Mapping Urban Space in the Antebellum Temperance Drama

The Drunkard’s Directions: Mapping Urban Space in the Antebellum Temperance Drama

michael d’alessandro

HEN William H. Smith’s temperance melodrama The W Drunkard premiered at Moses Kimball’s Boston Mu- seum in 1844,theBoston Daily Atlas reported that the play “cannot be witnessed without exciting the deepest emotions. It is just such a representation as our mixed population need [sic]; furnishing a worthy entertainment with good instruction.”1 Such praise was not, however, universal. Reviewing an 1850 production of the play at P. T. Barnum’s American Mu- seum in New York, the International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art deemed The Drunkard a“dis- gustingly vulgar and brutalizing piece . . . in which the chief characters appear in all the stages of degradation.” “With all its pretensions to morality,” the commentator concluded, “the play is irredeemably bad and base.”2 Despite their differing opinions about how well the play fulfilled its aims, both writers identified its ambition to offer “good instruction” as centered on the specific dangers of drinking. As an extension of this educational goal, the play imparts simultaneous lessons on the broader perils of urbanity and engaging with the city at large. Detractors had reason to be concerned about the influence of The Drunkard. Breaking box office records, it drew un- precedented audiences to theatres at the Boston Museum in

1Boston Daily Atlas, 5 March 1844,p.2. By “mixed” audience, the reporter evidently means men, women, and children. 2“A Mock Guillotine—Delirium Tremens on the Stage,” International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art, 1 July 1850,p.8.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 253 1844, where it played for 144 nonconsecutive shows, and at Barnum’s American Museum in 1850, where it became Amer- ica’s first play to reach 100 uninterrupted performances,3 thus establishing the “long-run” for American theatres.4 Unlike the British temperance dramas from which it derived, The Drunk- ard focused on the downfall not of a working-class denizen but of a middle-class, nonresident protagonist. Significantly, his status mirrored that of the majority of the play’s spectators, many of whom were out-of-towners eager to learn more about the city and the assorted characters within it. Few critics have examined the play’s city scenes beyond jux- taposing them against its country ones. John Frick describes the play’s “inverted arc” structure, in which the prosperous Edward Middleton begins as a respectable village landlord, descends to become a degraded city drunkard, and is finally restored to his middle-class standing in the final act.5 Similarly, Bruce McConachie claims that Edward’s final escape from the city represents a “neoplatonic return to wholeness couched

3John Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 113;RosemarieBank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 143; Walter J. Meserve, Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People in the Age of Jackson, 1829–1849 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 152; and Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth- Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 48. Reports of production numbers vary, but these appear to be the most accurate. The show opened at Kimball’s museum in February 1844 and reached at least 140 nonconsecutive productions there by the next year. Barnum’s show premiered on 8 July 1850 and reached 150 straight performances (including matinees) by the time it closed on 7 October 1850. See Judith N. McArthur, “Demon Rum on the Boards: Temperance Melodrama and the Tradition of Antebellum Reform,” Journal of the Early Republic 9.4 (1989): 520, and Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), p. 178. 4According to David Grimsted, during this era, most shows did not run more than a week. Only about twelve shows had played at least fifty nights in the first half of the nineteenth century. See his Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (1968; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 87.OnThe Drunkard’s launch of the long run, see also George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–36), 6:70–71. 5Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform, p. 121. Jeffrey Mason first used the term “inverted arc” to describe the plots of temperance speeches and fictional temperance narratives in which a middle-class citizen (usually a clerk or businessman) would fall from his initial position to degraded drunkenness and then, through his sobriety, climb back to a position of social and economic esteem. See his Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), p. 72.

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within the terms of bourgeois respectability.”6 While Frick’s and McConachie’s observations about Edward’s ﬁnal return to the middle class remain valid, neither critic scrutinizes how the play selectively portrays the antebellum city.7 Both Kimball (in his 1844 and 1849 Boston Museum productions) and Barnum (in his 1850 New York production) drew upon domestic sightseers’ curious fascination with the city while also attempting to quell their equally intense fears. As they depicted speciﬁc urban geographies and notorious street types, playwright Smith and his drama’s producers sought to demystify urban space and, at the same time, to teach their out-of-town audiences how to navigate it safely. Replicating and at times revising the goals of contemporaneous tourist literature, The Drunkard im- ages the city as knowable and, thus, as traversable for those willing to map its physical contours. Though such depictions were historically false, theatre producers successfully recruited middle-class tourists as their new audiences by leading them to believe that they were enlightened city consumers.

Urban Tourism and the Museum Theatre Movement During the antebellum decades, American cities were boom- ing. Between 1820 and 1860, the number of city inhabitants rose 797 percent, marking America’s fastest rate of urban expansion to that point.8 The home of only 43,000 people in

6McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, p. 184. 7In the first published version of the play, the preface writer states that Kimball commissioned a play from an unknown gentleman whose script was “entirely deficient in stage tact and dramatic effect,” and so Smith revised it. See William H. Smith, The Drunkard: or, The Fallen Saved! (Boston: Jones’s Publishing House, 1847), p. 6. Historians identify that gentleman as most likely John Pierpont, a Unitarian clergyman who lectured on temperance. See Amy Hughes, “Answering the Amusement Question: Antebellum Temperance Drama and the Christian Endorsement of Leisure,” New England Theatre Journal 15 (2004): 2; McArthur, “Demon Rum,” p. 519;andFrick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform, pp. 116–18. Other sources, including an exchange between Barnum and the New York Herald, posit the author of the original “story in dialogue” as New York citizen William Comstock. See New York Herald, 4 June 1850,p.2, and “The Author of the Drunkard,” New York Herald, 7 June 1850, p. 7. 8Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 35.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 255 1820, Boston swelled to a population of over 137,000 by 1850.9 New York tallied 202,000 permanent residents in 1830 but had grown to nearly 515,000 by the time Barnum’s Drunkard premiered in 1850.10 Due partly to an inﬂux of nearly three million immigrants between 1830 and 1850 as well as to the movement of rural men hoping to attain or solidify a middle-class status, cities became increasingly overcrowded.11 Adding to those numbers were streams of visitors.12 In the 1830sand40s, sightseers ﬂocked to Boston’s waterfront to walk the wharves and spot clipper ships.13 Epitomizing the scores of European visitors upon his tour of the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens admired the visual splendor of Boston’s private houses, the State House, and the Boston Common, writing “I sincerely believe that the public institutions and charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them.”14 New York City, meanwhile, provided a port for steam- boat tours of the Hudson River Valley and other central New York sites, including Albany, Ballston, and Saratoga Springs. The route became increasingly popular among middle-class va- cationers from the 1810s onward, and while waiting for trans- fers, travelers often spent nights in the city.15 By the mid-1830s,

9Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 2003), p. 49, and Stephen Puleo, A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850–1900 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), p. 88. 10Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in An- tebellum New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 11. 11Between 1830 and 1850 alone, the census recorded upwards of 2,750,000 new immigrants. See Zane Miller and Patricia Melvin, The Urbanization of Modern America: A Brief History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1973), p. 40, and Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 68. 12Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 25. 13Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1940), pp. 9–10. 14Charles Dickens, American Notes, for General Circulation (1842; repr. New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 36. 15Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), pp. 31, 153–56.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 256 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY New York welcomed nearly seventy thousand tourists and visiting businessmen annually. They initially congregated in the City Hall area, with its park, churches, and theatres, but by the 1840s travelers were extending their ventures to witness the diverse spectacles within the city’s slums.16 A variety of literary genres emerged out of the rising interest in urban life. Sensational city-mystery novels, spawned by Eugene` Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43), featured graphic scenes of urban decay and were marketed largely toward working-class city readers, though a more diverse population actually read them.17 The “urban sketch,” on the other hand, tended to circulate among rural consumers unfamiliar with the city. Contemporary reviewers, who observed that vol- umes of such sketches were being “scattered over the country” by door-to-door book peddlers, noted that they were “hor- rify[ing] many a farmer” who read them.18 Stuart Blumin credits journalist George G. Foster with inventing the form, which he launched as a series of New York Herald columns. Five months before The Drunkard’s New York premiere in July 1850, Foster’s New York by Gas-Light was released in book form, eventually selling upward of two hundred thousand copies. While both urban sketches and the city-mystery novels trafﬁcked in urbanity’s voyeuristic thrills, only the sketches emphasized the city’s topography. Purporting to be “detailed, factual, and comprehensive guides” to urban locations, they devoted chapters to speciﬁc neighborhoods and leisure sites (including “Bowling and Billiard Saloons,” “The [Five] Points

16Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 600–601, and Eric Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 31–37. 17Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), p. 105. Denning argues that the city-mystery novels’ “actual readers were the working people of the city,” but his ﬁndings have been con- vincingly challenged; see, esp., Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 29. 18Literary World, 9 February 1850,p.122, quoted in Stuart Blumin, intro. to George Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1990), p. 16.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 257 at Midnight,” and “Butter-Cake Dick’s” newsboy eatery). Ac- cording to Blumin, the genre’s primary function was “explain- ing the new metropolis,” a task that involved making sense of the beggars, workingmen, and prostitutes who made city strolls “socially uncomfortable for the respectable middle class.”19 Two other types of less tawdry traveler literature—tourist guidebooks and travel journals—simultaneously informed the period’s readers about American cities. In the 1830s, travel articles “appeared regularly in middle-class magazines,” many of which were circulated throughout the Midwest and which “detail[ed] each city’s trade, industry, and culture.” These articles soon evolved into a tourist guidebook genre consisting of national travel manuals, urban handbooks, and “stranger’s guides.” In the late 1840s, New York publisher Daniel Appleton released the Appleton’s United States Guide Book for Travellers, the ﬁrst of its kind, which contained city maps and was written “specifically for pleasure journeyers.” Most local guidebooks provided a brief history of a given city and then directed readers to its respectable streets and renowned buildings (hotels, libraries, banks, churches).20 During the same decades, writers such as Dickens and Richard Henry Dana published travel journals de- scribing their visits to American cities. Though these authors were not concerned with offering directional assistance, they did depict low-class areas in gleefully graphic detail. As fears of and fascinations with the American city grew, urban sightseers could consult any of these literatures—urban sketches, city guidebooks, and travel journals—to familiarize themselves with metropolitan areas. American theatre contributed to and borrowed from these three print genres, but plays often assumed a prior understanding of the city. Following a rash of unsuccessful city-rambling plays—including The Times; or, Life in New York (1829), Life

19Blumin, intro. to Foster, New York by Gas-Light, p. 11,andCocks,Doing the Town, p. 35. 20Cocks, Doing the Town, pp. 25, 27, 26. Cocks references Dona Brown’s Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995)forthelate1840s launch date of Appleton’s guide, but she notes that the earliest copy she had seen personally was published in 1853.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 258 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in Philadelphia (1832), Life in New York (1834), and Old Man- hattan; or, Wall Street in an Uproar (1840)—the American urban play climaxed with Benjamin Baker’s AGlanceatNew York (1848). This farce starred Frank S. Chanfrau in his famous role as the working-class Bowery b’hoy Mose,21 featured several local sites, and relied on inside jokes and songs. Baker’s play sparked a craze among downtown workers and spun off several sequels, among them Mose in a Muss (1849), Mose in Califor- nia (1849), and Mose in China (1849).22 Mose’s characteristic barroom rowdiness was not, however, intended for respectable, “uptown audiences”; rather, “the appeal was clearly made to a certain class of citizens” who recognized and participated in Mose’s working-class life.23 The play offered considerably less to middle-class spectators, especially city outsiders. In the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, theatres in Philadelphia and New York accommodated a cross-section of the new republic’s citizenry. The “fashionables” sat in the high- priced boxes, the “unfashionables” watched from the gallery or rear balcony, and those who were neither rich nor poor oc- cupied the modestly priced pit.24 As the number of theatres increased by the mid-1830s, though, individual theatres began to target their performances to more homogenous audiences.

21The Bowery B’hoy, named after the working-class district where he spent most of his time, was a “manly white mechanic” who emerged as a common street type in newspaper articles and illustrations. He maintained a distinctive fashion, including greased hair tucked under a top hat, a loosely buttoned collared shirt, a frock coat, green-striped trousers, and a cigar in the mouth. The Bowery B’hoy was often, and alternately, referred to as a fire b’hoy because he volunteered for a fire company when not working his day job (Mose worked as a butcher). Bowery B’hoys were known particularly for their rowdiness and penchant for getting into fights. Stock actor Frank Chanfrau originated the role of Mose in AGlanceatNewYork’spremiereat the Olympic Theatre in 1848 and developed the character through the play’s many sequels. See Bank, Theatre Culture in America, pp. 87–89; also David L. Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk Hero,” Theatre Journal 33.2 (1981): 199–212. 22Benjamin Baker only wrote Mose in China (1849). W. B. Chapman wrote Mose in aMuss(1849)andMose in California (1849), while the authors of two other sequels, Mose’s Visit to the Arab Girls (1848)andMose, Joe and Jack (1849) remain anonymous. See Meserve, Heralds of Promise, pp. 126–27, 239. 23Meserve, Heralds of Promise, p. 126. 24Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, pp. 52–54; McConachie, Melodramatic Forma- tions, p. 8.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 259 Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre and New York’s Park Theatre played to upper-class spectators, while Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre and New York’s Chatham and Bowery Theatres served working-class audiences.25 However, the emer- gent middle class—including businessmen, salaried workers, retail clerks, and their families—lacked a designated theatrical space of its own. Kimball and Barnum positioned themselves specifically to serve this clientele.26 Both Kimball and Barnum opened their museums in the early 1840s, largely from the remnants of former museums. In 1838, after failed starts in real estate and newspaper publishing, Kimball bought Boston’s New England Museum, which had been operating on Court Street since 1812. His new museum, which opened in 1841 (fig. 1), continued to display the New England Museum’s paintings as well as Chinese curiosities, statuary pieces, and stuffed giraffes and elephants, among other curiosities.27 The museum was so successful that, in 1846, Kimball moved it to a building that could accommodate all of his novelties and allow room for future expansion (figs. 2 and 3). Also beginning his museum career in 1841, Barnum purchased Scudder’s American Museum, located downtown at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street. He reopened it as the American

25Andrew Davis, America’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 40, 54;StuartM. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 144;Bank,Theatre Culture in America, p. 50; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 5:1. 26Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 64;PaulGilmore,The Genuine Ar- ticle: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 31. Others have suggested that the museums intended to cultivate a middle-class (and speciﬁcally not a working-class) audience, and they succeeded in doing so. See Faye Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses & Audi- ences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale University, 1994), pp. 107–8, 118–20;Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 123–24; and Gilmore, Genuine Article,p.34. McConachie speculates that some working-class citizens may have attended museum theatres when the programming (The Drunkard; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; etc.) overlapped with that of working-class theatres; however, he also asserts that Catholic immigrants and the urban poor tended to be shut out from the museums due to the 25-cent ticket price (Melodramatic Formations, pp. 196, 285). 27McGlinchee, First Decade of the Boston Museum, pp. 28–29.

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Fig. 1.—Kimball’s ﬁrst Boston Museum, Corner of Tremont and Bromﬁeld Streets, 1841. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Museum in 1842 (ﬁg. 4) and, like Kimball, showcased a variety of attractions, including insects, bows and arrows, ﬁsh tanks, landscape paintings, an Egyptian mummy, and live armadillos and zebras.28 More colleagues than rivals, Kimball and Bar- num wrote each other almost weekly during the 1840s, trading

28John Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940 (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 21–24.

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Fig. 2.—Kimball’s second Boston Museum, Corner of Tremont and School Streets, ca. 1856.R.L.Midgley,Sights in Boston and Suburbs, or Guide to the Stranger (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1856), p. 34.

advice and even exhibits. In 1842, Barnum leased from Kim- ball the “Fejee Mermaid”—in fact the body of a ﬁsh merged with the head and hands of a monkey—and created a frenzy of anticipation in the New York press.29 By the end of the 1840s, both Kimball and Barnum had become legitimate theatre producers as well. In 1843, Kimball hired the Wales-born William H. Smith, a journeyman actor who had been active in the United States since 1827, to serve as both stage manager and performer for his museum’s theatrical shows.30 Kimball expanded his museum and designated a new space therein not a theatre but a “Moral Lecture Room.” When the Boston Museum closed in 1903, New England Magazine claimed that from the 1850s to its end, the venue maintained “a half century of such continuous and substantial prosperity as no other Boston playhouse could or can claim.”31 Barnum

29Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 41–42, 62–63. 30McGlinchee, First Decade of the Boston Museum, pp. 61–62. In fact, Smith originated the role of The Drunkard’s Edward Middleton. 31Howard Malcolm Ticknor, “The Passing of the Boston Museum,” New England Magazine, June 1903, pp. 383, 386.

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Fig. 3.—Lobby of Kimball’s second Boston Museum, ca. 1856.R.L.Midgley, Sights in Boston and Suburbs, or Guide to the Stranger (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1856), p. 37.

also founded a lecture room soon after opening his museum in which he initially favored presentations of minstrel troupes, assorted giants, and fake dwarf Tom Thumb. But with the

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Fig. 4.—Barnum’s American Museum, New York, Corner of Broadway and Ann Street, 1850. Barnum’s American Museum Illustrated (New York, 1850), p. 1.Har- vard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

production of The Drunkard in 1850, he decided to mount full-length theatrical productions within his museum’s lecture room as Kimball did (ﬁg. 5). Between 1841 and 1865 (when it succumbed to a ﬁre), Barnum sold 38 million admission tickets to his museum.32 Kimball and Barnum cultivated middle-class spectators by reimagining the theatre as an educational experience with, as one contemporary reviewer phrased it, “excellent moral

32Arthur H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 107. Saxon notes that many of these tickets were no doubt purchased by repeat customers, but the number is still staggering considering that the total population of the United States in 1865 was 35 million.

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Fig. 5.—“The Lecture Room” in Barnum’s American Museum, New York, 1850. Barnum’s American Museum Illustrated (New York, 1850), p. 30. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

point[s]” and “good instruction.”33 Though their programming alternated between didactic and more sensational fare, the museum producers promised a controlled theatre environ- ment. Excepting the upper-class opera houses, urban theatre of the 1830sand40s had become known as, in critic Paul Gilmore’s words, a “disreputable den of immorality haunted by boisterous working-class men, predatory pseudoaristocrats, and fallen women.”34 By the mid-1840s, lecture rooms at Kim- ball’s and Barnum’s museums provided the emerging middle classes, who often avoided theatergoing in the 1830s, a venue for respectable entertainment and restrained company.35 The museums reinforced the middle class’s behavioral codes of

33Boston Daily Atlas, 5 March 1844,p.2. 34Gilmore, Genuine Article, p. 6. 35Gilmore, Genuine Article, p. 31.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 265 decorum and gentility, qualities separating them from the boisterous viewing habits of the immigrants and working classes largely excluded from museum theatres.36 In fact, the propri- etors speciﬁed exactly what and who would not be present. Kimball promised that no “profane expletives and indecent al- lusions” would be uttered onstage,37 and the Boston Museum’s lecture room was soon nicknamed the “deacon’s theatre” for the large numbers of clergymen who patronized it.38 In 1850, the Hudson River Chronicle praised Barnum’s museum as a place “where all those who disapprove of the dissipations, de- baucheries, profanity, vulgarity and other abominations which characterize our modern theatres may visit without fear of hear- ing or seeing anything that might shock the most susceptible moral sensibility.”39 Both producers banned alcohol from being served, forbade prostitutes from entering, and ran several matinees a week to encourage women to attend with their children (for whom ticket prices were reduced). Even reformers who had denounced theatre in the 1830s came to embrace the middle-class museum venues.40 While the precise demographic composition of the audiences attending the museum theatres is not known, both Kimball and Barnum actively recruited audiences from their cities’ outskirts. Kimball’s playbills advertised an omnibus service 1/ (for 12 2 cents) that transported spectators from the theatre to far-ﬂung neighborhoods such as Roxbury and East and South Boston and nearby towns such as Cambridge and East Cambridge.41 When Kimball relocated the museum in 1848, coach departure times stretched from ten in the evening until midnight. An early historian of the Boston Museum noted that “Boston was rapidly growing less provincial,” and many viewers

36McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, pp. 157–58; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, pp. 64–65. 37Quoted in McGlinchee, First Decade of the Boston Museum, pp. 21–22. 38McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, p. 173. 39Hudson River Chronicle, 2 July 1850,p.3. 40Allen, Horrible Prettiness, pp. 64–65; Gilmore, Genuine Article, p. 34. 41See, e.g., Boston Museum, playbill, The Rent Day, 9 November 1849. Broadside Playbills, Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries, Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. All 1849 playbills from the Boston Museum list the omnibus destinations at the bottom of the page.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 266 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY wished to stay in town for hours after the theatrical shows concluded.42 Some patrons from more remote locales such as Salem, fifteen miles north of Boston, enlisted their own private carriages to transport them to museum shows and other town attractions.43 Kimball also coordinated his efforts with other events that would draw patrons into the city. In May 1844, for instance, a Boston correspondent for the New York Herald, anticipating that the upcoming Massachusetts Temperance Ex- hibition “will probably bring more people to the city than have ever visited it before on any similar occasion,” observed that “every room, house, and shanty is being put in requisition to accommodate the swarm expected.” Capitalizing on the occasion, Kimball produced a new temperance play (The First and Last Pledge) and promised a painted banner commemorating The Drunkard—which had in only a few short months gained national press—to the county that sent the most delegates to town.44 The following September, a furniture and farming ex- hibition brought, according to the Evening Transcript, “thousands on thousands of strangers in[to] the city who [had] heard of the fame of this celebrated play,” The Drunkard. Kimball projected the rise in demand and accordingly increased the number of performances of Smith’s drama to three a day.45 As the newspaper reports reveal, venturing to see The Drunkard became an essential experience for city tourists. Kimball cast his museum, and specifically his greatest theatrical hit, as key to an understanding of authentic urban life. Barnum, who shared Kimball’s strategy, was particularly adept at luring country visitors to his museum.46 In its 1851 profile of Barnum, The Spirit of the Times asserted that “the

42John Bouve´ Clapp, “The Passing of an Historic Playhouse,” ca. 1903,BostonMu- seum Collection, scrapbook, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 43McGlinchee, First Decade of the Boston Museum, p. 52. 44“Boston: The Music Mania—Old Bull in Boston—Temperance—Theatricals,” New York Herald, 27 May 1844,p.2,andBoston Daily Atlas, 27 May 1844. 45Boston Evening Transcript, 18 September 1844. 46Barnum’s New York Museum was likely split almost evenly between urban and rural patrons during its most popular years, with its proprietor adjusting his programming to appeal to both audiences. As Adams reports, Barnum produced anti-abolitionist blackface minstrelsy shows for city patrons, who tended to support compromise with

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 267 country visitor considers that he has not ‘been to town,’ un- less he has witnessed the wonders of the American Museum, Broadway.”47 Barnum plied his country patrons with illustrated playbills and lithographs that they could display at home, sou- venirs that in turn raised the public visibility of his museum. He advertised at the downtown hotels that tourists frequented, and he set matinee performance times to coincide with rural daytrippers’ ventures into the city.48 Thanks to such tactics, Barnum’s American Museum emerged alongside the Boston Museum as a vital city landmark. Referring to his “provincial patrons” in his autobiography Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty Years’ Recollections (1869), Barnum recalled that “I was determined that there should be nothing in my establishment, where many of my visitors would derive their ﬁrst impressions of city life, that could contaminate or corrupt them.”49 So he, like Kimball, used his museum’s lecture room to orient eager tourists and to initiate them to the pleasures and pitfalls of urbanity. In both cases, The Drunkard became the ideal tool for accomplishing just such a goal.

The Confounding City and Its Sketch Figures Premiering at the Boston Museum on 26 February 1844, The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved! eschewed insiders’ knowledge of the city, such as that required by the Bowery plays, and focused instead on outsiders’ inquisitiveness. Its plot fol- lows many formulas from the period’s temperance literature. It tracks landlord Edward Middleton who, due to his unquench- able thirst for alcohol, plunges from a blissful country life with his wife Mary and daughter Julia in acts 1 and 2 into an intoxicated slum existence in acts 3 and 4. Mary and Julia

the South, as well as antislavery dramas such as George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) for rural antislavery spectators. See Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, pp. 129–30. 47“Peter T. Barnum: His Character-Fortune—More Gigantic Enterprises,” Spirit of the Times, 17 May 1851,p.147. 48Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, p. 113. 49P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs: or Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum written by himself (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1869), p. 160.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 268 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY chase Edward to the city, but when they cannot find him, they too descend into destitution. All three characters are ultimately saved by Edward’s foster brother, William, and the temperance spokesman Rencelaw, who restore the Middle- tons to their village and middle-class contentment in the fifth and final act.50 Redemption is achieved, however, only after Edward’s drinking binge drives him to the brink of suicide and Mary and Julia’s maladjustment to urban life leaves them sickly and starving. Smith’s play typified, in McConachie’s terms, the “moral reform” melodramas that appealed to the middle classes. These plays, largely descending from Great Britain’s eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedies, cautioned against he- donistic, often illicit pursuits such as sex, thievery, drinking, and gambling. Titles of other plays in the subgenre included Thirty Years, or the Gambler’s Fate and The Six Degrees of Crime, or Wine, Women, Gambling, Theft, Murder and the Scaffold. Moral reform plays, and temperance ones in partic- ular, followed the “victim’s temptation and downfall from [a] modest position and public esteem to the depths of ruin and

50Smith casts Rencelaw as a temperance spokesman in the vein of the Washing- tonians, a society of former drunkards who gathered in loosely connected sects and chapters, mainly between 1840 and 1845. The Washingtonian movement emerged ﬁrst in Baltimore, thrived in the Northeastern cities (particularly New York and Boston), and established notable communities in the South (Georgia, South Carolina) and Mid- west (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois). See Milton Maxwell, “The Washingtonian Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 11 (1950): 418. The organization reported two hundred thousand members in the United States by the end of 1841 and one million the following year. Most Washingtonians were working class, but some middle- and even upper-class citizens participated as well. Most Washingtonian meetings centered on reformed drunkards’ reports about their experiences, “spontaneous, unpolished speeches from ordinary men” intended to create a feeling of empathy in audiences and induce listeners to sign the abstinence pledge. See Thomas Pegram, Battling De- mon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), p. 29. Notably, during the movement’s waning days in 1846, one Boston chapter met three nights a week in Washingtonian Hall, located “under the Museum” (presumably Kimball’s Boston Museum). See “Washingtonianism,” Prisoner’s Friend: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Criminal Reform, Philosophy, Science, etc., 18 February 1846, p. 26. For more on the Washingtonians, see also Glenn Hendler, “Bloated Bodies and Sober Sentiments: Masculinity in 1840s Temperance Narratives,” in Sentimen- tal Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Hendler and Mary Chapman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Amy Hughes, in “John Gough’s Afternoon at the Theatre; Or, the Tyranny of an Account Book” (Performing Arts Resources 28 [2011]: 108), persuasively suggests that Smith derived the play’s delirium tremens scene in part from temperance speaker Gough’s speeches.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 269 shame” and sometimes (but not always) concluded with his restoration.51 In the course of The Drunkard, playwright Smith directly addresses middle-class tourists’ anxieties about urban life. Por- traying the host city (Boston in the original production and first printed version) as a confounding maze of alleys and byways, he mimics the audience’s limited spatial knowledge in the play’s characters. When village spinster Miss Spindle visits Boston, her efforts to find a landmark are frustrated by the labyrinthine avenues: “Why! This Boston is the most awful place to find one’s way I was ever in; it’s all ups and downs, ins and outs. I’ve been trying for two hours to find Bunker Hill Monument and I can’t see it, though they tell me it’s six hundred yards high.”52 In the New York version of the play, she announces a similarly unsuccessful search for Trinity Church steeple.53 Spindle enters as a naıve¨ tourist figure who relies on gossip alone to orient her rather than consulting the urban handbooks designed to help tourists navigate unfamiliar metropolitan areas. Edward, too, appears lost in the city, in part because of the machinations of the play’s villain, Lawyer Cribbs. Formerly a representative of Edward’s father, Cribbs offers unheeded legal advice to Edward in the opening scenes and harbors a secret vengeance against the family. In the first city scene, Cribbs ponders “where that drunken vagrant [Edward] can have wan- dered. Ever since he came to Boston, thanks to his ravenous ap- petite and my industrious agency, he has been going down hill rapidly” (p. 30). The city’s confusion actually assists Edward’s debauchery, providing him a venue to feed his self-destructive habits and the conniving Cribbs adequate cover to organize his schemes. The city’s overwhelming gloom and incessant noise add to the visiting characters’ bewilderment, thwarting their efforts to orient themselves. In the 1847 play text, act 3,scene2 takes

51McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, p. 178. 52Smith, The Drunkard (Jones version), p. 32 (hereafter cited in text). 53W. H. Smith, The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (New York: Samuel French, ca. 1860), reprinted in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 282. Further page citations will be included in the text.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 270 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY place on “School street—stage little dark”(p.32), scene 5 is set in a garret with a “lamp burning dimly”(p.35), and the act’s final scene plays out in “Phillips Place. Lights down”(p.38). The progressive darkening not only symbolizes Edward’s steady decline but also reflects the physical obscurities of city life. The Phillips Place scene, in which the foster brother William finally rescues Edward, shows “rowdies” fighting and ends with the stage direction “General Confusion”(p.38). When he arrives to the city and vows to redeem Edward, William admits that he must first find him: “There’s another row, well, if this Boston isn’t the awfullest place for noise. Come, Mrs. Middleton, I’ll find him if he’s in Boston, jail or no jail, watch-house or no watch-house” (p. 37).54 The maddening din, a further assault on the senses, is yet one more entanglement that obstructs those individuals seeking to navigate the city. William vows to wade through the urban chaos and eventually locates Edward as he promises, but the city itself threatens to block him at every corner. Smith also establishes the city as a place where human con- nection appears impossible at times. Despite Mary’s devotion and her desire to reunite her family in the city, she and Ed- ward never encounter one another.55 According to the original Boston production’s playbill, Edward appears successively at Phillips Place and Court Street (3.1), School Street (3.2 and 3.4), Faneuil Hall and Dock Square (3.6), and Hawley Street (4.1) as he slips deeper into depravity.56 In the New York version, Edward crawls across a series of downtown bars, as his loafer friends promise to take him to Cross Street in

54A lock-up or guardhouse. 55Edward and Mary are in fact reunited at Rencelaw’s house before returning home to their village. The residence could be in the city, but Smith never specifies the address. Dramaturgically, then, the house functions as a transitional space between the city and country, and not as a distinct urban location. 56Though they otherwise match up, the opening night playbill and the earliest published play text (Jones, 1847) contain a significant difference: the setting of act 3, scene 6. The playbill specifies that the scene takes place at Faneuil Hall and Dock Square and the text lists it as Phillips Place. The playbill seems the most reliable resource regarding how the play was first performed during its year-long run of at least 140 performances, but it is possible that during some minor revivals between 1844 and 1847, Phillips Place (already the site of act 3,scene1) was used as a substitute.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 271 Five Points—an area of near legendary depravity in antebellum America—in search of liquor (p. 280). He moves from Broadway (3.1) to a Broadway bar (3.3), then finally to outside the presumed destination barroom in Five Points (3.4), before awaking crumpled on the ground at an unspecified “wretched out-house or shed, supposed to be near a tavern”(4.1)(p.280). Edward is a relentlessly peripatetic, public figure, while Mary, sitting at an “old table and chair” sewing shirts in a degraded garret, remains fixed and private (p. 284). The two fates are equally undesirable. Neither character—Edward aimlessly wan- dering; Mary locked away—possesses the skills to navigate the dizzying cityscape. With both characters proving to be dysfunc- tional urbanites, husband and wife never cross paths. Once in the city, Edward and Mary quickly devolve from middle-class rural transplants into the lower-class stock figures who populated urban sketches. Historian Eric Homberger reports that as early as 1846, various forms of city literature not only described standard tourist attractions but also offered “lurid accounts of [the city’s] inhabitants.”57 Like many moral reform melodramas, the urban sketch appealed to middle-class readers by concealing voyeuristic urban spectacles under a veneer of respectable instruction. The street drunkard represented one of the most prominent of these illicit exhibits, as George Foster outlines in New York by Gas-Light (1850): “Here and there a lamp-post is embellished with a human swine who leans, a statue of drunkenness, against it for support, and consigns his undigested supper to his fellow pigs who rise early o’mornings.” Also parading through the scene are other degenerate types indigenous to the city’s streets, including a “flashily-dressed woman” and groups of men “waiting for a last and desperate chance of game.”58 When Edward Mid- dleton appears at the end of The Drunkard’s second act “lying on ground, without hat or coat, clothes torn, eyes sunk and haggard, appearance terrible,” he has become just such a type (p. 38). No longer an autonomous urban subject, he is now

57Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City, p. 33. 58Foster, New York by Gas-Light, p. 75.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 272 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY an object, a mere spectacle for others to behold. Disoriented, like Foster’s street drunk leaning against the lamppost, he cries out, “Where am I?” (p. 38). At that moment and in that place, Edward exemplifies middle-class tourists’ acute fears of finding themselves lost in the bowels of a bewildering city. Yet there is always, Smith assures his viewers, an escape from such a fate. As he descends from a middle-class rural landlord to a lowly urban figure on display, Edward senses his change in status. Awaking on the street after one drinking binge, he exclaims, “I wanted daylight, but now it has come, what shall I do in daylight! I was out of sight when it was dark” (p. 38). Though the dimming stage lights signify the city’s increasing impenetrability, the darkness also cloaks its inhabitants from the tourists’ intrusive gaze. It is this exposure that Edward most fears, for it groups him with the “wicked and wretched classes” that Foster studies in the urban sketch. 59 Thanks to William’s intervention, however, his social demotion is happily reversed. By presenting Edward as a respectable landlord both before and after his fall, Smith contextualizes urban figures like the drunkard, whom audience members may encounter when they leave the theatre. In doing so, he humanizes these figures, differentiating the irredeemable working-class drunks from the hapless middle-class sinners waiting to be discovered and returned to their proper stations in life. Ultimately, then, The Drunkard aims to comfort viewers, for it reassures any middle-class visitor lost in the city that he or she will eventually be found and returned home. Smith’s portrayal of Mary as a seamstress also marks her as an urban object awaiting restoration, a displaced victim closely aligned with analogous sketch literature types. In the 1820s, the clothing trade began outsourcing sewing to women who worked in their own homes, often six days a week from dawn until ten at night, and were subject to unpredictable fluctuations in demand. By 1848, the number of seamstresses in New York City

59The goal of the urban sketch was, in Foster’s words, “to discover the real facts of the actual condition of the wicked and wretched classes” (New York by Gas-Light, p. 69).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 273 was estimated to be 30,000, most earning at best $1.50 a week. Becoming the “quintessential victim” in the popular imagination, the seamstress remained a central figure in sensation fic- tion.60 The front cover of the anonymously penned city-mystery novel The Orphan Seamstress (1850), for example, observed thatthe“GreatCity...take[s]everycountry girl from the path of virtue and happiness and plunge[s] her into shame and misery.”61 Foster, too—who, as Blumin notes,62 rarely sympathizes with any urban group—devotes a chapter in his urban sketch New York in Slices (1849) to the sad plight of the “needlewomen,” the “wives and daughters of broken-down merchants and speculating politicians” who have been inhumanely “reduced from affluence to poverty.”63 Mary, similarly “reduced,” evokes the audience’s sympathy when she describes her ru- ined condition, suggestive of the besieged needlewoman: “Alas, alas! It is very cold—faint with hunger—sick—heart weary with wretchedness, fatigue, and cold (Clock strikes one).... These shirts I have promised to hand in to-morrow by the hour of eight. A miserable quarter of a dollar will repay my industry” (p. 35). Desperate for sustenance, Mary even briefly considers stealing her daughter’s bread but then relents. Just as he recasts the formerly middle-class Edward as a city street drunkard, Smith exhibits the previously respectable Mary as a generic working-class seamstress. Instead of treating the drunkard and the seamstress as iso- lated urban types, Smith draws a causal relationship between them. In this case, the drunkard (Edward) is directly respon- sible for the social demise of the seamstress (Mary). While the play points out the haunts of the common drunkard, he remains a shadowy (even though public) figure, shrouded by

60Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Ur- bana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 110–112, 125, and Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City, p. 22. 61Anon., The Orphan Seamstress, A Narrative of Innocence, Guilt, Misery and Crime (New York: Garrett & Co., n.d. [ca. 1850]). 62Blumin, intro. to Foster, New York by Gas-Light, pp. 52–53. 63Foster, “The Needlewomen,” in New York in Slices, in Blumin’s edition of New York by Gas-Light, p. 231.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 274 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY night’s darkness and slipping in and out of dingy barrooms. The seamstress, on the other hand, is a private figure, usually hidden from the view of passersby within her urban slum apartment. On The Drunkard’s stage, for instance, one of the hovel’s walls is removed to reveal a “wretched garret,” its inhabitant wearing “miserable apparel” and a “wretched shawl” while “sewing on slop-work”(p.35). By observing a secret scene of urban misery they would not likely encounter in their walking tours of the city, viewers can become urban slummers themselves without leaving their seats. Such poverty, Smith shows, can also lead to even greater ills. In his sketch of “The Needlewomen,” Foster claims that most seamstresses work “until they sink beneath temptation or despair—to the brothel or the grave!”64 Smith suggests that Mary may suffer a similar fate. At one point, Cribbs proposes that Mary change professions: “[T]here are plenty of women, not of the most respectable class, who are always ready to re- ceivepresents...andarenotveryparticularintheliberties that may be taken in exchange” (p. 36). In an effort to stream- line and sensationalize his depiction of the city for middle- class visitors, Smith conflates the categories of working class and lower class. Indeed, contemporaries often associated seamstresses with prostitutes. Focusing on New York in his 1855 His- tory of Prostitution, William Sanger observed that seamstresses’ exclusively male employers often required “the sacrifice of a woman’s virtue . . . for the privilege of sewing at almost nom- inal prices.”65 The effect of Smith’s representation of Mary’s decline is, then, not unlike that of Edward’s. Here, Smith ex- plains how easily someone like Mary can fall from being a respectable wife to a working seamstress to an urban pariah like the prostitute. By educating spectators that lower-class figures may have middle-class backgrounds, he urges middle-class viewers to sympathize with the human predicaments of recognizable individuals like Edward and Mary.

64Foster, “The Needlewomen,” p. 231. 65William Sanger, A History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects Through- out the World (1858; repr. New York: American Medical Press, 1895), p. 533.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 275 Staging Localities, Programming the Tourist In addition to introducing viewers to the working and lower orders, The Drunkard simultaneously served as a local guide to specific landmarks and locales of each city in which it was produced. These idiosyncrasies are most apparent upon com- paring The Drunkard’s three most prominent productions: the play’s 1844 debut at Kimball’s Boston Museum, the 1849 revival at a relocated Boston Museum, and the 1850 production at Barnum’s American Museum in New York.66 The Boston productions direct viewers to visit the city’s safe, middle-class tourist sites such as those listed in 1840s urban handbooks. But whereas Kimball essentially denies the presence of hazards in Boston, Barnum’s New York production draws on contemporaneous travel-journal and sketch literature to offer a voyeuristic peek at Manhattan’s dangerous working-class neighborhoods. In doing so, however, Barnum overwrites his textual sources to insist that such areas are legible and may be approached by wary country dwellers who have been properly instructed. While Smith’s script attempted to introduce spectators to diverse city figures, Barnum and Kimball chose the play precisely because they could adapt it easily to local sites and therefore appeal to middle-class tourists. In the original, 1844 Boston Museum production, Moses Kimball and The Drunkard’sscene painters provided a virtual tour of Boston via backdrops that displayed famous local landmarks, city views that most tourists would recognize from travel guidebooks or newspaper profiles. The preface to the play’s first published edition in 1847 specifies that the Boston “scenery, mostly local views . . . served to aid in the triumphant success that was awarded [the play]

66There were, of course, many other notable productions of The Drunkard during the period. When Barnum debuted the play in New York at his American Museum in the summer of 1850, the Chatham, the National, the Bowery, and Niblo’s Garden (where it was retitled One Glass More) all produced rival versions of the play, but they had very short runs and were ultimately overshadowed by Barnum’s dominant production. See McArthur, “Demon Rum,” p. 520,andFrick,Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform, p. 127. McConachie (Melodramatic Formations, p. 178) adds that in the years following, the Bowery, the Brooklyn Museum, and Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre, among others, often produced The Drunkard to boost proﬁts.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 276 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY on its first representation.”67 At its head, the opening night playbill promises “great local interest” and boasts about the “new and beautiful scenery, Views in Boston and its Vicinity” (see fig. 6). Throughout the playbill, Kimball promotes scene painters T. C. Bartholomew and George Curtis, who prepared ten backdrops for the play’s five acts (six of them for the two acts set in the city). Indeed, the bill’s largest type is reserved for urban sites—such as a “WRETCHED ATTIC IN ANN STREET” and “FANEUIL HALL and DOCK SQUARE”— while plot markers—such as “Despair and Suicide,” “The Plot! The Detection!” and “The Confession! The Punishment!”—are relegated to small type.68 Privileging settings over dramaturgi- cal events, Kimball markets a selective picture of Boston as one more spectacle in his arsenal of museum curiosities. The play therefore becomes a vehicle for piquing the viewers’ interest in the same city they will encounter when they exit the theatre. New York’s working-class theatres like the Bowery and the Chatham had repelled many middle-class viewers, but Bar- num’s New York–set production of The Drunkard brought many of these spectators to the popular theatre.69 In his urban manual New-York: Past, Present, and Future (1849), author Ezekiel Belden opined that there remain “numerous sources of more rational entertainment than theatrical representations,” but Barnum’s American Museum—with its “beautiful marble edifice” and “most novel curiosities”— stands as a notable exception.70 Ten years later, Norton’s Handbook of New-York City (1859), deeming Barnum’s museum “one of the most ex- tensive and instructive places of Amusements in the United States,” advised that “strangers visiting the city should not fail to visit the American Museum,” especially its lecture room.71 In

67Anon., preface to Smith, The Drunkard (Jones version), p. 5. 68Boston Museum, playbill, The Drunkard, 26 February 1844, Playbill Collection, Princeton. 69Gilmore, Genuine Article, p. 31. 70Ezekiel Porter Belden, New York: Past, Present and Future (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849), p. 118. 71Alfred Norton, Norton’s Hand Book of New York City (New York: Norton, 1859), p. 30.

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Fig. 6.—Playbill, The Drunkard, or the Fallen Saved! 26 Febru- ary 1844 at the Boston Museum. Broadside Playbills, Eighteenth– Twentieth Centuries, Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 278 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 1848, when he was considering mounting the play at his Amer- ican Museum, Barnum wrote Kimball and asked, “Would your piece of The Drunkard do here by changing localities a bit?”72 With some adjustments to accommodate local tastes, Barnum first launched The Drunkard in 1849 at his Philadelphia Mu- seum. When he brought it to New York the following year, he featured familiar city sites like Broadway and Five Points. His strategy, borrowed from Kimball, paid off. Soon after the play’s New York premiere, Barnum boasted in a circular that day-travelers were journeying “a distance of forty miles” to see The Drunkard.73 The specific choice of urban settings for the play’s scenes suggests that Kimball and Barnum were eager to orient viewers to their theatres’ respective vicinities. A majority of the settings specified in Kimball’s original 1844 production—the intersection of Phillips Place and Court Street, School Street, Hawley Street, and the Mall and Winter Street—were located within three blocks of the Boston Museum’s first home, on the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets (see fig. 7). By the time of the 1849 production, the Boston Museum had moved one block to the corner of Tremont and School Streets.74 But the updated scene locations—including one scene at the Re- vere House (a hotel situated in Bowdoin Square), one scene at the Boston Common, and two scenes at Summer and Wash- ington Streets—all remained within four blocks of the theatre (fig. 8).75 Similarly, with only one exception,76 all of the urban

72P. T. Barnum to Moses Kimball, 2 February 1848, quoted in Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, ed. A. H. Saxon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 39. 73Printed Circular Letter, ca. 1850, quoted in Saxon, P. T. Barnum, p. 64. 74McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum, p. 49. 75The only scenes that fell outside of the four-block radius in Boston were Mary and Julia’s impoverished garret on Ann Street (in both the 1844 and 1849 productions) and the next scene in which William frees an inebriated Edward at Faneuil Hall and Dock Square (only in the 1844 version). The juxtaposition in the 1844 version is notable, however, because Ann Street and Faneuil Hall are so close to each other. As Mary and Julia are starving and shivering in their impoverished attic, Edward is presumably in watchmen’s custody just two blocks away. 76Act 4,scene2, of the New York version takes place in Union Square, quite far from the rest of the play’s downtown city scenes. Featuring Cribbs’s attempt to forge a check, it is the only city scene in which none of the Middletons are present, which highlights their inability to escape the play’s dangerous downtown areas.

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Fig. 7.—Map of Boston, 1842,fromH.S.Tanner,The American Traveller; or Guide Through the United States, 8th ed. (Philadelphia: Tanner, 1842). Lo- cations marked correspond to the Boston Museum’s 1844 production of The Drunkard according to the original playbill. Key: : Boston Museum 1844:corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets. A: Phillips Place and Court Street (3.1). B: School Street (3.2). C: School Street (3.4). D: Wretched Attic in Ann Street (3.5). E: Faneuil Hall and Dock Square (3.6). F: Arch and Building, Hawley Street (4.1). G: The Mall and Winter Street (4.2). H: School Street (4.3). Note: In the published 1844 version and playbill, there are no specific locations for act 3,scene3, specified only as “a well[-]known Bar Room.”

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Fig. 8.—Map of Boston, 1842,fromH.S.Tanner,The American Traveller; or Guide Through the United States, 8th ed. (Philadelphia: Tanner, 1842). Locations marked correspond to the Boston Museum’s 1849 production of The Drunkard according to the original playbill. Key: : Boston Museum 1849: corner of Tremont and School Streets. A: Revere House and Bowdoin Square (3.1). B: Summer and Washington Streets (with an exterior view of Jones, Ball and Poor’s Store) (3.2). C: Wretched Attic in Ann Street (3.5). D: Exterior of Boston Museum by Night (3.6). E: Boston Common (4.2). F: Washington and Summer Streets (4.3). Note:Onthe1849 playbill, there are no speciﬁc locations for act 3,scene3, speciﬁed only as “a City Bar Room”; act 3,scene4, simply “a Street”; and act 4,scene1, again “a Street.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 281 sites represented in Barnum’s 1850 New York production— Broadway Avenue, the Arbor Bar on Broadway, Broadway (with a view of Barnum’s Museum), and Five Points—were located within just eight blocks of one another and of the theatre itself (fig. 9). This clustering of scenes so close to Kimball’s and Barnum’s museums promised visiting spectators that the play’s urban stimuli could be observed just outside the theatre doors. Hence, the play functioned as a guide for out-of-town viewers who wished to complement their theatrical experiences with a walking tour of the city, a carefully outlined activity in the travel handbooks.77 By highlighting the proven stations of safety such as those included within bourgeois guides like Appleton’s, The Drunk- ard participated in these books’ urban boosterism. The 1844 production, for example, set a scene in Faneuil Hall, a Revolutionary-era meeting place for anti-British factions that was touted by sightseeing manuals. The Family Tourist (1848) described Faneuil Hall’s “lofty brick edifice,” “spacious gal- leries,” and its importance to local politics,78 while the Colonial Magazine and Commercial Maritime Journal (1841) dubbed it “the most popular of all the public buildings in Boston” and “an object of universal veneration.”79 AlaterDrunkard scene takes place at the Boston Mall, in the southwest quadrant of the Boston Common, originally a cow pasture that was established in 1830 as the nation’s first public park and a popular strolling area for both residents and visitors.80 According to the History and Topography of the United States of Amer- ica (1846),theMallwas“averybeautifulpublicwalk,... a delightful promenade during the summer months.”81 The

77Cocks, Doing the Town, pp. 28–29. 78C. A. Goodrich, The Family Tourist: A Visit to the Principal Cities of the Western Continent (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Tiffany and Company, 1848), p. 57. 79Colonial Magazine and Commercial-Maritime Journal, vol. 6, ed. Robert Mont- gomery Martin (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1841), p. 201. 80Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 2010), pp. 3, 65. 81John Howard Hinton, The History and Topography of The United States of North America (Boston: Samuel Walker, 1846), p. 342.

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Fig. 9.—Map of New York City, 1849, from Samuel Augustus Mitchell, A New Universal Atlas Containing Maps of the Various Empires, Kingdoms, States and Republics of The World (Philadelphia: S. Augustus Mitchell, 1849), p. 11. Locations marked correspond to Barnum’s American Mu- seum’s 1850 production of The Drunkard according to the published text (Samuel French, ca. 1860). Key: : Barnum’s American Museum: corner of Broadway and Ann Street. A: Broadway (3.1). B: Interior of the Arbor Bar, Broadway (3.3). C: Exterior of a Barroom on the Five Points (3.4). D: The Five Points (3.6). E: Union Square (4.2). F: Broadway, with a view of Barnum’s Museum (4.3). Note: In the published 1850 version, there are no speciﬁc locations for act 3,scene2, speciﬁed only as “a Street”; act 3,scene5, “a wretched garret”; and act 4,scene1, “wretched out-house or shed, supposed to be near a tavern.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 283 Southern Lady’s Companion (1849) added that the Mall “is the loveliest looking place in the whole city. The most handsome residences are to be found here.”82 The dramatized urban sites are, then, notable either for their historical importance or for their consistency in drawing respected visitors and residents, all qualities that confirm that they are heavily trafficked and safe. The Boston Museum’s 1849 revival of The Drunkard updated its settings to include other well-regarded areas, but the goal of orienting the middle-class visitors within secure Boston spaces remained the same. Viewers of the 1849 production would have thrilled to see a scene displaying the Revere House, a hotel “of the first order,”83 that had recently been established (1847) in Bowdoin Square. Founded on teetotaler principles and “filled with columns and splendid furniture and adorn- ments,” the “deservedly popular house” for out-of-towners was described in guidebooks such as Bowen’s, Appleton’s, and the Gazetteer of Massachusetts.84 In addition to Bowdoin Square and Boston Common, the 1849 play advertised select commercial establishments, as when it offered an “EXTERIOR VIEW OF JONES, BALL & POOR’S STORE,” where out-of-towners could purchase fine jewelry and tableware.85 This shop had previously garnered special attention in The Stranger’s Guide in the City of Boston (1848): “The store has long been considered one of the most brilliant and gorgeous on the city thorough- fare; and the windows exhibit a collection of Gold and Silver Plate, Jewelry, etc. . . . $50,000 worth of property may be seen through these windows.” Tellingly, the inside front cover of the Stranger’s Guide features a full-page advertisement for the Boston Museum. Underneath a sketch of its exterior, a caption insists that “Strangers visiting the city should not omit

82Southern Lady’s Companion, vol. 3, ed. M. M. Henkle and J. B. M’Ferrin (Nashville: Nashville Christian Advocate Ofﬁce, 1849), p. 131. 83Wellington Williams, Appleton’s New and Complete United States Guide Book for Travellers (New York: D. Appleton, 1849), p. 37. 84Williams, Appleton’s, p. 37; John Hayward, A Gazetteer of Massachusetts (Boston: John Jewett, 1849), p. 53;AbelBowen,Bowen’s New Guide to the City of Boston and Vicinity: State of Massachusetts (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1849), p. 11. 85Boston Museum, playbill, The Drunkard, 20 November 1849, Playbill Collection, Princeton.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 284 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY seeing the interior of this noble building.”86 The advertisement’s placement before the entries for Jones, Ball and Poor’s Store and other Boston landmarks suggests a specific route for tourists. The Stranger’s Guide encouraged sightseers to begin their trips with a visit to the museum, where they would be properly oriented to the larger city. If these same visitors later returned to the museum to see The Drunkard once again, they could take pleasure in revisiting the landmarks and reliving the window-shopping experiences they had recently enjoyed around town. Barnum’s 1850 New York production is also deeply invested in the issue of urban safety, but differently so. Rather than limiting the audience’s view to sanitized tourist sites, as did the Boston shows, the New York production depicts genuinely dangerous, mixed- and lower-class neighborhoods as secure. These areas include Broadway, which accounts for three of the play’s city scenes and which becomes a topographical purgatory for Edward before he wanders into the firmly immigrant, working- class Five Points. “Clothes torn away and very shabby,”Edward enters the first Broadway scene complaining that his “last cent is gone” and that a “burning thirst consumes” him. The presence of Edward’s two “loafer” companions suggests his down- wardly spiraling social rank (pp. 279–80). From the first city scene, then, Barnum warns his audiences that class mixing is one of the principal dangers of a democratic street like Broad- way. Barnum’s theatre offered middle-class spectators a haven in which to congregate, but beyond its walls lie the allure- ments that have trapped Edward, an upstanding citizen such as themselves. The specific order of barroom scenes reveals the city’s swift powers in ensnaring outsiders. In the play’s second Broadway scene, set within the “interior of the Arbor” Bar, Edward and his friends dance, fight, and are quickly ejected (p. 283). The opening of the next scene takes place outside another bar—this one in Five Points—as Edward and his friends pile out “struggling, singing, shouting &c., &c., Exit fighting”

86The Stranger’s Guide in the City of Boston (Boston: Andrews & Co., 1848), p. 90 and inside cover.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 285 (p. 284). The successive scenes give the impression of a single barroom, but the shift from Broadway to Five Points spatially signals Edward’s descent. The drinkers are only ejected from the Broadway bar, but their rowdy, inappropriate behavior remains identical in both locations. Thus Barnum suggests that without the benefit of an education about city life such as he offers, the middle-class tourist can fall just as easily as Edward does from bar-hopping on Broadway to outright depravity in Five Points. In a travel-journal entry from 1843, Richard Henry Dana made a similar point when he drew attention to the close prox- imity of Broadway’s “cheerful light” and “happy, affectionate & virtuous people” to the “dark, filthy, violent & degraded re- gions” of the adjacent Five Points. Foster, too, advising that Five Points crime occasionally spilled over into Broadway, recalls watching two predatory “fishers of men” who snatched a country greenhorn on Broadway, then drugged and abducted him.87 Because Barnum’s American Museum sat at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, he could hardly portray Broadway as a place to be avoided at all costs. So instead, he instructed his middle-class tourists not only to avoid certain unsavory establishments (that is, the Arbor Bar) but also to understand visual codes that set apart the respectable citizen from potentially menacing Broadway types. Five Points undoubtedly presented the city’s most infamous perils. While walking down Broadway, Dana confides, he had a “sudden desire to see that sink of iniquity & filth, the ‘Five Points.’” To satisfy his readers’ curiosity, he recounts the revolt- ing sights of prostitutes, drunkards, and domestic fights, including one woman whose “drunken screeches & curses were so loud that they could be heard several squares off.”88 The year before, Charles Dickens had toured Five Points accompanied by two policemen. Cataloguing the neighborhood’s “leprous

87Richard Henry Dana, “Journal, Entry: January 4, 1843,” in Empire City, New York, Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 197; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, p. 71. 88Dana, Journal, pp. 195, 196.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 286 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY houses,” “drunken frays,” and “coarse and bloated faces,” he concludes that “all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”89 For audience members who were fearful of entering Five Points, The Drunkard allowed them to experience the area and its low-class inhabitants vicariously, as do Dickens’s and Dana’s readers, after which they can safely return home. In Barnum’s version, the play’s two Five Points scenes feature barflies fighting outside a barroom, locals battling with police, and perpet- ual drunkenness, all features that piqued tourists’ simultaneous fear of and interest in the forbidden neighborhood. For more adventurous spectators, the play served to initiate them to, as Dickens wrote, Five Points’ crisscrossed “lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep.”90 In addition to offering viewers the topographical and sensory information they need to navigate Five Points, Barnum’s production assures viewers that true middle-class figures remain identifiable. As William saves Mary and Julia in one scene and Edward in another, the play implies that virtue is recognizable even in the dire and dingy corners of the slums. Conversely, disreputable characters, even when posing as upstanding citizens, will be exposed in such locations. “I’m a lawyer, I’m a respectable man,” Cribbs insists, but no one listens (p. 288). Dana and Dickens, who portray a filthy Five Points populated by indistinguishable degenerates, are outsiders to the city and have no incentive to sugarcoat the phenomena they observe. Barnum, on the other hand, wants tourists to believe that even in a space as disorienting and corrupt as Five Points, their middle-class values will protect them—just as they ultimately reclaim Mary and Edward from their grim existences within the city. Of course, such an intimation was historically inaccurate and hazardous to suggest. Historian Christine Stansell characterizes Five Points as “an easy walk from most places of business,” a ward where “crime and amusement rubbed elbows.” Begin- ning in the 1840s, businessmen and other middle-class males

89Dickens, American Notes, pp. 99-101. 90Dickens, American Notes, p. 101.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 287 ventured into Five Points to visit its brothels, many of which secretly ran sophisticated robbery schemes.91 Contrary to the play’s image of Five Points as decipherable, contemporary police reports reveal the neighborhood as an unpredictable and treacherous area. In one New York Herald account from 1848, an Englishman touring the neighborhood met some seemingly friendly men, who then spiked his liquor and robbed him of all his money. Another Herald report the following year described a sightseer from central New York who was seduced into, and promptly drugged within, one of Five Points’ establishments that housed the “belles of the vicinity”; he woke up the next day penniless.92 While Barnum’s Drunkard suggests that one’s respectability will be recognized and rewarded even in the most degraded of urban areas, newspaper accounts prove that a visitor’s middle-class appearance only marked him or her as a potential victim. Kimball pursued a different strategy. In both the 1844 and 1849 productions, he did not suggest that Boston’s slums were safe; instead, he essentially ignored them, preferring to stage only the public and commercial landmarks of middle-class guidebooks. Boston Museum spectators learned nothing of the salacious street life that Barnum would later stage in Five Points. Rather, the scenes of Edward’s debauchery transpire on unspeciﬁed or uncharacterized Boston streets. Only Mary and Julia’s garret scene, set in Boston’s North End, deviates from this formula. The scene takes place on Ann Street, a fair distance from the theatre and from the locations in which other scenes are set, and is conﬁned to an interior space. Kimball thus spares his audience members a view of a single street that, in 1851, was estimated to house 227 brothels, 26 gambling dens, and 1,500 liquor stores.93 A contemporaneous report on cholera

91Stansell, City of Women, pp. 174–75. For descriptions of prostitutes’ speciﬁc cons, like “The Husband Game” and “Panel Thieving,” see James Dabney McCabe, The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia: Jones Bros., 1868), pp. 306–7. 92New York Herald, 20 October 1848,p.1,and20 September 1849,p.2. 93Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the Ameri- can Reform Tradition (1987; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 26, 41.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 288 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY details Ann Street’s “over-crowded population, bad ventilation, insufficient and unwholesome diet, intemperance, and the en- tire absence of cleanliness.”94 During the same years in which Kimball was attempting to attract and placate tourists, Boston court reports also documented an astonishing increase in the city’s overall crime—including spikes in prostitution, battery and assault offenses, and especially public drunkenness. The Municipal Court handled only 169 criminal cases in 1832, but by 1850 that number had increased more than ninefold to 1,538.In1838, city officials had become so concerned that they established a police force exclusively devoted to stamping out vice crimes.95 Still, the city was alluring, and Kimball and Barnum both sought to package their attractions as respectable and reassur- ing middle-class entertainment. Toward that end, both producers featured their respective museums as scenic backdrops that played a role in The Drunkard’s plot and reasserted the play’s theme of middle-class reclamation. In the 1849 Boston production, the “exterior of [the] Boston Museum” appears, painted into the background of act 3,scene6, when William rescues Edward.96 The scene encourages a self-reflexive re- sponse in which Boston Museum spectators can celebrate their new theatre space and distinguish themselves from the unruly, working-class audiences not invited to share this venue and its reputable amusements. In the 1850 New York production, the “view of Barnum’s Museum” is reserved for act 4,scene3, an episode in which Rencelaw, Edward’s financial savior, in- forms William that the Middletons’ middle-class respectability has been restored: Edward is resting safely, Mary and Julia are being sheltered, and “their home, their happy home, is prepared for them in the village” (p. 44). The setting of Barnum’s

94Henry Rogers, “Report on the cholera in Boston in 1850,inReport of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health, ed. Massachusetts Sanitary Commission (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1850), p. 429. 95Theodore Ferdinand, Boston’s Lower Criminal Courts, 1814–1850 (Newark: Uni- versity of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 25, 143–48, 137, 27. 96Boston Museum, playbill, The Drunkard, 20 November 1849, Playbill Collection, Princeton.

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Pastoral Paradise/Urban Access The Drunkard’s final scene peeks in on the Middleton family, inside their country cottage, as the “sun is setting over the hills at back of landscape”(p.50). Edward plays “Home, Sweet Home” on the flute, Julia sings accompaniment, and Mary sews “handsome work” (as opposed to the “slop-work” she produced in the city) (pp. 50, 35). The tableau recalls the idyllic opening act, when Edward and Mary are married in front of a “beautiful cottage,” covered with vines, the “extreme of rural, tranquil beauty”(p.19). Given the plot’s juxtaposition of a bu- colic, green world with the dank, despairing city, Celia Braxton assumes that the play’s “ideal is located in the family’s home, the sphere of domesticity, which is represented by one partic- ular cottage.”98 Yet such a scene is only an “ideal” because a significant percentage of Kimball’s and Barnum’s patrons were not city residents themselves. The play’s educational city scenes allow spectators to believe that they are capable of navigating the convoluted city but, like the Middletons, choose to return to a purer village life. Still, the play does not uplift the Middletons as knowledge- able and urbane characters, suggesting instead that William and Rencelaw are the real models for attaining a mastery of the city. At first overwhelmed by the city’s multiple stimuli,

97The claim originated with Harry Birdoff in The World’s Greatest Hit (New York: Vanni, 1947), p. 85, and is cited in Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, p. 122. 98Celia Braxton, “‘Home Sweet Home’: ‘The Drunkard,’ Domesticity, and the New Theatrical Audience,” New England Theatre Journal 17 (2006): 20–21.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 290 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY William ultimately tracks down Mary and Julia in their garret, Edward in the slums, and Cribbs through various urban neighborhoods. In the final act in the village, Cribbs escapes down a back road, boasting “I shall escape all observation” (p. 48). But William espies him and devises a plan to “cut . . . quick across Farmer Williams’ pasture” and “keep ourselves concealed” to successfully apprehend the villain (p. 48). William, who ultimately deciphered the tortuous city streets, returns to the country with his senses and navigational skills sharpened. Rencelaw, too, gains a deeper understanding of his surroundings because he has learned to negotiate the demands of the city. In the first Boston version, he helps usher the broken Edward out of a Hawley Street alley, rushes to Court Square to press charges against Cribbs, orchestrates the Mid- dletons’ return to the village, and finally escorts the captured Cribbs back to the city, where he is imprisoned. Smith and the producers demonstrate that middle-class viewers who are determined to educate themselves, like William and Rencelaw, can navigate both town and country and seamlessly cross the border between the two. The reality was, of course, much more complicated. While outsider audiences congregated under the pretense that they could comprehend and safely traverse the city, urban areas were often dangerous places for tourists and residents alike. Both Kimball and Barnum no doubt understood the fallacy of their staged urbanities in The Drunkard. Yet they also knew that for visitors eager to see famous Boston landmarks or infamous New York neighborhoods, there could be no better advertisement for their theatres than the promise of a safe trip to town.99 Complementing the nation’s legitimate urban tours with their effectively artificial ones, the Boston and the

99Beginning six months after The Drunkard’s premiere and running through the early 1850s, Kimball, and later Barnum, held competitions for the best play featuring a local setting. For more on the Boston Museum prize winners, see Clapp, “The Passing of an Historic Playhouse.” For a Boston Museum advertisement, see, e.g., Boston Mu- seum, playbill, London Assurance, 9 October 1848, Playbill Collection, Princeton. For Barnum’s efforts, see “Prize Dramas: Barnum’s Museum,” Dollar Magazine, December 1851,p.279.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 ANTEBELLUM TEMPERANCE DRAMA 291 American Museums thus captured the imagination—and the dollars—of middle-class audiences eager to plunge into the ex- panding depths of America’s alluring cities.

Michael D’Alessandro is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Boston University. He has previously published in the Eu- gene O’Neill Review, and his work has been supported by research grants from Princeton University, the American Anti- quarian Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. He is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “Staged Read- ings: Sensationalism and Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”

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