"NOT from the Drowsy Pulpit!": The Moral Reform Melodrama on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

“NOT from the Drowsy Pulpit!” The Moral Reform Melodrama on the Nineteenth-Century Stage John W. Frick In a February 1871 article in the Galaxy magazine the novelist and legendary storyteller Mark Twain made a claim that to the casual observer of today’s theatre—especially of Broadway—might seem preposterous: namely, that nine-tenths of the American populace learned their morals not from the “drowsy pulpits” of the country’s churches but from the stages of its theatres.1 While it is conceivable that Twain was simply referencing in general the dominant form of nineteenth-century drama—melodrama—regarded by Peter Brooks, David Grimsted, Bruce McConachie, Rosemarie Bank, Elaine Hadley, and other experts on the subject as the era’s morality play, it is equally likely that he had in mind a particularly polemic and didactic subtype of melodrama: the moral reform drama.2 This essay will examine various aspects of this often overlooked subgenre—the ways in which the moral reform drama differed from other forms of melodrama; its in®uence on the dominant ideology of the era; its role in expanding and changing the gender and class composition of the antebellum theatre audience; and its serving as a harbinger of a more socially conscious drama to follow in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth—plays like The City, by Clyde Fitch, and Ned Sheldon’s Salvation Nell. In his seminal study of melodrama Bruce McConachie has distinguished between the various strains of the form and has codi¤ed a typology that includes sensation melodramas, apocalyptic melodramas, fairy-tale melodramas, nautical melodramas, domestic melodramas, gothic melodramas—and the moral reform melodrama.3 While all of these discrete types might be said to embody and reinforce values, and hence deserve to be regarded as “not only a moralistic drama, but as the drama of morality, it was the moral reform melodrama, more than the other forms, that assumed ideological and political signi¤cance.”4 During the nineteenth century the moral reform melodrama abounded both in England and in the United States.5 In the United Kingdom during the early decades of the nineteenth century, popular melodramatists like Douglas Jerrold, J. B. Buckstone, and John Walker adopted and espoused a variety of causes—from temperance reform, in such dramas as Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life (c. 1828), The Bottle (1847), and The Drunkard’s Children (1848)—to the plight of England’s working poor in plays with titles like Luke the Laborer (1826), The Rent Day (1832), and The Factory Girl (1832); while in America, during the middle years of the century, noted social activists like T. S. Arthur and Harriet Beecher Stowe penned reformist narratives that were quickly adapted for the stage. From the mid-nineteenth century onward hundreds of temperance melodramas, the most popular of which were The Drunkard (1844) and an adaptation of Arthur’s temperance classic Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1852) took the temperance message to the uneducated masses, while numerous adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguably the greatest moral reform drama of all time, preached abolition to an equally large theatre audience. Peppered with indictments of slavery like George Harris’s rebellious lines—“What right has [my master] to me? I’m as much a man as he is!” and his incendiary declaration, “I’ll be free, or die!”—stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly became recognized as politicized statements as transgressive as Mrs. Stowe’s original text.6 The emergence of the moral reform drama—the ideal vehicle for disseminating progressive ideology during the middle years of the nineteenth century—was hardly a historical anomaly, for, according to Henry Steele Commager, the antebellum era was the “day of universal reform,” a period during which “every institution was called before the bar of reason and of sentiment” to be measured and judged against a hierarchy of truths.7 Predicated on the Enlightenment belief that human beings are divine, that humankind is perfectible, and that, consequently , no social problem could be considered intractable, nineteenthcentury reform was “designed to harmonize man with the [ideal] moral order,” to promote and encourage human improvement.8 This overriding conviction—the belief...