English Ethiopians: British Audiences and Black-Face Acts, 1835-1865

Abstract

The phenomenon of the nigger minstrel show has been the subject of much discussion in the United States. It has been regarded, both by its nineteenthcentury practitioners and by recent scholars, as 'the only true American drama', even 'our only original American Institution'.1 Debates about the origin of this original drama have raged; but whether it owed more to European popular art or to genuinely African modes, it has provided a fruitful field of study, for the same reasons which have been advanced to explain its original popularity. According to Alexander Saxon, 'taken as a whole, the genre provided a kind of underground theater where the blackface convention rendered permissible topics which would have been taboo on the legitimate stage or in the press'.2 Not only did the minstrel show come to be the major vehicle of the popular culture; its form has been seen, by Jules Zangler, as actually making an attack upon the high culture.3 The other important and interesting aspect of the form's success is its role in the history of race relations. Robert Toll's study of the minstrel show is based upon the fact that it 'served as a safe vehicle through which its primarily Northern, urban audience could work out their feelings' about 'slavery and the proper position of Negroes in America'. He shows that 'minstrelsy's portrayals of slavery and the blacks reveal the evolution and functioning of American racial stereotypes better than any other source' (pp. 65-66). The form was flexible: it confronted the upper class American culture on the one hand, and the 'presumptuous nigger' on the other. This theory of the minstrel show, however, relates it to only one of its popular audiences. Very little of what explains its success in America is relevant to its success in Britain; and yet this was almost as great. It is therefore my purpose here to explore some of the possible reasons English popular audiences had for their response to the black-face act; and additionally to suggest what developments in the separate evolution of minstrelsy in Britain can be seen to have arisen from the response of the British audience.