Coram Boy speaks of the personal and sharply contrasting histories of a number of young people. Although the characters are fictional, what happens to them, and the conditions in which they lived are based in
historical reality. In the early 18th century,
young people were often especially badly treated by adults . Many children were either abandoned by their parents to fend for themselves, or lived with their family in dire poverty with the threat of premature death always present. The poor, like Meshak Gardiner, did not go to school; at best they worked, usually from the age of 8 or even earlier.
On the other hand, the children of the rich, boys like
Alexander Ashbrook, led very different lives. Although not entirely protected from disease, they could expect to live long and generally healthy lives not least because the hard work of generating their wealth and sustaining their rich lifestyle was undertaken by others. Some of those ‘others’ included not only household servants like Mrs Lynch, but also unseen workers in the sugar and cotton plantations of the West Indies in which, as the text hints, the Ashbrook fortune is based. The plantations depended on slavery to generate profits, used to purchase silk and sugar for their tea.
In the play, a young boy, an inmate of the Coram Hospital, makes friends with Aaron Dangerfield (the son of Alexander Ashbrook and Melissa Milcote). His name is Toby, and he is
the only black character in the play. There were a few black people living in England in the early 18th century, most of them employed as domestic servants. Their masters would often dress them in exotic clothing which, together with their colour, made them objects of curiosity, gawped and wondered at by those visiting the great houses in which they were employed. When Toby leaves the Coram Hospital to become a liveried servant he is not surprised when he learns that his employer will allow him to attend church on Sundays and have “one day off a year”.
Toby’s master (the loathsome Mr Gaddarn) abuses him and exploits him unmercifully. The
role of Toby is played by actor Akiya Henry. Akiya is black, and she talks about how the playing the part of Toby reinforced the importance to her of
understanding her personal history.