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. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 2 (June 2014). C 2014 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00369. 252 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00369 by guest on 28 September 2021 254 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 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 ex- pansion 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 pri- vate 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.

Load more