European theatre in the nineteenth century was energetically international, and there is no better representative of the adventurous performer than Anglo-Australian theatrical producer George Coppin. As Mita Chowdhury observes, it was in the eighteenth century that ‘patterns of theatrical circulation […] were analogous to the patterns of mercantilist exchange’,1 and the early establishment of theatre in Australia—within six months of the commencement of European settlement in 1788—attests to the combination of entertainment, commerce, and entrepreneurial flair of the late eighteenth century theatre on the move. The position of theatre in Australia as a going concern, and indicator of ‘civilisation’ in this outpost of empire, was established less than 50 years later, and in this swift modernisation of colonial theatre, actor-manager George Coppin stands out. Alec Bagot called him ‘the Father of Australian theatre’, and Jim Davis reports that Coppin had ‘an especially significant impact on the development of Australian theatre in the nineteenth century’.2
Lucy and George at their holiday home The Anchorage in Sorrento, 1898. Photographer unknown. State Library Victoria, Coppin Collection, MS8827/13/PHO21.
Our knowledge of George Coppin’s life, drawn from the richness of the holdings of the Coppin Collection at the State Library of Victoria, also contributes to an understanding of Australian theatre history more generally. Through Coppin’s performances as a ‘low’ comic actor, his talents in producing large-scale theatre, his ability to nose out opportunities, and his management of the talents of other performers, Coppin’s career can stand for the extraordinary achievement of early Australian colonists. The significance of Coppin is manifold: his career symbolises the entrepreneurial energy of colonists of the first half of the nineteenth-century; his work challenges dominant literary historical accounts of nineteenth-century theatre in Australia; the materials of his archive emphasise the intertwined networks of family and professional connections; and Coppin’s writing (letters, autobiographical fragments) offer a rare and rich account of one man’s career in detail. Within sixty years of European settlement, Coppin (and others like him) established a thriving theatre industry across the distances between the colonial cities of Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney.
However, some caution might be applied here. Coppin’s presence in Australian theatre history may be, in part, due to the preservation of a large collection of his papers, both personal and professional, held by the State Library of Victoria. The Coppin Collection is a gift to the historian, as it is possible to trace the threads of Coppin’s multiple activities in some detail. We can see, for example, how he built his business and managed it. Yet the richness of this collection has the potential to distort the historical record, dazzling historians so we miss other voices, other practitioners. Eric Irvin rather sardonically comments on Bagot naming Coppin ‘Father’ of Australian theatre, apparently ‘fathering something which was in existence ten years before Coppin’s arrival in Australia’.3 When we have such detail, it is all too easy to forget the other voices in the headlong development of the Australian theatre industry.
However, if we see Coppin’s career as representative rather than directive, it can challenge the orthodox narrative of the establishment of the Australian theatre. For too long, theatre history focused on the radical nationalist playwrights and theatres of the twentieth century, largely ignoring the strong and fiercely independent commercial theatre of the nineteenth century. This early Australian theatre industry was often denigrated at the time of its making: Eric Irvin cites the drama critic of the Australasian in 1875 who complained that ‘Australian managers have not yet satisfied themselves there are any Australian dramatists’.4 This dismissal was compounded in later literary history, particularly in the establishment of Australian Studies and the serious study of Australian literature in the academy. Nineteenth century theatre was routinely overlooked, for example, in H.M. Green’s 1961 magisterial History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied. Green mentions only about a dozen literary, and mostly unperformed, dramas of the first half of the nineteenth-century, judging them to be ‘extremely dull, reflecting the stunted imagination, the fossilized conventions, and the cheap sentimental melodrama of the contemporary English stage’.5 Green asserts that Australian drama ‘in the sense of drama arising out of Australian conditions’ was founded in the period of self-conscious nationalism from 1890 (p. 736). This literary viewpoint has distorted our understanding of the colonial theatre, and—more importantly—our understanding of colonial society more broadly. As Richard Fotheringham argues, the commercial theatre was an important way in which colonists created their identity as cosmopolitan modern citizens.6 In this respect, theatre in the new colonies was not just a form of entertainment, but a means by which colonists performed identities as active participants and creators in the formation of Australian culture, not simply as passive consumers. Veronica Kelly goes further, to argue that the ‘Australasian modernity’ of the nineteenth-century colonial entertainment industry ‘laid the foundations for twentieth-century global entertainment’.7
The story of Coppin’s life and his role in developing the Australian commercial theatre industry has been told several times.8 What I want to look at in this essay is the way in which Coppin’s family, and especially his third wife, Lucy Coppin, were active in the web of Coppin’s private and professional activities, and how Lucy Coppin facilitated his entrepreneurial activities. Lucy Coppin’s daughter, also Lucy, continued this work of behind-the-scenes organisation and management for her father and his successor, Bland Holt. What is significant here is that the Coppin Collection shows how much the Coppin-Holt business network was also a family network. But it was one in which women were largely invisible in its public manifestations, except as performers. Jacky Bratton has pointed out the ways in which theatre management in the nineteenth century was a family business:
The tracing of families as engines of induction, training and inheritance within the profession, and the exploring of the internal, sometimes hidden, power structures that reveals, brings into focus the historical contribution of women to theatre.9
To Bratton’s list of women’s activities, we might add Lucy Coppin’s stable presence at home as administrator, comforter, and emotional centre for Coppin. His letters home to Lucy reveal just how important his self-image as a hard-working family man was to him, and to his endeavours in business and public life.
Blanche and Amy, Lucy and George’s eldest children; and Lucy with Constance, c.1865. State Library Victoria, Coppin Collection, MS8827/13/PHO9.
George Coppin’s marital and familial history was not simple. Lucy Coppin was his third wife (or possibly his second lawful wife). She was the daughter of his second wife, Harriet Hilsden, by her first husband, Hilsdon, a master mariner.10 Coppin’s first domestic partnership started in 1842, with Maria Watkins Burroughs, an actress whom he met when working in Dublin. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography describes them as living together; Elisabeth Kumm and Mimi Colligan note that Maria ‘called herself Mrs. Coppin,’ and Bagot notes the union as de facto in the Coppin lineage he publishes.11 Of course, this kind of pragmatic partnership was not unusual: the theatre was a family business, and both partners were likely to fare better than as a single person. The Coppins certainly demonstrated this in their decision—on the toss of a coin—to seek their fortunes together as emigrants to Sydney in 1843. Maria died suddenly in Adelaide in 1848, leaving Coppin alone, and prone to get into romantic scrapes. Coppin’s second marriage in 1855 was to Harriet Hilsden, the sister of G.V. Brooke’s wife, Marianne. Coppin had managed and produced Brooke’s extended tour of Australia, and had satisfied Mrs Brooke’s request to see if he could help her recently widowed sister, Harriet Hilsden, in Sydney. On their marriage, Coppin took on the care of Harriet’s four children (including Lucy Hilsden); eventually Harriet had three more children with Coppin. Harriet died shortly after the birth of her youngest child, Amy, in 1859, leaving her daughter Lucy at age 18 to manage the large family. Of Lucy Hilsden, Bagot writes rather fulsomely and in terms which feel uncomfortable sixty years later:
Lucy was quite capable of taking charge. She slipped into her new position quietly and efficiently, like a well-rehearsed understudy assuming the leading lady’s part at a minute’s notice. Lucy in this emergency proved herself so competent that she evoked his admiration as well as gratitude. Satisfied, he left the reins of household management in her firm young hands, turning himself again to his many public and business interests.12
In May 1861, Coppin married Lucy, who was then 20. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography notes that Lucy’s first child was born on 5 January 1862. Lucy had seven children in total, and the sixth child (also a Lucy) was to stay working within the family business as Bland Holt’s secretary.
Marriage for Coppin seems to have offered an anchoring in a domestic emotional life, which enabled him to work more productively in his professional life. A kind of pragmatism emerges from this bare account of his marriages and family arrangements, and the sensibilities of 2025 might well question the familial sexual politics of Coppin’s marriages: first to his business partner’s sister-in-law, and then to her daughter. Our sensitivities to coercion and abuse within families are more sharp and troubled now than in colonial Victorian life, when the stability of family could shore up precarity in business. And the theatre was always a precarious business.
Lucy Coppin, c.1870. Photo by Johnstone, O'Shannessy & Co., Melbourne.
State Library Victoria, Coppin collection, MS8827/13/PHO230
Coppin with Lucy’s brother Frank, c.1870. Photo by Richards & Co., Ballarat.
State Library Victoria, Coppin collection, MS8827/13/PHO221
The twin threads of Coppin’s life—his precarious business and desire for a stable domestic life—are certainly recurring themes in his letters home. Coppin’s letters to Lucy comprise a significant part of the Coppin Collection family papers. These letters show the ways in which Lucy Coppin was involved in the family business in an invisible, but important way. All mails came to her, as the stable point in Coppin’s busy touring life. She is regularly instructed by Coppin to pay bills, tender cheques, and organise or otherwise administer aspects of the business from their family homes in Sorrento and Pine Grove, in Richmond (just outside of the central business district of Melbourne). Lucy is clearly also an emotional lynch-pin for George Coppin, who writes regularly about being lonely, and of missing her and their children. Coppin’s letters to Lucy are a curious mix of emotional neediness, often castigating her for not writing, combined with clear and precise commands for Lucy to attend to matters of business for him, or send him scripts, or manage actors and other employees. When touring in the Hunter Valley (inland from the Australian town of Newcastle), Coppin writes from Maitland:
I have received letters from several English friends asking me to advise against Miss Helen Fleming. I wrote to Mr. Simmonds to engage her and if she is unsuccessful there I sent her an order for passage to New Zealand. I require actresses and she would be useful. If she calls upon you make her welcome and if you like her invite her to visit you. She must be very lonely poor thing in a strange country.
Lucy’s role here in exercising domestic hospitality looks like it is also part of Coppin’s business strategy: Lucy is to help with ensuring Coppin’s touring actors are cared for so that they may perform well, and bring him more profit. He finishes the letter with instructions:
I shall require the manuscript of Janet Pride, The Overland Route with parts and many other books that you will find upon the shelves.13
Lucy was cast in the role of both office clerk and kind hostess. Coppin writes in the certainty that she will manage both the family and the business—she will know where his scripts are, and she will mother actors who may be useful for the business.
In another letter home (dated from the York Hotel, Adelaide, 3 May 1868) Coppin requests that Lucy attend church as an example to their children:
I hope that before our children are old enough to understand our neglect that fortune will enable me to settle down without the anxieties of business and to do my duty by them in setting an example that will bring them up as true and religious christians [sic].
After more family matters, Coppin goes on to discuss business, and his step-son Charley’s behaviour (Charley is also Lucy’s brother) in the family business:
You do not say anything in your letter about Charley having paid the money into the Oriental Bank. Tell him to give the manuscript of the Streets of Melbourne to Mr. Bellair. [...] If Charlwood has a wood cut of the Pilot let him send 50. I also want the book of The Pilot out of my lot, also the books of Mrs. Burberry and the parts if I have them.
From Ballarat and the gold mines there, Coppin writes:
I shall sell when I can get a profit upon my shares. I cannot get him to complete the settlement upon his family. I spoke to Mr. Walsh upon the subject and he will assist me. If a mine or two in which he holds shares turn out well I do not think we shall have any difficulty upon the subject but it must be done before the Melbourne Cup comes off or Mr. Walsh things [sic] he will loose [sic] all his money. This day week will bring me nearer home. Altho’ I am as comfortable as it is possible to be away from you all it is very miserable to be separated from you and the children.14
Writing from Adelaide, where Coppin was trying to set up a theatrical venture, his letters express the same mix of emotion and business.
It is distressing after working so hard for so many years that I have not got enough to keep my wife and children in respectability without leaving home to seek my fortune and it is heartbreaking to meet with such serious losses instead of a remunerative return for the misery I feel at separation.15
and
there is quite a gloom over Adelaide in consequence of the failure in the crops and I do not feel that I shall have a good season. It will be very hard luck to have the misery of being separated from Wife, children and home and to loose [sic] money into the bargain. It is a splendid Hall and will make a nice Theatre but I fear it will cost too much to pay. Tell Charley to send 50 Posters of Milky White and 50 of Paul Pry by Mr. Cobb. To have them printed at once that they may dry.16
The jump from heartfelt ‘misery,’ to speculation about the ‘splendid Hall’ as a likely theatre, concluding with the peremptory command to ‘tell Charley’, suggest that Coppin sees his wife as a loving confidante and a business partner. While Coppin is away from home, it is Lucy who organises his scripts, bills, and oversees employees and matters with business associates. She does this while remaining the private and domestic mother of seven, living in houses outside of the central business and entertainment districts of Melbourne.
The tension expressed in Coppin’s letters home to Lucy throughout their marriage—his need to make money and his desire to stay at home with his family—is most acute in the trip to America. In his preparations for travel to America in 1864 with Charles and Ellen Kean, whose tour of Australia he had managed, Coppin writes at length about his separation from family:
if I had known of the misery and privations I should have made myself contented by the side of my darling Wife and children, enjoying the comforts of my happy home and confined my exertions to the Colonies to have you well provided for when it pleases god to take me from you.17
This very long letter to Lucy describes in detail the travelling conditions on the sea voyage from Sydney to San Francisco with the Keans. The detail is fascinating and is a reminder of the adversity and discomfort which were the cost of nineteenth-century mobility. This mobility was all the more remarkable because its purpose was to entertain others—for profit, of course. And the possibility of making a lot of money in America, on tour with the Keans, the international stars of the day, was irresistible. Coppin’s descriptions of Kean suggest the costs of that ambition, however. To Lucy he writes that Charles Kean is ‘Selfish, dictatorial very bad tempered and offensive’.18 John Ripley provides the other half of that relationship, citing Kean’s views of Coppin, also recorded in a letter home to his daughter, Mary:
I am disgusted with Mr. Coppin my Agent. He is a coarse vulgar brute, & as far as this country is concerned perfectly incompetant [sic]. There is only one thing he is always ready to do & in which he is punctual to the moment—taking his share of my profits.19
Kean’s renowned ‘gentlemanly’ snobbishness and George Coppin’s new world entrepreneurialism were bound to clash, although the year-long tour satisfied Coppin’s desire for financial stability.
George Coppin’s children in c.1880: George (aged 14), Daisie (aged 5), Frederick (aged 11), Emma (aged 9), and Lucy (aged 7). Photo by Stewart & Co., Melbourne.
State Library Victoria, Coppin collection, MS8827/13/ PHO245
Lucy Coppin, c.1880. Photo by Stewart & Co., Melbourne.
State Library Victoria, Coppin collection, MS8827/13/ PHO231
Unfortunately, the Coppin Collection does not hold many traces of Lucy Coppin’s words or thoughts; she is a mostly silent presence in the archive. She was not a performer, but organised Coppin’s business and family life, and her presence as a lynchpin in Coppin’s career is worth remembering. While a domestic, private woman, she undertook many of the tasks required of a ‘confidential secretary’ (usually a man’s job in the nineteenth-century), as well as acting as Coppin’s proxy when he was away from Melbourne. She also seems to have been his emotional centre. Coppin may well have been a success without his wife, but it is difficult to escape the sense that her steady matriarchal presence, in their mansion in Richmond, or their seaside holiday home in Sorrento, was the necessary anchor for Coppin’s energy and mobility. He could range around the world, making his fortune, secure in the knowledge of a domestic sanctuary at the end of his journey.
Endnotes
1. Mita Choudhury, ‘Circulation: Emergent Modalities of Intercultural Performance,’ in Mechele Leon (ed), A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, Vol. 4, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2017, p. 97.
2. Alec Bagot, Coppin the Great: Father of Australian theatre, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1965, and Jim Davis, ‘Actor Migration to and from Britain in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Yana Meerzon and S.E. Wilmer (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, p. 689.
3. Eric Irvin, Theatre Comes to Australia, University of Queensland, St Lucia, 1971, p. 228.
4. Cited in Eric Irvin, Australian Melodrama; Eighty years of popular theatre, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1981, p. ix.
5. H.M. Green, History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied, Vol. I, Angus and Robertson, 1961, p. 127.
6. Richard Fotheringham (ed.), Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834–1899, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2006, p. xxvii.
7. Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian costume drama, 1890s–1920s, Currency House, Sydney, 2009, p. 1.
8. As well as Simon Plant, Entertaining Mr Coppin (due August 2025) and Bagot, Coppin the Great. See also: Eric Irvin, Theatre Comes to Australia, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1971, and Harold Love (ed.), The Australian Stage: A documentary history, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1984.
9. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 178.
10. Bagot, Coppin the Great, pp. 185–6. He notes how the spelling of ‘Hillsdon’ changed to ‘Hilsden’, perhaps typical of the shape-shifting of Australian colonial life in the nineteenth-century.
11. Judy Leech, ‘George Coppin & Bland Holt,’ https://theatreheritage.org.au/on-stage-magazine/gallery/item/197-george-coppin-and-bland-holt and Bagot, pp. 348–9.
12. Bagot, p. 226.
13. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 73. June 16, 1863, Maitland.
14. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 78. August 1866.
15. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 78. ‘Sunday morning’ Adelaide, [1868?].
16. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 78. York Hotel, Adelaide 16th February 1867.
17. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 73. August 17th, 1864.
18. Coppin Collection, State Library Victoria, MS 8827, Box 73. August 17th, 1864.
19. John Ripley, ‘“We are not in little England now”: Charles and Ellen Kean in Civil-War America’, Theatre Notebook, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2007, pp. 77–106.