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A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American Stage Irishman, 1820–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Dale T. Knobel
Dale T. Knobel
Affiliation:
Dale T. Knobel is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843.
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Extract

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 1981 , pp. 45 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

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2 Foster, G. G., New York by Gas-Light (New York, 1850), pp. 85–88Google Scholar.

3 Power toured the United States between 1833 and 1835 and again in 1839–1841. Samuel D. Johnson was Williams' in-house playwright. During 1849–1853 Williams toured the country with his wife, performing primarily in the comic melodrama Born to Good Luck. He was especially acclaimed in New Orleans and along the Mississippi Valley. Though Boucicault's greatest successes came after 1860, he was already an acknowledged playwright in England during the early 1840s; in 1853 he emigrated to the United States and toured through 1856.

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6 “In the ideal world of melodrama,” notes James L. Smith, “life is.…simple and uncomplicated, character and motive are reduced to blackest black and whitest white, coincidence and chance are tamed, unlucky accidents are overcome, and virtue after many thrilling and precipitous reversals is guaranteed to triumph over vice.” Smith, James L., ed., Victorian Melodramas: Seven English, French and American Melodramas (London, 1976), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

7 The rate of European immigration to the United States began to accelerate noticeably in about 1827, when the annual total reached almost 17,000 persons. In 1832 it leaped to a new plateau, averaging between 30,000 and 70,000 annually for the rest of the decade. Average annual rates in the range of 100,000 arrivals for the early 1840s gave way to 200,000 in the late '40s and 300,00 during the early 1850s. The peak year for European immigration in the pre-Civil War period was 1854 with 405,000 registered arrivals. Britons ceased to constitute a plurality of European immigrants in 1822. The Irish occupied this position until 1854 except for the year 1846 when several thousand more Germans arrived. During the late 1850s about 50 percent more German than Irish immigrants landed in US ports each year.

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11 Grimsted, “Melodrama as Echo,” p. 82.

12 Apparently this possibility was perceived by contemporaries. Tyrone Power wrote that his American audiences expected no less than “a portrait of nature” in the stage Irishman, which no doubt meant a portrait of their perception of nature. And an American critic scorned the representation of Terence O'Cutter at the New York opening of The Jealous Wife in 1846 as “not a genuine personage,” falling far below the verisimilitude of melodramatic art to life that theatergoers had come to anticipate. Power, Tyrone, Impressions of America During the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835, 2 vols. (London, 1836), 1:61Google Scholar; French, Samuel, Introduction to The Jealous Wife, by George Colman (New York, 1846), p. ivGoogle Scholar.

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21 Table 1 borrows extensively from Howard Ehrlich's “A Preliminary Dictionary for the Classification of Ethnic Stereotypes,” quoting or paraphrasing most of Ehrlich's category descriptions. A fifteenth category, “Group Subjective,” was added to Ehrlich's fourteen-fold system to account for terms that did not seem to fit elsewhere. I have also described Category ii as “Political/Religious Characteristics” rather than adopt Ehrlich's plain “Political Characteristics” in recognition of the strong association ante-bellum Anglo-Americans perceived between those qualities. For Ehrlich's complete formulation see Ehrlich, , The Social Psychology of Prejudice, pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

22 For a tight summary of the coding and scaling procedures of Evaluative Assertion Analysis see North, Robert C., Holstoi, Ole R., Zaninovich, M. George, and Zinnes, Dina A., Content Analysis: A Handbook for the Study of International Crisis (Evanston, Ill., 1963), pp. 92–96Google Scholar.

23 William Macready's The Irishman in London, which received its American debut in Boston during 1850, for example, went through twelve different runs in Philadelphia, twenty-five in Charleston, and six in New Orleans over the course of the following decade.

24 Arranged in order of earliest American publication, the forty-two plays, burlesques, and minstrel pieces are: Butler, Richard, The Irish Tutor (New York, 1823)Google Scholar; Knowles, James Sheridan, Brian Boroihme (New York, 1828)Google Scholar; Rodwell, George Herbert, Teddy the Tiler (New York, 1830)Google Scholar; Kenney, James, The Irish Ambassador (New York, 1832)Google Scholar; Pocock, Isaac, The Omnibus (Philadelphia, 1833)Google Scholar; Burton, William E., “The Boys of Kilkenny,” in Burton's Comic Songster (Philadelphia, 1837)Google Scholar; Burton, William E., “Juggy Delaney,” in Burton's Comic Songster (Philadelphia, 1837)Google Scholar; Burton, William E., “Paddy Denny's Pig,” in Burton's Comic Songster (Philadelphia, 1837Google Scholar; Buckstone, John Baldwin, The Irish Lion (New York, 1838)Google Scholar, Power, Tyrone, Rory O'More (New York, 1838)Google Scholar; Fitzball, Edward, Jonathon Bradford (Philadelphia, 1845)Google Scholar; Colman, George, The Jealous Wife (New York, 1846)Google Scholar; Paulding, James Kirke, The Americans (Philadelphia, 1847)Google Scholar; Baker, Benjamin, A Glance at New York (New York, 1848)Google Scholar; Bernard, William Bayle, The Irish Attourney (New York, 1848)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, Temptation; or, The Irish Emigrant (New York, 1848)Google Scholar; Sargent, Lucius M., “Fritz Hazell,” in Temperance Tales (Boston, 1848)Google Scholar; Sargent, Lucius M., “An Irish Heart,” in Temperance Tales (Boston, 1848)Google Scholar; Williams, Barney, Irish Assurance and Yankee Modesty (New York, 1848)Google Scholar; Macready, Wiliam, The Irishman in London (Boston, 1850)Google Scholar; Pilgrim, James, The Limerick Boy (New York, 1850)Google Scholar; Johnson, Samuel D., Brian O'Linn (New York, 1861)Google Scholar; Morton, Thomas, Gotobed Tom (New York, 1852)Google Scholar; Power, Tyrone, Born to Good Luck (New York, 1852)Google Scholar; Barry, S., The Persecuted Dutchman (New York, 1854)Google Scholar; Pilgrim, James, Katty O'Sheal (St. Louis, 1854)Google Scholar; Amherst, J. H., Ireland As It Is (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Boucicault, Dion, Andy Blake (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, “Dan Duff's Wish,” in The Bunsby Papers (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, The Irish Yankee (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, “O'Bryan's Luck,” in The Bunsby Papers (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, A Recollection of O'Flannigan and the Fairies (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Brougham, John, “The Tipperary Venus,” in The Bunsby Papers (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Johnson, Samuel D., In and Out of Place (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Morton, John Madison, The Irish Tiger (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Planché, James Robinson, The Irish Post (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Wood, C. A. F., The Irish Broomaker (New York, 1856)Google Scholar; Anonymous, Deseret Deserted (New York, 1858)Google Scholar; Gratton, Thomas C., “An Irish Priest in Flanders,” in The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor, ed. Burton, William E. (New York, 1858)Google Scholar; Mackenzie, R. Shelton, “Father Prout,” in The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor, ed. Burton, William E. (New York, 1858)Google Scholar; Pilgrim, James, The Wild Irish Girl (Baltimore, 1858)Google Scholar; Boucicault, Dion, The Colleen Bawn (New York, 1860)Google Scholar.

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26 Bourgeois, Maurice, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (London, 1913)Google Scholar, quoted in Duggan, , The Stage Irishman, pp. 288–89Google Scholar.

27 The twelve most often used descriptive terms in order of descending usage frequency were: drunken, wild, fighting, blundering, loving, red-haired, impudent, florid, ignorant, poor, stupid, merry.

28 Billington, Ray Allen, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study in the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938), p. 36Google Scholar.

29 Davis, David Brion, “Some Ideological Functions of Prejudice in Ante-Bellum America,” American Quarterly, 15 (Summer 1963): 116, 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Davis, , “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (09 1960): 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 The very chapter titles of Handlin's study of ethnic diversity in nineteenth-century Boston are suggestive, e.g., “Group Conflict,” “Conflict of Ideas.” See Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation, 2nd ed., (New York, 1972), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar. Elsewhere Handlin argues that it was “the stranger who stood in the way of attainment of some particular objective” who “became the butt of attack.” See Handlin, , The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People, 2nd ed., (New York, 1973), p. 239Google Scholar.