The rise and demise of Octavia Hamilton: a study of colonial celebrity and scandal

Abstract

This thesis recovers the history of Octavia Hamilton, a singer-celebrity who occupied colonial Victoria’s lyric stage between 1854 and 1865 before scandal destroyed her career, and provides insights into the cultural values of the era. The English born subject arrived in Melbourne in 1854 as Mrs Moon, a theatrical unknown, yet she secured her first singing engagement within a month under the pseudonym “Miss Octavia Hamilton”. Her celebrity was founded on a level of musical expertise that was valued, in part, because it supported colonists’ own projects of social mobility: attendance at high calibre musical productions showcased residents’ material and cultural capital. Hamilton’s history complicates the notion of colonial female respectability, supporting the argument that pragmatism was a stronger ideological force than evangelicalism in the construction of respectable female lyric stage identity in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. This study of Hamilton’s life adds depth to our understanding of colonial female experience by revealing new connections between lyric stages performance and audience ambition, female philanthropists and celebrity music-makers, Melbourne’s ‘ladies’ and female artistes, and women in financial crisis from both the working and middle class. Hamilton’s history provides additional knowledge about enabling female networks and collaborative relationships between male and female professionals. While there is evidence of strong and diverse class support for Hamilton, analysis of her failure to connect with some audiences, such as Melbourne’s Trade Unionists, adds strength to the thesis' argument that spectator involvement in lyric stage culture was influenced by self-conscious projects of identity formation. An analysis of the two-phase nature of the Hamilton scandal provides new insights into social perceptions of female misdemeanour in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. In a colony striving to build an image of civility, some residents were prepared to dim the lights on the publicised adultery of a singer with cultural utility. However, Hamilton’s perceived abandonment of her children in the second phase of the scandal saw her shunned by audiences, a response conveying the limits of colonial pragmatism. In this cultural history, the study of Hamilton’s rise and demise reveals as much about Victorian colonists as it does about a long-forgotten celebrity.