Comments On My Plays..

"The Octoroon is based on the novel by an Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid, The Quadroon (1856). Neither Boucicault nor Reid actually resided in the South." -Anonymous

"Mr. Moreton, we presume, is labouring under the peculiar and unfortunate malady commonly expressed by the phrase of being 'stage-struck': you are a young man, and this renders the circumstances more excusable.  Your friends, too, have doubtless persuaded you that you have talent…Your performance did not fail from a want of that confidence and knowledge of the business of the scene which are the usual stumbling blocks in the way of you as a young actor…On the whole, it is evident to us that "Mr. Moreton's" friends have very much overrated your powers." -Paul B. Reuben

In 1856 Boucicault agitated for new legislation to protect the rights of American dramatists, then settled down to a steady dramatic output: The Poor of New York (1857), Dot and The Octoroon (1859), and the highly-successful Colleen Bawn. His son, Darley George, Boucicault nicknamed "Dot" after the Winter Garden play of September, 1859. Certain Americanisms such as "jail" (p. 21), "color" (p. 34) and possibly "furrin" (p. 30) point to the play's having been written in the United States. In the summer of 1860 the Boucicaults returned to London, where Agnes had engaged with Webster to open in the title role of Colleen in September at the New Adelphi. The play had a then-record run of two hundred seventy-eight performances, providing the theatrical couple enough money to take over the lease of Drury Lane in 1862, and begin refurbishing Astley's Amphitheatre as The Theatre Royal, Westminster."
-E. L. Bulwer Lytton