The Vey Latest Edition of Black-Eyed Susan

The Very Latest Edition of Black-Eyed Susan was F.C. Burnand’s burlesque of Douglas Jerrold’s famed nautical melodrama Black-Ey’d Susan (Surrey Theatre 1829). ¹ Flourishing in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, nautical melodramas celebrated Britain’s naval prowess and expanding imperial dominion. Their hero was always the ‘Jolly Jack Tarr’, a popular icon of British courage and national pride. T.P. Cooke, the original William in Black-Ey’d Susan, was the most celebrated performer in nautical melodramas. He was closely identified with the Surrey Theatre in south London, whose working-class audience, J.S. Bratton argues, found itself ’interpellated as sailor heroes by the discourse of imperialism over many generations’. ²