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chapter four Black Freedom and Blackface Picaresque Life in London, Life in Philadelphia In the 1820s, transatlantic exchange gave rise to a new picaresque “urban spectator ” theatrical genre. Adapted from comic prose sketches and cartoons, William Thomas Moncrieff’s play Life in London; or, Tom and Jerry debuted to instant acclaim at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1821 and Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in 1823. Along with Moncrieff’s subsequent Life in Paris, and The Death of Life in London (as well as “sequels” by other playwrights), the play provided a satirical look at newly recognizable class divisions and emergent ideas of masculinity through the eyes of its roguish heroes, the eponymous Tom and Jerry, two aspiring dandies of the new English urban middle class. Included in the purview of Tom and Jerry’s picaresque urban spectatorship was a parody of black and white working-class Londoners that took a keen look at the integration of blacks into both “low” and “high” life. But the significance of the urban picaresque genre for British Atlantic discourse on race and slavery went beyond the transatlantic popularity of Life in London. While the prose, cartoon, and theatrical Life in London satires had only limited intersection with debates about black slavery and freedom and were at heart a class-based commentary, Life in London became the template for a transatlantic racialized urban spectator genre. Philadelphia cartoonist Edward Clay played a crucial role in its development. Clay visited London in the 1820s at the height of the Life in London craze and then emulated the new genre in his 1828 cartoon series Life in Philadelphia. Clay, however, transposed the class-based divisions of London to race-based stratification in Philadelphia. He burlesqued free blacks’ aspirations to a middle-class lifestyle and inclusion in the body politic: the urban white dandy of London was now an overdressed black American. By the 1830s, the transatlantic flow was reversed when London cartoonist George Tregear reworked Clay’s racist cartoons under the title Black Jokes and used his new versions of Life in Philadelphia to disparage not only America’s “great experiment” but also black freedom in the British West Indies. The print-theater circulation came full circle in the 1830s when the blackface dandy stepped out of Clay’s and 120 Emancipation and Political Reform Tregear’s prints and onto the transatlantic stage, appearing in full-length plays and comic variety acts. The urban picaresque genre, while originating in London class-based satire, intervened directly in transatlantic debates about slavery and freedom and birthed an enduring proto-minstrel figure. High Life and Low Life London Pierce Egan created the germinal source for the urban picaresque genre in his comic prose series Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn , Esq. and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, and Accompanied by Bob Logic (1821).1 Egan may have been inspired by Rudolph Ackerman’s Microcosm of London , or London in Miniature (1808–11), which had established a market for plates of London’s parks, clubs, churches, and houses of entertainment.2 Egan’s Life in London prose sketches were picaresque in two senses. First, they were written in the picaresque literary form, that is, a prose fiction with a simple plot divided into episodic vignettes. Second, the plots were driven by the adventures of three urban rakes, Corinthian Tom, Jerry Hawthorne, and Bob Logic, whose exploits took them wandering among the high life and lowlife of the city, the latter of which prominently featured black Londoners. Tom, Jerry, and Bob were licentious voyeurs who offered a voyeuristic experience to readers and viewers. Egan’s prose sketches promptly spawned competing illustrations, the most influential of which were George Cruikshank’s narrative illustrations of “high” and “low” life London.3 His lowlife illustrations caricatured the London working class, both black and white, as raucous and intemperate, while the high-life plates poked fun at elite dandyism and the social pretensions of the new middle class. Cruikshank ’s plates, in turn, were dramatized by several playwrights, with the most popular iteration that by William Thomas Moncrieff. Egan’s picaresque prototype established the episodic narrative, key lowlife and high-lifecharacters,andallthespecificLondonsettingsthatCruikshankandMoncrieff adopted in their versions. Egan’s Life in London was first published between 1820 and 1821 in twenty monthly installments at a shilling each, and then in book form in 1821 with Cruikshank’s illustrations. Corinthian Tom was a brothelfrequenting rake, and Jerry Hawthorne a visiting country cousin...

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