The Politics of Theatrical Reform in Victorian America

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1840s there was a concerted effort by a group of editors and opinion-formers to encourage the development of a more respectable and “moral” theater. The American Dramatic Fund Association, based in New York City but consciously part of a transatlantic movement, was founded in 1848 as the organizational embodiment of this cause and the Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows was one of its foremost spokesmen. This article explores why theater reform was seen as important, who supported it, and who opposed it. It suggests that we should understand theatrical reform, in the form it took in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as a quintessential example of a transatlantic liberal reform aimed at combating the destabilizing and morally degenerate consequences of urbanization and industrialization. The article also locates theatrical reform within antebellum party formations, arguing that it exposed a basic fracture within the Whig-Republican coalition between evangelical reformers and cosmopolitan liberal reformers over the nature of cultural authority in an urbanizing, fragmented society.