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Transacting Value on the Transatlantic Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2014
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With the modesty then expected of a daughter of Britain's theatrical royalty, Fanny Kemble attributed the necessity of her 1829 stage debut to the hard circumstance of financial need. As she explained in her journal, hers was not an act of self-promotion; rather, she exposed herself to the scrutiny of London's critical establishment with the hope that interest in her performance might draw much-needed revenue into the cashbox of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, a venue jointly managed by her father and uncle, Charles and John Philip Kemble. However rhetorically necessary the narrative was for preserving her respectability, Kemble's financial motivation was also very real. The theatre was fiscally impaired, never quite able to square itself in relation to the expensive footing upon which the new building was erected after the fire of 1808. With construction costs high and materials scarce in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles attempted to raise ticket prices in the new theatre to help cover his expenses, raising instead public ire, in the form of protracted demonstrations known as the Old Price Riots, which bullied him into restoring the original ticket prices.
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Endnotes
1. Niall Ferguson's work on the history of the Bank of England emphasizes these three features of modern banking. Economic historian Richard Sylla, who compares late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and American economies, lists six key features, noting that the Bank of England's original charter limited its full development. To management of public debt, issuance of currency, and centralization of banking functions, Sylla adds the development of an integrated banking system, the development of a securities market, and the development of a corporate structure. See Ferguson, Niall, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001)Google Scholar, 112; and Sylla, Richard, “Comparing the UK and US Financial Systems, 1790–1830,” in The Origins and Development of Financial Markets and Institutions: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Atack, Jeremy and Neal, Larry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209–40.Google Scholar
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9. Henry Hart Milman, Fazio: A Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Samuel Collingwood, 1816). Milman does not explicitly establish Bartolo as Jewish, yet he stamps him with all of the stereotypical characteristics of the (comic) stage Jew. He is described, for example, as “the grey lean usurer” (55).
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38. The London Times reviewer asserted that “from the instant when she suspects that her husband's affection is wavering, and with a flash of horrible enlightenment exclaims ‘you have been with Aldabella,’ Miss Cushman's career was certain” (ibid.).
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50. These graphs are meant to be suggestive of the “distant reading” model proposed by Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar and Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013)Google Scholar.
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