The Lady Actress

Part I: Intriguing, But Less Than Ground-Breaking [A recording of this play is available at Librivox] John Westland Marston’s 1852 play, “Anne Blake” makes me glad I’m writing a blog. As you may have noticed, researching Anna Cora Mowatt’s acting roles has caused me to develop a taste for mid-19th-century popular drama. I found this script to be a wonderful example of the genre. If you too find…

The Wealth of Walter Watts vs. the Poverty of Bob Cratchit

Part II: The Proper Payment of Clerks As I stated at the beginning of my last entry, my focus of research is Anna Cora Mowatt, not Charles Dickens.  These two literary figures were active at the same time, although their paths do not seem to have crossed in any significant manner. I became intrigued by what seems to be an on-going internet debate on the topic, “Is Bob Cratchit Poor?” while I was…

The Wealth of Walter Watts vs. the Poverty of Bob Cratchit

Part I: The Character of Clerks [An abbreviated video version of this essay is available for viewing on Youtube] As I am sure may be true for you, Dear Reader, watching adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is part of my yearly Yuletide routine.  While scouring the internet in search of new or obscure versions of the classic, I stumbled onto the perennial debate of “Is Bob Cratchit…

Anna Cora Mowatt and “All That Glitters is Not Gold”

Part III: Anna Cora Strikes Gold as Martha [A recording of this play is available at Librivox ] Martha Gibbs, the pure-hearted heroine of J. Maddison Morton’s “All That Glitters Is Not Gold,” was not the most important role Anna Cora Mowatt would play in the 1850s. Parthenia of the comic melodrama “Ingomar, the Barbarian” would win her more acclaim. However, Martha was a role that came along at a…

Anna Cora Mowatt and “All That Glitters is Not Gold”

Part II: Glittering in England [A full cast recording of this play is available at Librivox ] “All that Glitters is Not Gold” was not the biggest hit for its playwright or most popular role played by its lead actress.  Despite the show’s respectable run and frequent revivals in both England and the U.S., it was not lavished with praise by contemporary critics.  It is, therefore, easy to see why…

Anna Cora Mowatt and “All That Glitters is Not Gold”

Part I: John Maddison Morton and His Other Play In any well-rounded streaming service that delivers movies, the romantic comedy is a category that holds a place of pride.  Even if you don’t particularly care for the genre, you are probably quite familiar with its stock characters, typical plotlines, and can even reel off a few of its most popular tropes.  In the 1840s and 50s, however, this…

Anna Cora Mowatt and Haunted Melrose

The Ghostly Legend of Isabella and Colonel Axtell [This essay is also available online in video format at Youtube  ] For the first five years of her marriage, Anna Cora Mowatt lived in a haunted house… or rather haunted mansion, which is probably an entirely different sort of experience. Despite the fact that it was completely demolished over a century ago, around this time of year, the Mowatts’…

Anna Cora Mowatt in Memoria

When I inaugurated this blog in the fall of 2019, I envisioned that one semi-regular source of material for these columns would be field trips that I would take to sites associated with Anna Cora Mowatt’s life and career.  Needless to say, dear Reader, I completely failed to incorporate a global pandemic into these plans.  As travel restrictions have eased over the past year, I have managed to…

Anna Cora Mowatt, Mimic Life, and the Critics

Part IV: The Pushback I know that I’ve been building to the negative reaction to Anna Cora Mowatt’s novel, Mimic Life for three blog entries.  However, I hope I haven’t given the impression that in March of 1856 folks suddenly started throwing mud at her picture or casting copies of the volume on bonfires.  Pushback in this case took the form of a limited number of thoughtfully worded articles in…

Anna Cora Mowatt, Mimic Life, and the Critics

Part III: Publication Although January of 1856 is usually listed as the publication date of Mimic Life, newspaper ads and reviews indicate that there was an initial release of the book starting in the Northeast around December 25, 1855.  This run quickly sold out, leading to the publication of blind items similar to this one that appeared in the Charlotte Democrat in the early weeks of January,…

Anna Cora Mowatt, Mimic Life, and the Critics

Part II: The Push [Given the response to my last entry, I am somewhat tempted to take a short vacation from writing about Anna Cora Mowatt and devote more time to relating my adventures in grad school with my somewhat portly portable computer.  I would give you her name, but I must confess that she did not have one. Frankly I tried to avoid emotional attachments to electronic equipment because…

Anna Cora Mowatt, Mimic Life, and the Critics

Part I: The Prep Among the reasons why it is a good thing that I am no longer in the classroom is that I would not now lend the sympathetic ear I once did to my Performance History students when they moaned of how difficult it was to find material on the obscure entertainers from the past I asked them to research.  Where once I would be understanding and forgiving, now I know that I would turn…

Anna Cora Mowatt and Louise Waller – Part IV

In Sickness and In Wealth: Men, Money, and Illness in Mowatt’s Narratives [Content Warning: Suicide] If you’re playing a drinking game that awards points for every time I mention the word “melodrama” negatively, you may have had a fairly dry time of it in the last blog entry while I drew connections between Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions of conjugal bliss among the inhabitants of Heaven and the…

Anna Cora Mowatt and Louis Waller – Part III

Love, Sex, and Heroes The truth is the majority of people don’t really care about history.  Even many folks who say they’re into history – who listen to history podcasts, read history blogs – only do so to bolster their opinions on contemporary issues. Becoming truly immersed in a historical moment – trying to reconstruct all the mundane, obscure, and sometimes offensive minutiae necessary to…

Anna Cora Mowatt and Louis Waller – Part II

Mowatt, Men, and Villainy If you pick up a book about popular culture in the 19th century in the U.S. and Great Britain that doesn’t mention the influence of melodrama somewhere in the first chapter, put that volume back down again immediately. I know I can seem rather touchy about this genre, but be assured that I do recognize its overwhelming importance to the Victorian era.  Audiences enjoyed…

Anna Cora Mowatt and Louis Waller

Part 1: Mowatt’s Woman A Master’s thesis is really a horrid sort of little document.  In the Humanities, most institutions put limits on their size.  They can only be around a hundred pages long.  If you’re an undergraduate reading this, that sounds gigantic.  If you’re a doctoral student or beyond, you know that barely gives you enough time to sign your name properly.  The assignment is to find…

Anna Cora Mowatt, Eugenie Foa, Lucy Landon, and “Cecil and His Dog”

Three Misfortunes that Resulted in a Happy Ending for Readers Although today her works are primarily of interest to scholars for the detailed insight they give readers about the lives of Jewish women in the Victorian Era, by far the most financially successful work of French author, Madame Eugenie Foa was her 1840 children’s classic, “Le Petit Robinson de Paris.” This short novel (also known by…