Our American Cousin is a three-act play by English playwright Tom Taylor. It is a farce featuring awkward, boorish American Asa Trenchard, who is introduced to his aristocratic English relatives when he goes to England to claim the family estate. The play premiered with great success at Laura Keene's Theatre in New York City in 1858, with Laura Keene in the cast, the title character played by Joseph Jefferson, and Edward Askew Sothern playing Lord Dundreary. The play's long-running London production in 1861 was also successful.
Joseph Jefferson as Asa Trenchard, the titular American cousin
Edward Sothern as Lord Dundreary, sporting his iconic "Dundrearies"-style sideburns
Laura Keene as Florence Trenchard
Playwright Tom Taylor
Tom Taylor was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.
Tom Taylor (photograph by Lock and Whitfield)
Caricature of Taylor by "Spy" in Vanity Fair, 1876
Poster for an 1868 revival of The Ticket-of-Leave Man
Taylor by Lewis Carroll, 1863