Entertaining Mr Coppin: An Antipodean Showman in Civil War America, by Simon Plant, Theatre Heritage Australia, Melbourne, August 2025. RRP A$50.00.
In Simon Plant’s pen pictures, George Coppin is ‘a merry plum pudding of a man’ and an ‘intrepid wandering minstrel’. He went from being a lowly ‘street patterer’, a child actor and musician from Norfolk working small theatres in distant corners of the United Kingdom, to be a very successful ‘low’ comedian in the Australian colonies from 1843 onwards—notably, as the ‘jaunty journeyman’ character of ‘Billy Barlow’ who commented satirically on topical people and events. Then as well, for nearly forty years, Coppin became Australia’s leading stage entrepreneur, theatre owner and manager—and still a force to be reckoned with a decade after that again.
George Selth Coppin (1819–1906) has been studied before: Alec Bagot’s Coppin the Great appeared in 1965, and four years later Sally O’Neill’s long Australian Dictionary of Biography entry (in vol. 3) provided the facts of his life and a brief account of the aggressive entrepreneurship that projected him to the top of his profession. He has not always been regarded favourably; a review of Bagot’s book at the time queried ‘Coppin—How Great?’, while O’Neill concludes by noting ‘he was not always scrupulous in dealing with rivals’.
In this new study, Simon Plant offers us a more sympathetic portrait and observes that part of Coppin’s success was due to the empathy and support he gave his fellow players. He had come from near the bottom of English society and never forgot it; only in Australia could he become equal with the best of his fellow ‘Antipodeans’ (those born in the UK but making their way in the colonies). Coppin skirted bankruptcy several times, took risks on many ventures that didn’t come off, and provided for three wives and ten children. If he was hard in business, he was living in a harsh world and an unforgiving profession and he looked after others as well as himself.
Mining the major Coppin collection in the State Library Victoria as his predecessors did, Plant decided to go further and in more detail by focusing on just two years of Coppin’s long life: 1864–1865—not coincidentally, the last years of the tragic and bloody civil war in the United States of America.
On tour in the US for much of that time, Coppin had kept a detailed diary of everything he saw and heard. As a result, Entertaining Mr Coppin suddenly leaps off the page not just as a wonderfully close-up story of the mid-nineteenth century stage in Australia and the USA (‘as true as I can make it’, says its author, and it is superbly researched and vividly narrated) but also as an important eyewitness account of American society during that terrible conflict as it impacted both those in California far from the ghastly battles of 1864, and their much closer fellow Americans in New York and the near/mid-west as the Confederacy collapsed, the war ended, the recriminations and revenge began, and Lincoln was assassinated. Coppin saw the President’s funeral procession from his hotel window. The US has since seen several Presidents murdered and many attempts on others including the present incumbent (twice, to date) and, reading Coppin’s memoir, where the declared attitudes, causes and consequences are remarkably similar, makes one wonder if soon we’ll be referring to it as the First US Civil War.
By the time Plant zooms in on the two years of his study, Coppin had been close to bankruptcy twice, paid back both sets of creditors in full mainly thanks to his own highly successful stage comic career, been elected to and resigned from the Victorian parliament, buried two wives, acquired three stepchildren and then married the eldest of these, Lucy, who was 18 (Coppin was 42). They had seven more children together; his diary suggests that he was a loving husband and affectionate father and stepfather and providing for their welfare was his abiding obsession.
Coppin’s opportunity for real wealth came in 1863 when Charles and Ellen Kean (née Tree) arrived in Australia. The Keans were in the estimation of many the doyens of British theatre (and certainly thought so themselves) with their repertoire of cut and paste spectacle Shakespeare and other historical dramas. Charles Kean was puffed as bringing ‘the greatest exponent of the greatest of all poets’ to ‘the land where the kangaroo and emu but lately held sway’. (And where 'the unlettered savage walked in solemn dignity in his native wilds' to quote from Richard Younge's address to the Keans.) Both Keans were now well past their prime, but they were hoping before retiring to cement their fortunes through a world tour. Coppin had contracted them for seasons in Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere, and acted as both their manager and publicity agent. The success of this tour enabled him to settle his debts in Melbourne.
Charles Kean, regarding Coppin as ‘a good businessman’ and ‘truly honourable and upright’ but ‘common’ and ‘rude’, asked him to accompany them on their onward journey to the United States—though more as a servant than a fellow thespian. George, much as it distressed him to leave for 18 months his new young wife and the first four of his brood (Lucy was pregnant when he set sail for San Francisco), saw an opportunity to go on milking the Keans’ successes and make him and his family financially secure for life. Although there would be more difficult years ahead, he did.
From 1 October 1864 when the Keans and Coppin arrive in San Francisco, Entertaining Mr Coppin manages to weave together (1) his work introducing himself to and befriending theatre owners and managers and newspaper reviewers, and selecting and booking suitable theatres; (2) supporting, nursing, cajoling and arguing with his difficult, needy and pompous stars with their alternating praise and condemnation and impossible demands (sometimes rescinded the next day without explanation or apology); and (3) trying to understand, often at a bar with a new acquaintance, the social and political maelstrom he found himself in—both because, as a man of the world and a once and future politician, it fascinated him, and because theatre in troubled times was doubly threatened.
Sometimes all three subjects collide: after Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in Washington shortly before the Keans were due to play there, Coppin had to cancel some performances out of respect; try to find Ford himself who, suspected of being complicit, had gone to ground; hurry to Washington to find a replacement venue after the US government announced that it intended to purchase and close Ford’s Theatre forever (it reopened in 1968, 103 years later); then persuade the Keans that their accommodation would be acceptable and the substitute playhouse satisfactory.
He had learned the hard way that he would get no thanks. On the Keans arrival in New York:
Coppin made sure every comfort was afforded the renowned artists. An open-top carriage drawn by four grey mares idled by the pier, ready to convey them to the Metropolitan Hotel where a small army of attendants—under the supervision of [the proprietor] —stood ready to meet their every whim. Four-poster beds and silk damask drapes, steam heating and the finest linen—everything was laid on in the Kean’s top floor apartment, but these luxuries did little to improve their peevish mood.
We are very uncomfortable in our Hotel here, very dear [expensive] & no attention. (pp.174–75)
It was a hard year, but Coppin undertook it tirelessly until, accepting that the Keans were ‘besotted with making money’ and would ‘wander about’ until one of them ‘breaks down altogether’, he finally found a way to resign honourably. He had been advance agent, venue hirer, hotel finder, publicist, bill poster, and counter and banker of the receipts. He even found time to perform himself to great acclaim and profit until Kean, concerned that this was taking too much of his employee’s time and affecting his (Kean’s) own audience numbers, made him stop. He befriended P.T. Barnum and, like the great showman, used the money he was earning to contract all sorts of entertainments to exploit after his return to Melbourne, from vaudeville glass blowers to roller skates. (The glass blowers flopped, his skating rink succeeded.) He cordially parted from the Keans over a glass of sherry in Philadelphia, hurried first to London to book more acts and then home.
Those (including the readers of On Stage) interested in the history of the popular theatre will find much to delight them in Entertaining Mr Coppin. There is Charles Kean directing the accompanying stock actors from the auditorium as a modern theatre director might; the sensitivities to be negotiated if such a supporting player was not cast according to his ‘line of business’; details of Kean’s own acting (he had supporting players who, when he forgot his lines which he frequently did, faced upstage and, imitating his voice, spoke for him). There’s a wonderful section (pp.131–41) when Coppin first arrives in New York and, ever the curious flaneur, goes up and down lower Manhattan from the Battery to Union Square, inspecting theatres, leaving his visiting card if the manager was out, and observing the tempo of ‘Empire City’. This is followed by an even longer section (pp.142-57) as, ‘miserable and lonely’, he negotiates with the hard-nosed impresarios of ‘Gotham’ to secure a theatre and a satisfactory share of the box office.
Coppin didn’t go whoring (or, at least, his diary denies it) and, mindful of his financial family responsibilities, he restrained his willingness to gamble, but long pub and club crawls were essential in learning the mores of his showbusiness companions:
A learned imbiber, Hingston knew the best places to ‘partake of a social glass’. Better still, he knew the bartenders. … A showman in America was at an advantage ‘if he is known at all the hotels, and [if] friendly with all the hotel clerks, so much superior will be his boarding and his lodging, and so much more will he be reckoned up as a specimen of that valuable class of people who are said to ‘know their way about’. (p.171)
In the end, though, it is Coppin’s observations on the people and society of the United States of America at the end of a ruinous war which are truly memorable and make Entertaining Mr Coppin a work of wider interest and relevance. Plant quotes Charles Dickens’ observation (from 1842) that, in the land of the free, ‘there is no country, on the face of the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion’, which Coppin endorsed from his own encounters. In San Francisco, shortly before the Presidential ballot which would re-elect Lincoln, when he was dining at his hotel:
His companions at table—both Northerners—managed to suppress their differences for a time, but one gentleman, ‘Southern in his feelings and a supporter of General McClellan’, finally rose and stalked out in high dudgeon. Turning to the Australian visitor, the remaining diner explained: ‘that [man] is a friend of mine. We have been acquainted and connected in business for many years, and yet he would no more mind shooting me than he did eating my dinner, and after killing me he would think himself perfectly justified’. Coppin held his nerve. ‘We [in Australia] also have some excitement at election time’, he said, ‘but we seldom resort to shooting’. (p.82)
In New York Coppin had observed that Mammon ruled, and that ‘scarcely anyone venerates his God’, but on his way back to Australia he ‘began to collect his thoughts’ and tried to summarise his experiences. He applauded the efficiency of the metropolitan Fire Departments and the street cars and admired too the way they planted trees along their streets and resolved to introduce the same to Melbourne.
‘It is a wonderfully productive country’, he reported to Lucy, ‘and I am not surprised that emigrants prefer it to Australia.’ In the same letter, however, he warned ‘I should not like to change’ the colonies for the US. Having experienced the ‘unsettled state of America’, having ‘seen and heard … many acts of injustice’, he ‘would not bring up our children in this state of society for all the wealth in the land’. (p.259)
Ever the showman, he resolved to educate his fellow Antipodeans about both the greatness and the madness of America through an entertainment, Coppin in California. It was not a success.
