The blonde in business class: Lydia Thompson’s transatlantic identity on tour (1865 – 1885)

I saw her again tonight in fact I see her every night for I watch and wait for her no matter how cold or windy the weather I don’t mind it if I can only see her. She is the only one I care to see now. (Saturday, 17 December)….oh if she only knew how much I thought of her she would surely bestow some of her regard on me. but she will never know what a true heart I have for her. (Wednesday, 14 December)In her later life, when reflecting on her career, Lydia Thompson would often defend the claim that it was she who brought the Leg Show to America. Much of contemporary scholarship on Thompson has, in turns, refuted, contested, or supported this assertion. Thompson’s physical display of self has formed the basis of discourse on her for as long as critics and scholars have been writing about her. This paper will reconstitute and resituate this approach with a more subjective response to both her identity formation and the impact her performance had on the culture in which it was performed by considering her movement on tour in America between 1868 and 1882. Women’s relationship to theatre and culture at this time was substantial but their narratives have too often been short sighted and, as a result, inaccurately reported. This paper adds the intercultural and the transnational perspective to this debate. In this, I consider the person and persona Thompson achieved, and memorably achieved outside her own nation, and I consider the effect this may have had on the spectatrices who would shortly turn, as the century did, to the Modern. This paper is largely informed by recovered personal testimony of both the subject and one of her spectators