Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival

Spenser, in some respects, is more southern than the south itself.

—Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy

“In the early days of our city, when it was peopled by a Catholic community, who understood and could appreciate the observances of the Day, Mardi Gras was a season of striking and memorable peculiarities. . . . But now the aspect of things has changed. Our population is not what it was. The old regime is no more. It has fallen into the list of forgotten things, and sway over manners has passed to the swine-eating Saxon.”¹ So lamented the 1853 Ash Wednesday edition of the New Orleans Daily Crescent in the course of its dismissive coverage of the previous day’s Mardi Gras festivities. This elegy for Carnival was repeated a few years later in the bilingual daily L’Abeille/The Bee: “In the old times,” averred the Creole newspaper, “this was the greatest holiday in the whole year round in the Crescent City, but of late years its observance has been gradually falling into desuetude before the march of new people, customs, and religion.”² The occasion now offered little worth recounting: “Boys with bags of flour paraded the streets, and painted Jezebels exhibited themselves in carriages, and that is about all,” reported The Bee. “We are not sorry that this miserable annual exhibition is rapidly becoming extinct.”³ The Daily Delta’s account of the 1856 Mardi Gras was similarly dismissive. “Licentiousness reigned again,” the newspaper declared, its reportage shading into the familiar anti-Saxon polemic: “The good old Creole customs are rapidly falling into disuse, as the people of the Second District [the French Quarter] go down before the men of Maine and Massachusetts, who have succeeded in controlling the ‘business’ of the city to a great extent in a narrow space of ground between Bienville Street and Felicity Road.”⁴ The “good old Creole customs” particularly at issue here, as we have already glimpsed, are those attendant on the celebration of Carnival, an event—a cultural practice, really—that takes shape in nineteenth-century New Orleans as an especially dense transfer point for the city’s civic and cultural self-identity. For one of the striking things about these editorializing news reports is how they proffer the decline of Creole Carnival as somehow both the symptom and the cause of a new Anglo-American ascendancy within other public spheres (“the ‘business’ of the city”) of this culturally variegated and obviously still quite divided metropolis—one that had known three national regimes (Spanish, French, and American) all within the first decade of the nineteenth century.⁵

Yet while it appears from such accounts that Mardi Gras had already been given over as lost to the city’s “old regime,” a fuller Anglicization of the holiday was still in the works. In fact, Perry Young, the great historian of New Orleans Carnival, marks 1856 (the date of the edition of the Daily Delta I have cited above) as “the last year that the Creoles could call Mardi Gras peculiarly their own.” “Their press had disclaimed it,” he continues, “and in the following year the Saxons assumed leadership and, with organization [and] persistence, . . . brought the festival to a degree of perfection which the Creole soon acknowledged with pride.”⁶ The signal event in the changing of the guard that Young here celebrates was the debut of the decidedly Anglo-American Mistick Krewe of Comus in a spectacular 1857 Mardi Gras evening parade, which presented as its theme the seemingly quite uncarnivalesque subject of John Milton’s poetry.

Comus was New Orleans’s first secret-society Carnival organization. Significantly, its original membership was composed almost exclusively of Uptown—that is, Anglo-American—professionals and merchants, including one who was an art-supplies dealer and another, a pharmacist, who was reportedly well versed...