career, in particular his claim to have on display a 161-year-old slave woman who had been George Washington's nursemaid. The standard biography remains Neil Harris's Humbug. The best book on temperance is John W. Frick's Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.

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By Bryan on March 10, 2008 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks back, my dad emailed me a link to John Strausbaugh's Times article on the history of jazz and other popular entertainment at Lincoln Square, a "cradle for serious grooving" roughly in the area where Lincoln Center now stands.

The email also served as a reminder that I'd promised here, last fall, to keep tabs on Strausbaugh's series of neighborhood notes and walking tours. So I should mention that, since I last mentioned these installments, Strausbaugh has also published entries on the Upper East Side and what he calls "P.T. Barnum's New York," meaning lower Manhattan in the 19th century.

I've also noticed that the Times is maintaining an interactive map with convenient links to each piece in the series, allowing you to get more details on specific sites Strausbaugh mentions along the way. As always, each installment is accompanied by a downloadable walking tour, though I have yet to give one of these a go. I'd love to hear from someone who's tried out one or more of them.

Of course, when it comes to Barnum, I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to the extraordinary resources available from the CUNY Social History Project, including their site "The Lost Museum."

Also in the realm of virtual NY, I've been meaning to say something about the Virtual LES articles that popped up in the paper a while back. You can visit the virtual LES at vles.com. I have more I want to say about that -- including some gossip about the site's treatment of rock and roll venues -- but that will have to wait for another time.

On the general subject of the LES -- cleaned up, virtual, or otherwise -- I've been keen on getting Richard Price's new novel, Lush Life, set in the neighborhood in the 90s. Friends have recommended that I listen to his interview on NPR's Fresh Air. I haven't yet, but you can beat me to it by clicking here.

(Price, incidentally, will be speaking at the Tenement Museum on Tuesday, April 15, at 6:30 pm.)

One reason they've been on me about Price is that I've been obsessing, over on The Great Whatsit, about nostalgic and antinostalgic strains in New York writing. I haven't had the time or space to work out everything I'm thinking on the topic, but for initial noodling around -- with fugitive comments on Edith Wharton, Michael Chabon, Adam Gopnik, Theodore Dreiser and others -- you can begin here.

[update, later that night: if Lush Life is half as entertaining as Sam Anderson's review of it in New York magazine, I think I'll dig it. Sam, by the way, among other things is an advanced PhD student in our department; he just won the NBCC's Balakian Award for his reviewing. Go, Sam!]

Entries tagged with “Barnum” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

Playing Drunk / Virtual Barnum

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