Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated

Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated . Solon Robinson's collection of loosely interconnected stories depicting the drink‐doomed habitués of Five Points, a notorious Manhattan slum, was first published in mid‐1853 in the New York Tribune, then a year later was expanded into a hardcover best‐seller. Dramatizations, according to George Odell, soon “swept the stages with a blast second only to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.” New York saw no fewer than three popular versions during the 1853–54 season: Little Katy; or, The Hot Corn Girl by C. W. Taylor; Hot Corn; or, Little Katy at Barnum's American Museum; and The Hot Corn Girl at the Bowery Theatre. The versions varied greatly, often changing characters' names and, apparently, sometimes adding original materials. The colorful characters in the pieces were the missionary Rev. Mr. Pease; the supposedly reformed Wild Maggie and her father; the seamstress Athalia Lovetree, who marries a drunkard; the tragic youth Madalina, whose death spares her the life of prostitution her ragpicker mother would force her into; and Little Katy, a tot selling peanuts in winter and hot corn in summer, who dies after her drunken mother beats her for falling asleep and allowing a thief to steal her nightly quota of corn.