Minstrels, Midgets and Melodrama (February 2007)
Friday, February 18, 2011 at 5:55PM Entertainment in small town Victorian America aspired to gentility, but often comprised racism, misogyny, and obsession with freakish spectacle. Our own town offers examples...
Excerpt:
"…Most of us know about Sam Clemens’ visit in 1871. “Mark Twain” was already a celebrity known through his humorous and incisive newspaper columns which had been reprinted in Cortland County newspapers. He packed the house.
We have the text of his lecture, about an early American politician, humorist, and itinerant lecturer, named Artemus Ward. We know from Clemens’s own writings how he wasn’t happy with it and was already hard at work on another lecture, entitled Roughing It, which later became a signature work.
He had reason to feel uneasy. Two weeks before his appearance in Homer, a reviewer in Brooklyn reported the following audience comments from Twain’s lecture on Artemus Ward. Some are pretty catty referring to Twain’s recent marriage and new family…
"My, what a handsome young man to be a lecturer!"
"He's married over three millions of money, and lectures for fun." And the retort: "So he ought, if he's a funny lecturer."
"He isn't a bit funny now he's married."
"He's got a baby and that takes all the humor out of him."
A review in the next addition of The Homer Republican is informative, as much about the audience as about the lecturer. Most of the audience got what they expected from Twain and laughter was “boisterous.” However the reviewer pointed out how the audience didn’t quite get some of Twain’s jokes and humorous allusions, and that some parts “will be better appreciated by reflection.” The reviewer considered Twain’s lecture to be “racy.”
Still it was the real deal. Reserved Seats were a dollar, two dollars for the whole lecture series in which Clemens is the only notable. Today $2 is the equivalent to about $15, so it wasn’t cheap. Clemens was known to accept only $100 from each performance, the house and sponsors sharing the balance. Seven hundred people turned up for Clemens with a total gate valued at more than $10,000. It probably bought a lot of teabags for the Homer Literary Society.
Actually, for your edification, teabags weren’t invented until 1903. Back to the beginnings for a moment…
So up to a point, through the 1830s, entertainment was centered in the home, new media reaching our rural ancestors through newspapers and infrequent visitors. Venues were small and multipurpose. Homer’s Wheadon Hall at Pine and Main offered 2,000 square feet of space for “entertainments” and meetings. Church halls and school auditoriums were also available.
Local gentlemen sought entertainment they could claim was elevating and character-building.
Everything was hunky-dory until actors came to town…"
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Lecture first presented in the Whiting Theatre at the Center for the Arts in Homer, NY