by Tana Wojczuk
“The seasons turned backward”: Vermont, a Guide to the Green Mountain State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), written by workers of the Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration for the State of Vermont, 31.
some argued the crisis was caused by deforestation http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/john-l-sullivan-americas-first-superstar-athlete/.
“our philosophy e’er dreamt on”: Quoted in The Reporter (Brattleboro, VT), July 17, 1816, six days before Charlotte Cushman’s birth.
“Climbing trees was an absolute passion”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 13.
“tomboy”: Ibid.
“child-brother”: Ibid., 183.
“keener, more artistic, more impulsive”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 183.
“tyrannical” to her siblings: Ibid, 14.
“first disaster”: Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman, Rome, May 21, 1861, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
nervous exhaustion: “The Influence of Railway Traveling on Public Health,” Lancet, January 4, 1862.
chapter two: Quest
“that dark, horrible, guilty ‘third tier’ ”: Claudia D. Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters,” American Quarterly 27, no. 5, Special Issue: Victorian Culture in America (December 1975): 575–84.
“Pastors, deacons, church members”: Charles Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1867).
“assumed the actors must be depraved”: Meredith Bartron, “The Tenter-Hooks of Temptation: The Debate over Theatre in Post-Revolutionary America,” Gettysburg Historical Journal 2, article 8 (2003).
The theatre’s marble facade shone creamy white: Phillip Harry, Tremont Theatre 1843 (Painting), Oil on Panel, 34.92 x 40.96 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“seemed a man of quick, irritable feelings”: Frances Williams-Wynn, Diaries of a Lady of Quality (London: Longman Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), 288.
families in the pit: Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The ladies glinted like constellations: Charlotte Cushman to Unknown, Walnut St. Theatre, January 1, 1842, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
Throughout Charlotte’s audition Mrs. Wood was quiet: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 20.
“that such a voice, properly cultivated”: Ibid.
chapter three: Transformation
The water of the Mississippi: Walt Whitman, “Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, March 6, 1848.
“the dwellings would speedily disappear”: Francis Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Oxford University Press, 2014), originally published 1832.
Near the St. James was the fashionable Esplanade Avenue: City descriptions from maps of nineteenth-century New Orleans at the Library of Congress.
four-thousand-seat auditorium: New Orleans Bee, December 1, 1835, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers. Manuscript/Mixed Material.
The walls and ceiling were brightly painted: Nellie Kroger Smither, A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans (New York: B. Blom, 1967).
struggled to fill the cavernous space: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 22.
“The worst Countess we have had the honor of seeing”: New Orleans Bee, December 4, 1835, quoted in Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 28.
“Miss Cushman can sing nothing”: New Orleans Bee, April 12, 1836, quoted in ibid., 28.
“bearable”: Quoted in Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman (Boston: Yale University Press, 1970).
Her tone was now “aspirated”: James Murdoch, The Stage, 1880, quoted in The Cambridge Handbook to American Theatre, 237.
“Never fell in love with a lord”: Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Stage (Philadelphia: Parmlee & Co, 1870), 133.
“I went on with tolerable composure”: Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Vol II, Macbeth (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincot & Co., 1873), 415–25.
“fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”: Ibid.
“pythoness”: “Miss Cushman as Meg Merrilies,” New York Times, January 23, 1887. She was called pythonic many times throughout her career.
At night she climbed up to the garret of the house: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman.
“a couple of begrimed men in shirt-sleeves”: Logan, Before the Footlights, 72.
short, fat, and four-foot-ten-inches tall: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 22–23.
“was almost insane on the subject”: Maeder, quoted in Price, A Life of Charlotte Cushman, 16–17.
“She made the people understand the character that Shakespeare drew”: Waters, Charlotte Cushman, 5.
“the Slaughterhouse”: Thomas Bogar, Thomas Hamblin and the Bowery Theatre: The New York Reign of “Blood and Thunder” Melodramas (New York: Springer, 2017), 3.
chapter four: The Star of the Bowery
“tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1913), 317.
“like pictures on the wall”: Firsthand descriptions of rail travel from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 52–56.
“train-induced fatigue”: Ibid., 58, quoting The Lancet.
“howl like a dog”: Ibid.
men in dark suits with worried expressions: Financial panic began at the end of 1836.
“as if he could clutch almost anything in his talons”: Lydia Marie Child, quoted in Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 83.
charred mass stretching seventeen blocks: Herbert Asbury, “The Great Fire of 1831,” New Yorker, July 26, 1930.
Copper roofs poured down themselves: Eliza Leslie, “Gleanings and Recollections: No 1, The New York Fire,” Parley’s Magazine, January 1838, 30–33.
a pair of gum arabic shoes: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Vol. 1 Young Man in New York 1835–1849 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
He told her she was exactly what he was looking for: Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 146–47.
“If a philosopher wishes to observe”: Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1846), 174.
Hamblin had drilled peepholes for police: Ibid., 175.
when an actor playing a king pretended to fall asleep: Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, November 28, 1832, quoted in Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 100–101.
“amused themselves by throwing pennies”: Ibid.
“rain of vegetable glory”: Quoted in Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, 28.
“Throw not the pearl of Shakespeare’s wit before the swine of the bowery pit” went one popular saying: Washington Irving compared the gallery gods to “animals” and the theatre itself to Noah’s Ark.
“Theatre is divided into three and sometimes four classes”: Quoted in Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, 43.
“licks the joints, but bites the heart”: Known as “Lasegue’s Dictum.” Ernst-Charles Lasegue, nineteenth-century French physician, 1864.
“ugly beyond average ugliness”: “Charlotte Cushman,” New York Times, February 19, 1876.
chapter five: American Genius
“after some important event”: James Henry Wiggin, “A House and a Name,” The Bostonian Vol. 1, 1894–95, 92.
“to create is the proof of a Divine presence”: Quoted in Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 29.
The joke was that “more members of both houses”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 28.
“bull in black silk�
��: Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland (London: William Heinemann, 1894), 101.
“harsh, but harmonious”: “The Career of Charlotte Cushman,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 18, 1876.
“magnificently attired”: Quoted in Waters, Charlotte Cushman.
“without injuring the harmony of the verse.”: Quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 39.
“My Dear Darling Sister”: Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress.
“The ground liquified under me”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman.
chapter six: Gypsy Queen
“suffer bodily to cure my heart-bleed”: Ibid.
“catch some inspiration”: “Charlotte Cushman: Her Debut as Meg Merrilies,” Robinson Locke Scrapbook, 139, New York Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 42.
she heard one gypsy say to another: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 149.
behind him in the darkness he heard a sound: Ibid.
imagines the character as an emblem of romantic wildness: John Keats, “Meg Merrilies,” 1818, poetryfoundation.org.
Charlotte crept into the gypsy tent: Mary Anderson, A Few Memories (New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1896), 37.
“strange, silent spring”: Ibid.
“If ever the dead come back among the living”: Daniel Terry, Guy Mannering, or, the Gypsy’s Prophecy (Boston: Wells and Lily, 1823).
“so wild and piercing, so full of agony”: “Women Who Have Assayed the Role of Hamlet,” New York Herald, June 11, 1899.
more time to rush backstage: Ibid., 152.
she heard a knock: Quoted in Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 149.
“How,” the artist asked incredulously: Ibid., 150.
“She seems to identify herself so completely”: Walt Whitman, “About Acting,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 4, 1846.
“The Meg Merrilies of Miss Cushman”: “Miss Charlotte Cushman’s Last Appearance in America,” Prompter, 1850, from the Brander Matthews Collection, Houghton Theatre Library, Harvard University.
“Unless one does”: Augustin Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 135.
“noble frenzy of eccentric genius”: “Charlotte Cushman, The Versatilities of a Great Career,” New York Clipper, nd (likely 1876), clipping from Charlotte Cushman Collection, Library of Congress.
Edmund Simpson, Charlotte’s new boss: Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, “Simpson, Edmund,” in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 625.
He had hair that curled up from his brow: Description from an image in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Collection.
Simpson had been an actor but taken up managing: James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, “Edmund Simpson,” in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1909).
the African Grove: Bruce McConachie, American Theatre in Context: From the Beginnings to 1870, Ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144–45.
lame in both legs: F. B. Sanborn, “A Concord Note Book: Ellery Channing and His Table-Talk,” The Critic, Volume 47 (Berkeley: University of California, 1905).
“I have felt what it is to be defenseless”: Charlotte Cushman to Park Benjamin, October 13, nd.
chapter seven: Descent into Five Points
“always given to actresses of little or no position”: Annie Hampton Brewster, “Miss Cushman,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 1878.
“I was at the mercy of the man”: Ibid.
“a large proportion of those connected with the Stage”: Quoted in Stephanie Rosa Galipeau, “Victorian Rebellion in Drag: Cushman and Menken Act Out Celebrity,” master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2003, 32.
“studying that bare skeleton of a part”: Quoted in Brewster, “Miss Cushman.”
around the lake grew a row of slaughterhouses: Five Points details from Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
“narrow ways, diverging to the left and right”: Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: A. and W. Galignani, 1842), 104.
Middle-class tourists might pay to go “slumming”: Ted Chamberlain, “Gangs of New York: Fact vs. Fiction,” National Geographic (online), March 23, 2003.
“hot corn girls”: Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), originally published in 1927.
decorating their mantels with pictures: Chamberlain, “Gangs of New York.”
“every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell”: Ibid.
crisscrossed with shortcuts: Joe Cowell, Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America: Interspersed with Anecdotes and Reminiscences of a Variety of Persons, Directly or Indirectly Connected with the Drama During the Theatrical Life of Joe Cowell, Comedian (New York : Harper & Brothers, 1844), 56.
Charlotte carefully navigated an alley knee deep with filth: Ibid.
The galleries were draped in a swath of baize: Ibid.
the Park was the only one considered fashionable: Trollope, Domestic Manners.
The Park had its own infamous “third tier”: Rosemarie Bank, Theatre Culture in America 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
She reaches for him, but he roughly pushes her away: Details and dialogue from George Almar’s stage adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, first produced in 1838.
“the most intense acting ever felt on the park boards”: Walt Whitman, “About Acting,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 14, 1846.
chapter eight: First Love
Sully threw out his first painting of Charlotte: Thomas Sully, Diary. New York Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Archive.
Inside the front cover: Charlotte Cushman, Diary, Columbia University Butler Library Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Charlotte thought marriage between men and women was foolish: Letters between Charlotte Cushman and Helen Hunt Jackson, Colorado College archive.
“bold and impulsive”: Cushman, Diary.
She paid $100 for the ticket: Ibid.
“imagination unchecked”: Cushman, Diary.
“I have always said that time’l show”: Charlotte Cushman to Mary Eliza Cushman, March 2, 1845, Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress.
“more wretched”: Cushman, Diary.
Charlotte had to rush to Sallie’s room: Ibid.
“glaringly beautiful”: Ibid.
chapter nine: Enemies Abroad
“Whether she means it as a compliment or not”: Cushman, Diary.
“quite ill-tempered”: Charlotte Cushman to Mary Eliza Cushman, December 2, 1844, Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress.
Charlote and Sallie moved into modest rooms in Convent Garden: “Some Recollections of the Princess Theatre,” Gentleman’s Magazine vol. 262, 69, https://books.google.com/books?id=tkc3AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=%22charlotte+cushman%22+fell+on+her+knees+london+theatre+manager&source=bl&ots=uoULdvTpnQ&sig=qtKfzvnzrQgN8ISYANRKfvPvtw8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF1IaBq73cAhVRMawKHYbtB-IQ6AEIOTAD#v=onepage&q=%22charlotte%20cushman%22%20fell%20on%2her%20knees%20london%20theatre%20manager&f=false.
At the theatre, Maddox invited her into his office: George Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Note-Book (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1860), 186–87.
Maddox recognized at once the energy of Lady Macbeth: Ibid., 213.
“looking very well and is in very good spirits”: Charles Cushman to Mary Eliza Cushman, London, May 1, 1845, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
Forrest had made his debut in a female role: Bordman, Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 268–69.
“iron repose, perfect precision of method”: William Winter, quoted in William Rounesville Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, American Tragedian Vol. 2 (New York: J. B. Lippincott & Company, 1877)
, 651.
“It was something worse than ridiculous”: “Princess Theatre,” Guardian and the Observer, February 24, 1845.
“emptiness of ambition”: Ibid.
One dissenting observer: Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Note-Book.
“don’t like Americans in the newspapers”: Charlotte Cushman to Mary Eliza Cushman, March 28, 1845, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
“brilliant and triumphant success”: Ibid.
“I have not slept for three nights and look like a ghost”: Charlotte Cushman to Mary Eliza Cushman, April 17, 1845, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
chapter ten: Lady Romeo
“a mess of dialogue from [Garrick’s] own pen”: “Miss Cushman and Miss S. Cushman,” Observer, January 4, 1846.
“in no uncertain terms the difficulty”: Quoted in Lisa Merrill, “Charlotte Cushman,” in Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman: Great Shakespeareans, Ed. Gail Marshall, Volume VII, Chapter 4 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 141.
Macready sent Charlotte a dagger from one of his own performances: Celia Laquau, “The Macready Dagger,” 1892, unpublished manuscript, Folger Shakespeare Library.
“disclosed that ardent, passionate disposition”: “Haymarket Theatre: The Misses Cushman as Romeo and Juliet,” Scotsman, January 3, 1846. In the same newspaper is a report that references Hamlet in talking about brain disease as one of the worst ailments “flesh is heir to.”
“the bend of the knee, slight sneer of the lip”: Quoted in Merrill, “Charlotte Cushman.”
Charlotte was a convincing swordsman: New York Daily Tribune, November 9, 1860.
“The character of Romeo is one which every man of sentiment takes to himself”: Quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman.
“the vivifying spark”: “Haymarket Theatre: The Misses Cushman.”
“entered well into the character”: George Rowell, Queen Victoria Goes to the Theatre (London: P. Elek, 1978), 74. Quoted in Merrill, “Charlotte Cushman,” as a footnote.