Chapter 8
The Idols of the Halls

Meanwhile, Victorian Britain was crazy for the American minstrel show. For good and ill, Britain has made a habit of absorbing trends and influences from America ever since the bloody separation of the two nations in 1783, and there was no bigger US trend than the one that took like a bush fire in the summer of 1836. Thomas Dartmouth Rice was an apprentice cabinet-maker turned itinerant actor from the Black and Irish ghettos of lower Manhattan, and he had arrived in London armed with a particular novelty.