Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850

Essay on Sources

essay on sources My research for this book began by locating collections of printed and manuscript plays; digital and archival cartoons, playbills, broadsides, and ephemera collections; and printed travelogues, diaries, memoirs, and theater calendars. I also examined newspapers and journals, sermons and hymns, poetry and speeches, and other printed and manuscript matter including tax records, police records, correspondence, and the minutes and published writings from British and American abolitionist organizations. Printed, manuscript, and digital collections and catalogs of plays were crucial sources. The 1737 Licensing Act required that all narrative dramas that debuted in London be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner for censorship and approval, and the manuscripts of these submissions are still extant: the British Library (BL) and the Huntington Library (HL) both house the Larpent Collection of play manuscripts (1737–1824). Despite changes in the licensing laws in the mid-nineteenth century, playwrights were still required to submit manuscripts for approval well into the twentieth century, and the BL also holds the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, a collection spanning from 1824 to 1968. The BL’s Daybook Registers of the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays (1824–1897) are also a rich manuscript resource. Of even greater value, however, is The London Stage, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–68), a five-part, eleven-volume calendar of London plays compiled by Charles Beecher Hogan et al., which includes excerpts from reviews and playbills. As no official body of censorship existed in Philadelphia there is no comparable manuscript collection. But the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) has an extensive printed collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plays. And the University of Pennsylvania Press has published three volumes of daybooks compiled by Philadelphia theater managers ; these provide eighteenth-century play calendars of the Philadelphia theaters and nineteenth-century calendars that also include the theatrical circuits of Baltimore, Washington , and Alexandria: Thomas Clark Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century, Together with the Day Book of the Same Period (1933), covering 1700–1800; Reese D. James, Old Drury of Philadelphia: A History of the Philadelphia Stage, 1800–1835, Including the Dairy or Daily Account Book of William Burke wood . . . of the Chestnut Street Theatre (1932); and Arthur Herman Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre, 1835–1855 (1968). These volumes combine the daybooks for the main Philadelphia theaters for all the years between 1700 and 1855 except for 1800–1810, for which no play calendars are extant and I culled the play dates, therefore, from newspapers and playbills. Playbills, cartoons, broadsides, and ephemera are invaluable sources for researching transatlantic theatrical culture and its linkages to print and popular media. The LCP holds the McAllister Collection of playbills and ephemera and a larger graphics collection in the print department, which includes the Life in Philadelphia prints and engraved frontispieces for printed pamphlets and plays. The Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress offers phenomenal digital resources for cartoons and theatrical ephemera, as do the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and the Digital Library Collection of the New York Public Library; these extensive image collections are available to researchers 298 Essay on Sources online. LION (Literature Online) and ECCO (Gale-Cengage Eighteenth-Century Catalog Online) also have large banks of eighteenth-century plays, poetry, and pamphlets for scholars whose institutions subscribe to these databases. Theatrical memoirs and diaries proved fruitful for investigating theater and popular culture in the revolutionary British Atlantic. Actress Francis Maria Kelly’s diary (BL MS42920 ); playwright/actor John O’Keefe’s Recollections of the Life of John O’Keefe (London, 1826); playwright/actor Frederick Reynolds’s The Life of Times of Frederick Reynolds, Written by Himself (London, 1827); reviewer Henry Crabb Robinson’s The London Theatre, 1811– 1866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966); and playwright/theater manager Richard Brinsley Peake’s two-volume Memoirs of the Colman Family (London, 1841) are important diaries and memoirs pertinent to the London setting. Memoirs of Charles Mathews, by Mrs. Mathews, 4 vols. (London, 1838) and William Macready, Macready’s Reminiscences and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. Sir Frederic Pollock (New York, 1875), span the transatlantic stages. For Philadelphian and American theater, see especially stage manager Charles Durang’s History of the Philadelphia Stage from the Year 1749 to the Year 1855 (Philadelphia, 1854); theater manager William B. Wood’s Personal Recollections of the Stage; playwright/theater manager William Dunlap, Diary of William...