The Lost Life of Ira Daniel Aldridge (Part 1)

Bernth Lindfors

doi:10.2478/v10231-012-0064-5

Authors

Bernth Lindfors University of Texas at Austin

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10231-012-0064-5

Abstract

The sons of famous men sometimes fail to succeed in life, particularly if they suffer parental neglect in their childhood and youth. Ira Daniel Aldridge is a case in point-a promising lad who in his formative years lacked sustained contact with his father, a celebrated touring black actor whose peripatetic career in the British Isles and later on the European continent kept him away from home for long periods. When the boy rebelled as a teenager, his father sent him abroad, forcing him to make his own way in the world. Ira Daniel settled in Australia, married, and had children, but he found it difficult to support a family. Eventually, he turned to crime and wound up spending many years in prison. The son of an absent father, he too became an absent father to his own sons, who also suffered as a consequence.

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Author Biography

Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas at Austin

Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded and edited for twenty years (1970–89) the journal Research in African Literatures. He has written and edited a number of books on Anglophone African literatures and on African performers, among them Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Comparative Approaches to African Literatures (1994), Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (1999), Africa Talks Back: Interviews with Anglophone African Writers (2002), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009). Recently he has turned his attention to the life and career of Ira Aldridge, publishing Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius (2007), Ira Aldridge: The Early Years, 1807–1833 (2011), and Ira Aldridge: The Vagabond Years, 1833–1852 (2011).

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