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Notes
1 This essay will mainly draw from the 1858 New York play text of Jessie Brown, based on the drama’s performance at Wallack’s Theatre and publication as No. 473 of Dicks’ Standard Plays. However, important differences between this play text and the 1862 London play text, based on the licensing copy, will also be noted.
2 For more details, see comments made by Brantlinger (Citation1988), Thomson (Citation1984), McFeely (Citation2012), Smith (Citation2014), Wallace (Citation2015), and others on Boucicault playing Nana Sahib.
3 Neil Hultgren calls the play “a bold assertion of British racial superiority as well as a demonstration of Boucicault’s ignorance or refusal of history” (Citation2014, 20) and asserts that “melodrama simplified the moral ambiguities of Britain’s imperial crises” (23), while McFeely claims that “Boucicault positioned the besieged white ruling class as the deserved victors who had God on their side, and used symbols of British and Christian culture to represent the order that will be restored once the native non-Christians have been suppressed” (Citation2012, 9).
4 According to Mukharji, the association between the Jacobite Uprising and the Indian was not uncommon: “In fact, there were other Jacobite Mutiny ballads which openly invoked the Battle of Culloden, amply proving that such associations were definitely being made at some level or the other” (Citation2013, 45).
5 The London play text does not include the song title. Stage directions simply state, “Randal dances Effie on his knee and sings” (Boucicault [Citation1862] Citation2012, Act 1, Scene 1: 332).
6 The London play text confirms these directions twice: “Sings ‘My boy Tammie!’ unconcerned” and “JESSIE (sings with affected unconcern)” (Boucicault [Citation1862] Citation2012, Act 3: 350).
7 Triteness, in fact, was a criticism made by theater critics about the music in serious drama (Gardner Citation1980).
8 Norman O’Neill was one such critic who pointed out the emotional manipulation music can practice on the audience (Gardner Citation1980).
9 Gardner’s analysis of the music in The Bells is one example of the recent work that has analyzed the formal effects of music in melodrama, though more research certainly needs to be done in this field. He investigates the cuts and alterations Henry Irving makes to Etienne Singla’s original musical score (Citation1980) for the play and explains how these decisions change the emphasis placed on characters and undergird the different moods that develop at each crux of the play.
10 The London play text features similar stage directions (Boucicault [Citation1862] Citation2012, Act 3: 349).
11 See David Mayer and Matthew Scott’s Four Bars of ‘Agit’: Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama (Citation1983) for examples of melodies used in nineteenth-century stage melodramas.
12 To develop the implications of this point further, I suggest that we consider not only music but also melodrama as the relief of Lucknow. Melodrama, like music, can function as a similar coping mechanism for situations fraught with political complications and cultural threats.
13 The New York play text introduces Geordie as a “darling,” a newly commissioned officer “in love with his new uniform,” with girls like Alice and Mary vying for his attention and affection (Boucicault [Citation1858] Citation1984, Act 1, Scene 1: 103).
14 Here, I have included two verses from “O Charlie Is My Darling,” as recorded in One Hundred Songs of Scotland: Music and Words (1858). The London play text only includes the first verse (“’Twas on a Monday morning, / Right early in the year, / When Charlie came to our town, / The young Chevalier”), whose political content is more subdued compared with these other verses (Boucicault [Citation1862] Citation2012, Act 1, Scene 3: 336).
15 Gardner’s analysis of the music of The Bells may be helpful to consider here, as a point of comparison.
16 I have consulted two different sheet music texts of “Oh! Why Left I My Hame?” because while both texts attribute the words to Robert Gilfillan and feature similar lyrics for the first and third verses, the lyrics for the second verses are different.
17 Blount is a complex character to consider because, like song, he embodies the comical and the serious at once. Although it seems easy to laugh at his ridiculousness, his moralizing words possess a profound combination of Victorian self-reflection and contradiction that interferes with an urge to dismiss him entirely.
18 Comparing American and British audiences, Smith observes, “The message of rebellion may have resonated with American audiences via their own relationship(s) to the British colonial project” (Citation2014, 40).
19 Robert Burns, who penned two of the songs featured in Jessie Brown (“Auld Lang Syne” and “O Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”), is known for writing poetry that exudes a kind of national earnestness not unmixed with irony. His lyrics in “Ye Jacobites by Name” is a great example of this: “What is Right, and what is Wrang? / A short Sword, and a lang, / a weak arm, and a strang / For to draw // What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’Assassin’s knife, / Or hunt a Parent’s life / wi’ bludie war” (Burns [Citation1792] Citation2003, lines 9–12, 15–18). Contrast these lines with Randal’s claim that “Freedom was never won by murder, for heaven never yet armed the hand of an assassin” (Boucicault [Citation1858] Citation1984, Act 2: 122) and the British soldiers’ inability to prevent the gruesome death of Achmet.
20 Not limited to melodrama, irony also characterized real-life uses of music during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Winstock observes, for example, that the Indian rebels at Lucknow were discovered “persistently playing British marches ‘as if in defiance’” (Citation1970, 173).
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Christina Jen
Christina Jen is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, and her research interests include the Victorian novel, theater and performance, women’s literature, and global melodrama. She completed her PhD in Literatures in English at Rutgers University, where she defended her dissertation, “Reading as Acting: The Novel’s Casting Call and Readerly Performance in the British Nineteenth Century.” Her current book project explores the relationship between representations of reading and theater culture in works by Jane Austen, William M. Thackeray, Mary E. Braddon, Charles Dickens, and others. Her work on Sketches by Boz has also appeared in the Dickens Studies Annual. Christina is a passionate educator with a wide range of teaching experiences in a variety of classroom settings. She has taught diverse student populations – including international, first-generation, non-traditional, and underrepresented students – at institutions such as Southern University and A&M College, Western Colorado University, Union County College, Rutgers University, and Central China Normal University. Her teaching repertoire includes freshman composition, introductory and survey courses in British and world literatures, as well as upper-level literature courses in topics such as the Victorian Novel and Global Melodrama.