Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals

Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell; Longfellow’s Hiawatha rubbed shoulders with Old Mother Goose. For attendees, these events offered peculiar thrills. Similar to today’s fan conventions and cosplay events, participants engaged their cherished texts anew through physical enactment. Meanwhile, spectators could witness the totality of their reading experiences within a single shared space. Amateur play suddenly brought so many literary works to three-dimensional life—and all at once.Despite their amusements, however, the carnivals also fell short of loftier goals. First, organizers sought to advance a definitive literary canon in America, but they only affirmed Eurocentric texts that no longer dominated the marketplace. Second, the events might have produced an innovative form of theater, yet clumsy staging and spectatorial disorientation stymied these efforts. Thus, the authors’ carnivals left behind not only a legacy of spectacular fandom but also one of squandered cultural potential.US authors’ carnivals finally demonstrate[d] both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. . . . [D]espite their estimable amusements . . . the carnivals ultimately proved resistant to the literary and theatrical cultures they intended to bolster.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael F D'Alessandro English