The Gold Rush, Railroads, and the Theater Boom

British novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer Lytton's 1839 play Richelieu was hugely popular in the 19^th century. Booth added the title role to his touring repertory in 1860. The promotional card shown here reveals ways in which theater managers and local retailers or merchants worked to cross-promote featured tours.

Edwin Booth was considered America's finest Shakespearean actor during the second half of the 19th century. He was critically acclaimed for his Iago and Brutus. His 1870 production of Hamlet was described by the New York Herald as "a genuine feast of reason, or beauty, of fashion, and of historical intelligence and splendors...." A decade later, William Winter's review in the New York Tribune praised his Macbeth as "one of the most truthful personations of that fiend-haunted soul which ever, in our time, have illustrated the dark and terrible spirit of that tremendous tragedy."

As an adolescent, he performed with his father, Junius Brutus Booth, on the Mississippi River circuit and spent time in California where his brother, J.B. Booth, Jr. was an actor and house manager. Edwin Booth toured from New York to California frequently with the company from his Booth Theater in New York and in joint engagements with Lotta Crabtree, Helena Modjeska, Tommaso Salvini and Lawrence Barrett.