The Englishman’s B’hoy: Thomas Butler Gunn, Mose of the Bowery, and New York Mass Culture in the 1840s: A Latter-Day Lyceum Lecture by Andrew Loman

August 24 at 7:00PM
Free admission

Before the Thing first clobbered and the Hulk first smashed; before Superman out-sped his first bullet; before Ignatz lobbed his first brick, Jiggs ate his first dinner, Nemo dreamed his first art nouveau dream, and the Yellow Kid broke his first fourth wall; before the whole blustering comics cavalcade, there was Mose, the Bowery B’hoy, boisterous and rude and spiling for a muss. A popular character on the working-class stages of antebellum New York, Mose jumped platforms in June, 1850, appearing in a twenty-page proto-comic called Mose among the Britishers. Written and drawn by Thomas Butler Gunn, a struggling young artist just arrived in New York, the comic was received – with utter indifference. No one reviewed it; it never enjoyed a second printing; the whole world shrugged and moved on. Today only a few copies survive, in the British Library, in the New York Historical Society, in the Theatre Collections at Harvard.

Give Mose among the Britishers your full attention, though, and you’ll find that it’s surprisingly sophisticated, a work of “panorama literature” that, under the guise of genial political satire, develops a trenchant critique of white, working-class, urban American masculinity. Or at least that’s the argument that Andrew Loman makes in The Englishman’s B’hoy. In collaboration with Stella Hui, Darren Ivany, and others, he’ll present the text, explain its contexts, and plead the case that this piece of nineteenth-century ephemera deserves our attention now, in the Manosphereocene.