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“Death or Liberty”: Henry Box Brown “Personificating” Himself in Edward Gascoigne Burton's The Fugitive Free and The Nubian Captive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2021

HANNAH-ROSE MURRAY Open the ORCID record for HANNAH-ROSE MURRAY [Opens in a new window]
HANNAH-ROSE MURRAY*
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Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

In 1857, Henry Box Brown starred in Edward Gascoigne Burton's The Fugitive Free and The Nubian Captive, two “slave dramas” based on his life. His performance inevitably infused both with an antislavery message: in a radical departure from conventional black abolitionist strategies of resistance in the British Isles, the plays change our understanding of British anti-slavery, of Brown, and of black British performance in general. Despite his short acting career, Brown should be placed alongside fellow African American actors like Ira Aldridge for his integral role in challenging the white racial schema on the Victorian stage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 1071 - 1097
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies.

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References

1 Brown, Henry Box, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1851), i–iiGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., 54.

3 Edward Gascoigne Burton, The Fugitive Free, A Drama in Three Acts, licence awarded 15 June 1857, Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection, British Library, Add MS 52966 Y; Burton, The Nubian Captive; or The Royal Slave, Eastern Drama in Three Acts, licence awarded 14 June 1857, Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection, British Library, Add MS 52966 W; Burton, Pocahontas; or The English Tar and the Indian Princess, Original Drama in Three Acts, licence awarded 15 June 1857, Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection, British Library, Add MS 52966 X. See also Martha J. Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage,” Slavery & Abolition, published online at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2020.1843969?src=(2020), 1–21.

4 Cutter, 2–3. See also Cutter, Martha J., “Will the Real Henry ‘Box’ Brown Please Stand Up?”, Journal of Early American Life, 16, 1 (Fall 2015)Google Scholar, at http://common-place.org/book/will-the-real-henry-box-brown-please-stand-up; and Cutter, The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement 1800–1852 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 252–54. Kathleen Chater's Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2020) also examines the plays.

5 Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 2–3, 9–10.

6 Greenspan, Ezra, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), 346–55Google Scholar.

7 The Era, 4 Oct. 1857, 11.

8 See Murray, Hannah-Rose, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); R. J. M Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Peter Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume I, The British Isles 1830–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985); and Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974).

9 Rice, Alan, “Henry Box Brown, African Atlantic Artists and Radical Interventions,” in Bernier, Celeste-Marie and Durkin, Hannah, eds., Visualising Slavery: Art across the African Diaspora (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 104–19Google Scholar, 115–17. See also Fisch; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Rusert, Britt, “The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage,” African American Review, 45, 3 (Fall 2012), 291–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Liverpool Mercury, 8 Nov. 1850, 6.

12 Brown, Narrative, 1, 42–59. There is a wealth of writing on Brown's legacy: Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010); Rice, “Dramatising the Black Atlantic: Live Action Projects in Classrooms,” in Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins, eds., Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Kathleen Chater, Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2020); Cutter, The Illustrated Slave; Brooks; Rusert; Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 5–25; Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, “Passing beyond the Middle Passage: Henry ‘Box’ Brown's Translations of Slavery,” Massachusetts Review, 37, 1 (1996), 23–45Google Scholar; Teresa A. Goddu, “Antislavery's Panoramic Perspectives,” MELUS, 39, 2 (Summer 2014), 12–41; Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Kennell Jackson, “Introduction: Travelling Whilst Black,” in Harry J. Elam and Kennell Jackson, eds., Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1–39, 2–4.

13 Brown, 54.

14 Liverpool Mercury, 5 Nov. 1850, 8, and 8 Nov. 1850, 1, 6.

15 Goddu, 23–24.

16 Wolff, 23–24, 28–29.

17 Bradford Observer, 9 Aug. 1849, 7; Blackburn Standard, 15 Aug. 1849, 4; Preston Chronicle, 18 Aug. 1849, 3. Some of these reports were originally published in Boston newspapers.

18 Bristol Mercury, 21 April 1855, 5; Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 26 Nov. 1852, 1; Manchester Times, 22 Oct. 1853, 12; Nottinghamshire Guardian, 1 June 1854, 5.

19 Rusert, 299–301.

20 Isle of Wight Observer, 25 Dec. 1858, 2; Hampshire Chronicle, 12 June 1858, 5.

21 Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. See also Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily B. Todd, eds., Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006); and Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy & Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 134–35, 163.

22 Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 1–21; Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5–7. See also Jenna Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 7; Vanessa Toulmin, “Black Circus Performers in Victorian Britain,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 16, 3 (2018), 267–89; Juliet John, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Makonnen, Atedesde, “‘Our Blackamoor or Negro Othello’: Rejecting the Affective Power of Blackness,” European Romantic Review, 29, 3 (2018), 347–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Douglas A. Jones Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).

23 Gibbs, 1–3, 58–59, 64–65.

24 Osborne, Deirdre, “Writing Black Back: An Overview of Black Theatre and Performance in Britain”, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 26, 1 (2006), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also discussions about The Octoroon, a play performed in the early 1860s, after Brown's debut but central to the transatlantic narrative surrounding race, slavery and performance: Meer, Sarah, “Boucicault's Misdirections: Race, Transatlantic Theatre and Social Position in The Octoroon,” Atlantic Studies, 6, 1 (2009), 81–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bagneris, Mia L., “Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell's Octoroon,” Art Bulletin, 102, 2 (2020), 64–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Gregory Pierrot, The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 19.

26 J. R. Oldfield, “The ‘Ties of Soft Humanity’: Slavery and Race in British Drama, 1760–1800,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 56, 1 (1993), 1–14, 2–3.

27 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 54–55.

28 Waters, 1.

29 Bernth Lindfors, “Ira Aldridge's Africanness,” English Academy Review, 23, 1 (2006), 102–6; Hazel Waters, “Ira Aldridge's Fight for Equality,” in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Ira Aldridge: African Roscius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–125, 98–101. See also Cutter, ‘Performing Fugitivity,” 1–21.

30 Waters, “Ida Aldridge's Fight for Equality”, 98–101.

31 Theresa Saxon, “Ira Aldridge in the North of England: Provincial Theatre and the Politics of Abolition,” in Gretchen H. Gerzina, ed., Britain's Black Past (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 275–95, 285, 292–93.

32 Waters, Racism, 68–69, emphasis in the original.

33 Dorothy Couchman, “‘Mungo Everywhere’: How Anglophones Heard Chattel Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition, 36, 4 (2015), 704–20, 705–6, 715–16.

34 Bernth Lindfors, ed., Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe 1852–1855 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–4.

35 Errol Hill, “S. Morgan Smith: Successor to Ira Aldridge”, Black American Literature Forum, 16, 4 (1982), 132–35, 132–33.

36 Burton, Pocahontas.

37 For a definition of site-specific theatre see Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Joanna Tompkins, “The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance,” in Anna Birch and Joanna Tompkins, eds., Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1–17, 2.

38 Lee Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 184–7. As early as 1825, one tourist manual wrote, “these luxuries, comforts, and blessings invite, To the Margate Steam-Packets then haste with delight; You may stay out a week, taste the pleasures all round, And carry home change from a Note of Five Pound.” See Allan Brodie, “The Brown Family Adventure: Seaside Holidays in Kent in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Tourism History, 5, 1 (2013), 1–2; Howard Hughes and Danielle Benn, “Tourism and Cultural Policy: The Case of Seaside Entertainment in Britain”, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 3, 2 (1997), 235–55; Nigel Barker et al., “Margate's Seaside Heritage,” English Heritage (2007), at https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/margates-seaside-heritage/margates-seaside-heritage, 1.

39 Edward Gascoigne Burton, A Hand Book and Companion to Ramsgate, Margate, Broadstairs, Kingsgate, Minster &. And Guide to the Places of Public Resort, Rural Walks, and Select Routes for Excursionists and Visitors to the Isle of Thanet. G. Griggs, Ramsgate (Ramsgate, 1859), 4–6.

40 Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure, 186–87; Burton, A Hand Book and Companion, 37. See also the Theatres Trust website at https://database.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/2300-theatre-royal-margate.

41 The Era, 28 June 1857, 1.

42 Jones, The Captive Stage, 138–40, 163–64.

43 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 30 July 1853, 6. See also Cutter, The Illustrated Slave; and Chater, Henry Box Brown.

44 Burton, A Hand Book and Companion, 37–38, emphasis in original.

45 Burton, The Fugitive Free; Burton, The Nubian Captive; and Burton, Pocahontas.

46 Helen Freshwater, “Anti-theatrical Prejudice and the Persistence of Performance: The Lord Chamberlain's Plays and Correspondence Archive”, Performance Research, 7, 4 (2002), 50–57, 51.

47 Burton, The Fugitive Free.

48 Brown, Narrative, 22–25.

49 Adrienne Brown, “The Disenchanted Literature of Homeownership 1922–1968,” in Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager, eds., Timelines of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 37–53, 37–39.

50 South Eastern Gazette, 4 Aug. 1857, 5.

51 Burton, The Nubian Captive (1857), Act 1, scene i, 16.

52 Ibid., Act 1, scene III, 32.

53 Ibid., Act 3, scene vi, 73–80.

54 Burton, Pocahontas; Staffordshire Advertiser, 31 Oct. 1857, 1.

55 Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 146.

56 Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 2–3.

57 The Era, 27 Sept. 1857, 11.

58 South Eastern Gazette, 22 Sept. 1857, 5; The Era, 4 Oct. 1857, 11–12; Wigan Observer and District Advertiser, 16 Oct. 1857, 1.

59 The Era, 18 Oct. 1857, 1.

60 Staffordshire Advertiser, 31 Oct. 1857, 1.

61 The Era, 18 Oct. 1857, 1; The Era, 8 Nov. 1857, 1.

62 Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black, Othello, Othello Burlesques and the Performance of Blackness”, Early Modern Reenactments, 46, 2 (1994), 135–56, 139, 146.

63 Waters, Racism, 186–87.

64 The Era, 4 Oct. 1857, 11.

65 South Eastern Gazette, 4 Aug. 1857, 5.

66 Heather Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8–15; Jones, The Captive Stage, 138–40, 163–64, original emphasis. See also Harry J. Elam Jr, “The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness: The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown and No Place to Be Somebody by Charles Gordone,” in Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner, eds., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 288–306, 291–93.

67 Lindfors, Bernth, “Ira Aldridge's Africanness,” English Academy Review, 23, 1 (2006), 106–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Lindfors, Bernth, “‘Mislike Me Not for My Complexion …’: Ira Aldridge in Whiteface”, African American Review, 33, 2 (1999), 352–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Lindfors, “Ira Aldridge's Africanness,” 102–6; Waters, “Ira Aldridge's Fight for Equality,” 101, 113.

70 Burton, The Fugitive Free, Act 3, scene iv, 80–81. See also a similar description of freedom in The Nubian Captive, Act 2, scene i, 37–38.

71 Burton, The Nubian Captive, Act 2, scene iii, 50, and scene iv, 60.

72 Cutter, The Illustrated Slave, 248–50.

73 Cutter, “Will the Real Henry ‘Box’ Brown Please Stand Up?”, n.p.; Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 17–18.

74 Brown, Narrative, 16–17. See also Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 10–21; Neary, Janet, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 143–44Google Scholar; and Greenspan, William Wells Brown, 346–55.

75 Levy-Hussen, Aida, “Trauma and the Historical Turn in Black Literary Discourse,” in Colbert, Soyica Diggs, Patterson, Robert J. and Levy-Hussen, Aida, eds., The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in Expressive Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 195–211Google Scholar, 196.

76 Chater, Henry Box Brown, 91–93, 112–13.

77 Sanborn, Geoffrey, Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Burton, The Fugitive Free, Act 2, scene iv, 45–51. See also Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 1–21.

79 Brown, Narrative, 33–46.

80 Ibid., 2–3.

81 For discussions on anti-slavery and patriotism see Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery (London: Routledge, 1991); Wood, Blind Memory; and Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty.

82 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 133–42, 158. See also Wood, Marcus, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 36–7, 95–96; Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England, 83–84.

83 Gould, Marty, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ziter, Edward, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3, 8–12Google Scholar; Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty, 117.

84 Burton, The Fugitive Free, Act 1, scene i, 4–5.

85 Ibid., Act 2, scene i, 33–34. See also Cutter, “Performing Fugitivity,” 10–12.

86 Waters, Racism, 35.

87 Burton, The Fugitive Free, Act 1, scene iv, 25.

88 Ibid., Act 2, scene iv, 41–50.

89 Ibid., Act 2, scene v, 70–71.

90 York Herald, 28 Oct. 1854, 6. See also Wong, Edlie, “Anti-slavery Cosmopolitanism in the Black Atlantic,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 38, 2 (2010), 451–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisch, Audrey, ‘“Repetitious Accounts So Piteous and So Harrowing’: The Ideological Work of American Slave Narratives in England”, Journal of Victorian Culture, 1, 1, (1996), 16–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26–28.

91 Burton, The Nubian Captive, Act 1, scene iii, 35–36.

92 Ibid., Act 2, scene i, 42.

93 Ibid., Act 2, scene ii, 45–47.

94 Ibid., Act 3, scene iii, 68–69.

95 Ibid., Act 3, scene vi, 73.

96 Ibid., Act 3, scene viii, 88–90.