Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838

Wright, Richardson Little,Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838: plays and players of a century, tumblers and conjurors, musical refugees and solitary showmen, dinners, balls and cockfights, darky mummers and other memories of high times and merry hearts, New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937.

From the authors’ Preface:

This meandering into the past of Jamaican social life, and particularly as to its theatre, was first begun out of curiosity. It has led over so many roads that now, after nine years of leisurely research, the story of its progress has become a journal of travel.

(…)

Retracing these trails has demanded the intimate reading of several histories of the island, the records of parishes, the acts and minutes of the Assembly and the Legislative Council; searching the tax rolls, death and birth records, and the wills preserved in the island Record Office at Spanish Town, and such published and manuscript diaries and memorandum books as remain; and the careful scanning of all Jamaican newspapers printed in the eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth – at least of such copies of them as have survived fire, earthquake, flood, hurricane, the devouring worm, and just plain common neglect.