Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 by Jenna M. Gibbs (review)

Jenna M. Gibbs’s Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 is the latest addition to a wave of books with a transatlantic focus that are transforming Victorian Studies. The transnational approach is particularly rewarding for understanding issues of race and slavery. Gibbs explores the ways in which black racial stereotypes emerged in Anglo-American culture between 1760 and 1850. These stereotypes, it almost goes without saying, were largely authored by white people. So powerful was their impact that we are still dealing with their legacy today. Gibbs ends appropriately with Spike Lee’s flawed but underrated film Bamboozled (2000), which features black actors “blacking up” in a modern-day minstrel show. Satire has seldom been more cutting.

The book compares the depiction of race and slavery in London and Philadelphia. Its great strength is that it does not view theater as hermetically sealed from other forms of popular culture. Instead, Gibbs traces intersections with prints, cartoons, the novel, popular politics, and street festivals. Deploying this expansive notion of theatricality, she is able to powerfully demonstrate that theater was a crucial space in which images of race were constructed and contested. Gibbs is building in various ways on the very distinguished literature that we now have on black minstrelsy, which argues that minstrelsy was not peculiar to the United States.

The book, it should be said, is stronger on Philadelphia than it is on London, but it reveals effectively how discourses on race ricocheted back and forth across the Atlantic. She argues that a “British-American popular culture that synthesized antislavery, democratic precepts, and racial burlesque produced transatlantic performances of slavery, liberty and polity in theater, images and song—always with transatlantic competition over their meanings” (11). The payoff of this kind of approach is her recognition that the figure of Jim Crow grew out of conventions that circulated across the two countries in the 1810s and 1820s. She also insightfully traces the roots of blackface minstrelsy back to the character of the black-masked harlequin.

The book commences with Thomas Paine’s image of the Temple of Liberty, which gives Gibbs her sardonic title. The American Revolution released competing notions of liberty, which the new republic struggled to contain. Even before the revolution, Isaac Bickerstaffe deployed the first blackface character on stage in his play The Padlock, first performed in Philadelphia in 1769. Bickerstaffe’s character Mungo, a slave, shaped future depictions of blacks. The antislave sentiments of the play coexisted with the patronizing portrayal of Mungo and his allegedly comic accent, and this ambivalence in the representational codes around black subjects proved formative. Mungo’s malapropisms prefigured blackface minstrelsy and also, presumably, the career of the interwar black film actor Stepin Fetchit.

Following the abolition of the slave trade, racial mockery in theatrical representations was central to the development of white racism and racial violence against free blacks in Philadelphia and elsewhere. This was made worse by the development of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, which infused portraits of black people in popular theater.

Gibbs rightly appreciates that the urban picaresque genre of popular prints, plays, and novels had a strong racial dimension. Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) proved a multi-media hit on both sides of the Atlantic with its portraits of toffs slumming it in a succession of dens and dives with the poor. These portraits included encounters with black people. The theatrical version by W. T. Moncrieff at London’s Adelphi shaped blackface minstrelsy by bringing the illustrations in Life in London to life and mimicking real-life black Londoners such as the fiddler Billy Waters. The American cartoonist Edward Clay latched onto the Egan craze with a series of caricatures, Life in Philadelphia (1828), that, among other things, satirized the pretensions of free...