Well, there’s another day of research I’ll never get back. Today’s illustration of a kitten in an old boot looks innocent enough, but hang on. This playing card-sized promotion advertised the theatrical production of Mrs. Partington, once described as “the funniest play in America.”
I know way too much about Mrs. Ruth Partington, the quirky, fictional female character created by Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814-1890). I have all of BP Shillaber’s books, although reading them is no easy task. What was funny in the 1850s rarely cracks a smile today. Shillaber’s humor was droll, literary, subtle, thick with puns, full of wordplay, as mild as American cheese, and very much tied to the events and culture of his era.
Mrs. Partington was hugely popular in the mid-to-late 1800s. The character was reportedly based on Shillaber’s aunt, and his family lived in Portsmouth, NH’s North End. Think Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire or, if you have an English Literature degree, think Mrs. Malaprop, who loved to “dance the flamingo.” Mrs. Partington had a naughty nephew named Ike, a forerunner of “bad boys” Tom Bailey, Tom Sawyer, Dennis the Menace, and Bart Simpson. Curiously, in the theatrical version, Ike Partington was her son.
I didn’t know that Shillaber’s series of books starring Ike and Mrs. Partington was adapted into a successful stage play in the 1880s. This performance of Ike Partington’s Kitten at the Opera House in Keene, NH, (in city hall) promised to be “a continuous roar of delight” filled with “realistic absurdity.” Besides dotty Mrs. P, and “plaguey Ike,” the play featured Shillaber-esque characters including Philander Aplebody, the tongue-tied Deacon and a farmer named Hezekiah Muggins. My favorite Shillaber character is a slick-talking minister named Evermore Smooth.
Actor Joseph H. Keane, known for portraying “old widdy women,” often played Mrs. Partington, while young Miss Bessie Gray took on the role of Ike. This New Hampshire performance, however, featured Charles Fostelle as the female lead and “Master Arthur Dunn” as Ike. Sadly, the only reference I could find to these two actors came from Monarchs of Minstrelsy (1911), a voluminous catalog of popular blackface actors and musicians. Both Fostelle and his “abbreviated” sidekick Arthur Dunn, had “put on the black” as traveling vaudeville comedians prior to starring in Mrs. Partington.
Shillaber’s Ike Partington novels are clearly based on his Portsmouth boyhood in the early 1800s. In “The Double Runner Club,” for example, Ike and his buddies from “Riverton” ask Mr. Fernald and Mr. Dennett to build them the fastest sled on the Seacoast. The race down Mason’s Hill is all but suicidal and does not end well.
As to Ike Partington’s poor kitten, the backstory is downright depressing by modern standards. In one episode, laid up with a wounded wrist, Ike and friends put his cat in a laundry bag and torture it with a piece of straw from a broom. “We aren’t hurting her,” Ike explains to his aunt. “We’re just trying her temper.” Later, Ike saves the cat from drowning.
In another feline episode, Ike tries to teach his cat to skate on a pond by tying clamshells to her paws. Later, Mrs. Partington instructs Ike to keep the cat out of the butter. “Take our Tabby, and drop her somewhere, and see that she don’t come back again,” she says. The cat is later found hanging from a tree. Ike shrugs and pleads innocent. The cat must have committed suicide, Ike insists.
On BP Shillaber’s death in 1890, newspapers reported that his Mrs. Partington character “will doubtless ever remain a unique figure in American humor.” Maybe in the history books, but probably never again on the stage.
(c) J. Dennis Robinson
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