Abstract
From 1818 to 1834, Charles Mathews created a series of At Homes for the British stage, in the course of which he represented a range of different nationalities. While his representation of African-Americans in his Trip to America (1824) has been widely discussed, less attention has been paid to his performance of the American Yankee. This chapter focuses on Mathews’s ‘othering’ of the ‘Yankee’ and the controversy this unleashed among North American critics and spectators. Key issues explored here will be not only the representation of the ‘Yankee’ by Mathews, but also the consequences of this representation on notions of national identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Dickens was later to have a similar view of the American people. See Dickens, American Notes, 289.
- 2.
This quotation is taken from a compilation text based on the extant unauthorised texts published in 1824.
- 3.
Although the Yankee is associated with the eastern seaboard and is usually a new Englander, Jonathan Doubikin is presumably representative of Yankees who have migrated westwards to states such as Kentucky. However, in Jonathan in England , his uncle, from whom he has purchased the slave Agamemnon, is a citizen of Vermont, a New England state opposed to slavery.
- 4.
All quotations are taken from the version of Jonathan in England submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. Add. Ms. 42868, British Library. The manuscript version of the farce reveals that it was allowed by the Examiner of Plays, George Colman the younger, after some omissions and alterations were made, but it is not clear from the text which of these may have been made by the dramatist in advance and which were required by the Examiner.
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Davis, J. (2021). ‘A Wretched Caricature…Unworthy of America’: Charles Mathews’s Representation of the Yankee. In: Morosetti, T., Okagbue, O. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43957-6_19
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