The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  2

  ‘Agreeable and beautiful talents’

  Nelly’s history begins with a matriarchy. Her mother and her grandmother, though neither was rich or highly educated, were both independent and enterprising professional women. In each case their husbands disappeared from the scene when the children were still small; Nelly’s mother was about ten when she lost her father, and Nelly herself was younger still and can have had very little memory of hers. Mother and grandmother were women who earned their own livings, organized their own careers and managed to bring up their families without the help of husbands, brothers or sons. This was something so rare in nineteenth-century England as to set them quite apart from the general experience.

  The stage was virtually the only profession in which this sort of independence was possible for women at this time.1 The microcosm of the theatre differed in almost every respect from the social world surrounding it. An actress could, for instance, command payment equal to that of a man, or better. She could make her own working contracts. Her horizons, instead of being limited to a domestic circle, were as wide as the English-speaking theatre. She could, and frequently did, flout the prevailing sexual rules. The admirable Fanny Kelly, a contemporary of Nelly’s mother, bore and brought up a daughter unassisted and never married. In the same generation Fanny Kemble left her husband when she found him tyrannous, and later divorced him. Mrs Siddons arranged her life so that she and her husband were never together. Lucia Elizabetta Vestris abandoned her first husband, and Mrs Abington paid hers an annual sum to keep away. Helen Faucit, a byword for respectability in the Victorian theatre, was the child of an actress who left her husband, and Helen’s early career was actually managed by her mother’s lover, the actor William Farren.2 Ellen Terry took husbands and lovers with a total disregard of what the world might say; both her children were illegitimate. Fanny Stirling, one of the finest of the mid-century actresses, separated from her husband and lived openly with another man, whom she was able to marry only at the end of her life; and so on. None of these was a wicked woman, but they lived by standards that were quite different from those of their contemporaries and much closer to those of the late-twentieth century.

  Still more remarkably, perhaps, women were accepted as directors and managers. At the very beginning of the century the Rochester circuit, which had theatres in a good number of Kentish towns, was managed by the efficient and popular Mrs Baker. In the 1830s the actress Louisa Nisbett managed first the Queen’s Theatre and then the Adelphi, ‘with all that character of taste and propriety which Lady-Managers seem to have a peculiar talent of imparting to such things. Admirable managers they are, and the influence they possess is really extraordinary’: so wrote a young theatre critic called Charles Dickens.3 Another actress, Elizabeth Yates, also managed the Adelphi for a while in the 1840s after the death of her husband; but the best known of the women managers was undoubtedly Lucia Vestris, who described herself as ‘the first of all dramatic Joan of Arcs’, and brought about a revolution in staging techniques during her twenty-five years at the Olympic, Covent Garden and the Lyceum between the 1830s and her death in the mid-fifties.

  The theatrical world was hierarchical, with the London stars at the top and the poorest of the provincial strolling players at the bottom of the heap; it was also relatively small and closely interconnected. The great stars depended on their earnings from regular tours of the provinces; they worked with the stock companies and got to know their managers and regular players well in the process. Equally the provincial companies were the nurseries of talent, and their star performers moved on into London. Tate Wilkinson, for example, who ran the York circuit in the last years of the eighteenth century, discovered or promoted the talents of a galaxy that included Mrs Jordan, Mrs Inchbald, Charles Mathews and John Kemble. The prompter in Wilkinson’s company for many years was John Jarman, Nelly Ternan’s grandfather.

  The children of actors tended to follow their parents onto the stage, and there was both intermarriage and a circulation of the younger or less successful brothers and sisters around the provinces. John Kemble’s brother Charles, for instance, married Marie Thérèse De Camp, bringing two great clans together and producing Fanny Kemble from their union; Miss De Camp had begun her stage career at six, as Cupid at Drury Lane, and later worked for Wilkinson. Her sister Adelaide worked as a girl on the Durham circuit with Stephen Kemble; one De Camp brother managed the Sheffield Theatre, another emigrated to America to become an actor there. Again, Charles Mathews married a clever actress called Anne Jackson, half-sister to Fanny Kelly: Anne’s actor father had died, and her mother had married another actor, one of the Irish Kellys, and when this husband abandoned her she asked her impresario brother-in-law, Michael Kelly, to train little Fanny for the stage. He did it so well that Fanny was earning the family’s bread by the time she was six, like Marie Thérèse.

  Macready, the son of a theatre manager, first saw his wife Kitty Atkins as a child performer of nine in Glasgow and began his wooing by persuading his own father to give work to her entire family – Mr Atkins as a stage painter, Mrs Atkins good only for delivering messages or playing bit parts; Macready called her a ‘female hick, or hickess’.4 He made Kitty leave the stage and successfully kept his children from it, but his action was unusual. Charles Kean, son of the great Edmund, was sent to Eton to put ideas of the theatre out of his head, but he could not resist the lure of the stage and made a highly successful career as an actor-manager. The son of Charles Mathews trained and practised as an architect for some years but, again, the draw of his parents’ world was irresistible; he became almost as celebrated a comic actor as his father, enjoyed a particularly successful professional partnership with Lucia Vestris, and became her second husband.

  All these couples and families knew one another as fellow workers and friends, and the Ternans were no exception. Nelly’s grandparents played with De Camps, Kembles, Mrs Siddons (née Kemble), Mrs Jordan and Charles Mathews; her mother played with Vestris, Edmund Kean and Macready; Charles Kean and his wife gave work to Mrs Ternan and all her daughters. There were quarrels and rivalries but also a sense of solidarity; and the solidarity was reinforced by the fact that the profession was disapproved of as much as it was admired.

  The theatre had its own customs, beliefs and laws of behaviour. While depending on the support of the society around, it maintained itself quite apart; and society showed towards it an intense curiosity. Actresses were the supreme objects of this curiosity. Their position was seen to be especially anomalous. They were certainly not ladies, since ladies, by definition, did not work: ‘A lady, to be such, must be a mere lady, and nothing else. She must not work for profit, or engage in any occupation that can command money.’5 Actresses worked for money and, at the same time, constantly represented ladies of the most exalted rank on stage; the decorum and polish of their representation was often held up as a model of fine, ladylike behaviour.

  To pretend to be what you were not and to make a good job of it made you morally suspect. Alongside the admiration was a steady stream of abuse directed against actresses on the grounds that their work was of its very nature damaging to character. The point was made by many writers throughout the century. In Fanny Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, which was published in 1814, her heroine Juliet has no hesitation in preferring the prospect of starvation to a perfectly good offer of work as an actress, because she considers its very nature to be corrupting. In the same year Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, although it addressed itself only to amateur players, held up the most skilful and enthusiastic participants to particular disapproval: Mary Crawford’s charm is part of her inauthenticity, she is a good role-player on stage because she is a practised role-player in life, and she is propelled by vanity and self-love. Three decades later Thackeray, as we have seen, uses a similar principle when he makes Becky Sharp the child of a theatrical family and herself a skilful amateur actress; her success springs in part from her ability to fake her feelings. In 18
50, in The History of Pendennis, he went further, and drew a professional actress, Emily Fotheringay. The emphasis of this portrait is precisely on the rift between the person young Pen falls in love with on stage – a drooping, romantic, poetic heroine – and the prosaic, uneducated and calculating character of the actress offstage. Even her name is false: it is not really Fotheringay but Costigan. Pen has to learn about this rift between appearance and reality as part of his sentimental and moral education: the implication is that this sort of deception, supremely exemplified in an actress, is what men have to look out for in all their dealings with women. Fotheringay/Costigan is a symbol of the inherent duplicity of all her sex as well as a socially unacceptable member of it – socially unacceptable, that is, to Pen’s family. She is, in fact, a scapegoat for her sex. And although Thackeray goes half-way to admitting that the Fotheringays of this world had little choice about how they were perceived by their admirers, he is too solidly committed to the point of view of the Pendennis clan not to treat her more harshly than he treats them.

  Elizabeth Prior, or ‘Bessie Bellenden’, who appeared for some years at the St James’s Theatre in spangles and then escaped into governessing, has already been mentioned in Chapter 1. She is Thackeray’s last equivocal heroine, and ‘Lovel the Widower’ was written at the end of his life, when he was acknowledged as the writer who came nearest to presenting the standards of gentlemen to his contemporaries. He is markedly ambivalent about her, showing her as deceitful but also brave, hard-working, attractive and even lovable: a fighter who uses whatever weapons are available to her in a world which he knew allowed her very few. Elizabeth’s past is not her fault, but it has made her a dangerous person to introduce into a conventional family. When that past is revealed, the young doctor who has been in love with her departs, sobbing with vexation: ‘It wasn’t fair not to tell me. It wasn’t fair … I couldn’t ask a party into my family who has been – who has been …’ – and he can’t even bring himself to say what she has been.

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica had set the tone for all this with its article on actresses, in 1797:

  There are some very agreeable and beautiful talents, of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration; but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution. The pecuniary recompense, therefore, of those who exercise them in this manner, must be sufficient, not only to pay for the time, labour and expence, of acquiring the talents, but for the discredit which attends the employment of them as the means of subsistence. The exorbitant rewards of players, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c are founded upon these two principles: the rarity and beauty of the talents, and the discredit of employing them in this manner. It seems absurd at first sight that we should despise their persons, and yet reward their talents with the most profuse liberality. While we do the one, however, we must of necessity do the other … Such talents, though far from being common, are by no means so rare as imagined. Many people possess them in great perfection, who disdain to make this use of them; and many more are capable of acquiring them, if any thing could be made honourably by them.

  The assumption behind these words seems to be that the exercise of any talent by a woman in public is a form of prostitution. Fanny Kelly, who was seven at the time the article appeared and, as we have seen, already working to keep her family fed, expressed her just fury with it later; and her determination to change such an attitude lay behind her attempt to establish a school for young actresses in the middle of the century.

  The association between prostitution and the stage was made over and over again. Of course theatres did attract prostitutes into the audience. Behaviour was often rough and riotous, and, in the first half of the century at least, drinking (and eating and smoking) took place unrestrainedly in the pit and the gallery; Mrs Jordan’s letters talk of riots, the constables being called in, and the theatre smelling like a taproom by the end of the evening.6 The atmosphere was one in which prostitutes could expect to find clients. Everybody knew, too, that actresses themselves were popular with gentlemen in search of beautiful companions, though the blame for this can hardly be laid entirely upon them. Fanny Kelly’s experience is instructive again: when the Earl of Essex tried to force his attentions on her, she turned him away angrily and reminded him that she was friendly with his wife, and that for her sake only she would continue to tolerate his acquaintance.

  Other actresses accepted what was oddly called the protection of their aristocratic admirers, the most famous among them being Dora Jordan, who bore ten children to the Duke of Clarence between 1794 and 1810 (she already had four when they met). Mrs Jordan, who invented her own name and was never married, was the foremost comédienne of her day, possibly the best-loved actress ever seen on the English stage, extolled by Hazlitt and Byron among others; but this did not prevent her from coming to a miserable end when the Duke decided he must marry a rich wife, and she grew too old and tired to go on working. Had his love continued and had the laws pertaining to royal marriages been what they are today, we might have had an actress as Queen of England in 1830 and one of her sons on the throne as King in 1837, in place of Queen Victoria.* The idea of this narrow escape naturally inflamed some British subjects, particularly those who held that she was a disgrace and deserved her wretched end.

  Mrs Jordan earned a great deal of money; she probably gave the Duke more financial help than he gave her at times during their association.7 Money, and mercenariness, particularly worried those who made it their business to comment on actresses. A Memoir of Madame Vestris published in the late 1830s alleged that actresses habitually made ‘a handsome living by seducing the sons of the nobility’.8 In practice only those skilful enough to get their admirers to the altar seem to have made sure of financial security by this means. Apart from this glittering handful, few achieved more than modest comfort, and many ended in destitution. Fanny Kemble, always a good witness, noted the pathetic gratitude of a seventy-year-old actress in Liverpool who got the part of Nurse to her Juliet and drew her own conclusions; the saying that ‘playhouses lead to workhouses’ was based in bitter truth. Even the Kemble family, though its members earned huge sums and achieved a social position of some eminence, never managed to match it with financial security. Fanny Kelly, also a star for many seasons, ended her long life penniless; a pension was got for her when she was in her nineties, from Gladstone, just in time to pay her funeral expenses.

  It was hard, if not impossible, for an actress to present an acceptable financial face to the world. If she was poor, she was considered feckless. If she married a rich man, she was an adventuress. If she bargained with managers, was careful with her money and tried to put some aside, she was accused of avarice. This was said of Miss O’Neill, of Mrs Siddons, Vestris and Jordan. Mrs Jordan suffered the cruellest fate of all: her royal lover, who had fondly watched her appear on stage throughout their twenty years together, made it a condition when he dismissed her that she should lose the care of her daughters should she return to the stage. Soon she was obliged to do so – she needed the money for her other children – and saw her daughters taken away; and so died alone. Of her sons, who were given titles and half absorbed into the aristocracy, the eldest committed suicide; another, Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, took to hanging about Drury Lane to see his mother’s old dressing room and spoke with understandably bitter disrespect of his father when he was on the throne as William IV.

  Actresses themselves sometimes worried about the moral aspect of their work, on the grounds that it encouraged personal vanity. Although some – Vestris, who kept her physical charm into her fifties, and Jordan in her happy years – clearly enjoyed exhibiting their talent and beauty, others were troubled by the public display of their bodies, always referred to as their ‘persons’. Fanny Kemble said more than once that she found performing profoundly distasteful and believed that the public exhibition of herself did a violence to her womanly dignity; she considered th
e excitement unwholesome and the personal exhibition odious. Another actress wrote of the consciousness that ‘one’s person was a target for any who paid to make it one’ – the idea of being a target well expressing her sense of vulnerability.9 Fanny Kelly became a literal target when one of her admirers, thrown into a state of excited indignation by her appearance on stage as a boy in breeches, aimed a pistol shot at her from the auditorium. Fortunately he missed, but he could hardly have conveyed the ambivalence of the admiration accorded to actresses more graphically. Breeches parts were enormously popular with audiences, which did not prevent critics from censuring the actresses who played them for their immodesty in dressing in men’s clothes.