Sounding Slavery in the Victorian Drawing Room: The ‘Blackface’ Ballads of Philip Klitz

Abstract

Abstract In 1847, Southampton’s Philip Klitz (1805–1854) added two ‘blackface’ ballads to a cultural craze reflecting that year’s British tour by the white American minstrel troupe, the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’, and their imitators, the ‘Ethiopian Harmonists’. I show how Klitz and his fellow composers reflected and fed a potent stereotype, circulating songs in the bourgeois home that adversely affected the British perception of African Americans by sustaining racist themes and images in the popular-cultural imagination. Notwithstanding the negative impacts for black residents and visitors in Britain at the time, minstrelsy is also widely understood to have exerted considerable cultural influence throughout the nineteenth century. Among investigations of how the Victorian arts constructed race, few give music the significance it holds in this interpretation of how black caricature functioned in a post-abolition British context through the medium of music and musical orientalism in Victorian drawing-room ballads. This case study of previously neglected musical repertoire details an important episode in the history of ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, showing how racial attitudes formed within British domestic spaces during the late 1840s were affected by those of the popular stage in ante-bellum America.