From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

Carolyn Grattan Eichin’s From San Francisco Eastward explores the presence and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the center of the western theatrical world, having attained prominence behind only New York and Boston as the nation’s most important theatrical center by 1870. As a trade center and place of intellectual dynamism, San Francisco exerted a major social influence on western frontier communities that often imitated the cultural production of big-city dynamics.

Using the vagaries of the West’s notorious boom-bust economic cycles, Eichin traces the fiscal and literary influences that shaped western theater. With an emphasis on the 1860s and 70s, this thoughtfully researched work uses diverse notions of ethnicity, class, and gender to outline the parameters of Western theater. From San Francisco Eastward is a thorough analysis of the ever-changing theatrical personalities and strategies that shaped Victorian theater and its eastward expansion, and how these complex environments created a new democratized era of theater in the post-Civil War-era.