'The Conflict': Hannah Brand and Theatre Politics in the 1790s

'It is our St[o]urbritch Fair time and the Norwich Company are theatricalizing [sic]', Coleridge wrote to Southey on 26 September 1794. 'They are the first provincial Actors in the Kingdom'. He was disposed to be generous, having just contracted a friendship with the family of John Brunton (1741-1822), the Norwich Company's manager, and discovered an attraction to Brunton's daughter Elizabeth (?1772-99), an actress in the company. Nevertheless, Coleridge's assessment is probably accurate. In the 1790s the Norwich Company toured with great success, had good relations with the London theatres, and undoubtedly enjoyed a very high reputation. Much of this was due to Brunton himself. In 1700 Norwich had been the largest, most prosperous provincial city in England. Nevertheless, dominated as it was by business interests, it was several decades before its citizens took much interest in the arts. Indeed, it is striking that it was only after its 'Golden Age' of commercial prosperity, conventionally given as c.1740-80, that Norwich emerged as an important cultural centre. A theatre was built there in 1758, 'the second oldest provincial theatre built as such in England', which increased steadily in prestige until a royal patent was obtained in 1768 and it became the Theatre Royal. By this time the builder and proprietor, Thomas Ivory (1709-79), had built a second theatre at Colchester and made Norwich 'the centre of a strong and prosperous Circuit in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex' (Eshleman 17). In the 1760s he also 'encrease[d] the emoluments to the performers by making it, from a sharing, to a Salary Company' (Eshleman 72), thereby attracting more talented actors from London. However a more than East Anglian reputation was not obtained in Ivory's lifetime due to his employment of very undistinguished managers. Wider fame came in the Brunton era. Brunton was a great local success story. Born in Norwich, the son of a soapmaker, he served a seven-year apprenticeship as a grocer before going to London, where he was 'discovered' as an actor. Having played Hamlet at Covent Garden, his return to Norwich was a triumph, Brunton being acclaimed the finest actor ever to have appeared on the Norwich stage. After several years of acting in London, Bristol and Bath, he settled in his home city in 1785, and became manager of the Theatre Royal in November 1788. As a manager, he was thus confronted almost immediately with the political issues raised by what Gillian Russell has called the 'Bastille war'. As in London, theatrical representations of the Fall of the Bastille were given in Norwich in temporary, unlicensed theatres, with great success. Brunton's response to those issues is a major theme of this article. It is worth remarking here that for this and other reasons there is an instructive parallel to be drawn between Brunton and William Enfield (1741-97). Born the same year as Brunton, Enfield similarly settled in Norwich in 1785, replacing George Cadogan Morgan (the nephew of Richard Price) as minister at the Unitarian 'Octagon' Chapel (also, interestingly, designed by Ivory). Over the following decade, two groups of literary men and women emerged in Norwich, one centred on Brunton, the other on Enfield. Although literary historians have paid little attention to Norwich at this period (contrast the increasing interest shown in Bristol), the leftist emphasis of such studies as E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) has created a myth of Norwich as a Dissenting, 'Jacobin' city, most of its working men attached to various 'Revolution Societies', and the Enfield 'Circle' has accordingly been found representative of the 'spirit' of the place. But this leftist emphasis …