Embedded within the popular drama of the nineteenth century are not only concepts and attitudes towards `race' that still have influence today, but also a skewed take on genuine historical episodes and movements, including the development of colonialism. Focusing on one little known popular melodrama and locating it in the history of its time reveals a network of connections that span the British abolition of the slave trade, the importance of Brazil to the development of Britain's economy, the role of the London merchants and, of course, a clearly developed racial hierarchy. At its pinnacle stood the emblem of popular patriotism, the British Jack Tar.
Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: `a human awful wonder of God' ( London, Jonathan Cape, 2007).
2.
Ibid., p. 163.
3.
See, e.g., Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: a study in international trade and economic development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002); R. Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972) and L. Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970).
4.
See C. Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: the suppression of the African slave trade in the nineteenth century (London, Longmans Green and Co, 1949) and W. E. F. Ward The Royal Navy and the Slavers: the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1969).
5.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, Penguin , 1990), p. 312.
6.
Michael Booth, `The metropolis on stage', in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: images and realities ( London, 1973), Vol. 1, pp. 211-24.
7.
See, e.g., Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London theatregoing, 1840-1880 (Hatfield, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001).
8.
J.T. Haines, My Poll and My Partner Joe (London, T. H. Lacy, n.d., no. 1058), Act 1, scene 3.
9.
Bethell, Abolition, op. cit., p. 126. See also Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade : a census (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
10.
Lloyd, Navy and the Slave Trade, op. cit., pp. 36-8.
11.
Haines, My Poll and My Partner Joe, op. cit, Act 2, scene 2.
12.
C.H. Hazlewood, The Staff of Diamonds (London, French, n.d., no. 104).
13.
Ibid., Act 1, scene 1.
14.
Ibid. For a discussion of Gus's stage antecedents, see Hazel Waters, `Putting on "Uncle Tom" on the Victorian stage', Race & Class (Vol. 42, no. 3, January-March 2001).
