The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Even if she was careful not to appear seductive or mercenary, an actress must expect to be ‘despised by decent people’: so Mrs Patrick Campbell was told by her aunt in the 1880s.10 When the 47-year-old painter G. F. Watts proposed to the 17-year-old Ellen Terry in 1864, he explained that his chief motive was that he wanted to remove her from the ‘temptations and abominations of the stage’ and was prepared to compensate her parents financially for their loss of her earnings; and when he dismissed her from the marriage, he gave her a settlement which would be reduced if she returned to her career.11 At about the same time the daughter of Samuel Phelps was expelled from her boarding school at the request of a parent who discovered simply that she came from a family of actors: she hadn’t begun to be one herself, but no doubt she would soon be a victim of the vanity and ‘lax principles’ prevailing in theatrical circles. ‘Would any one of us wish our daughters to go on the stage?’ thundered the editor of Punch in the 1880s. ‘There can be but one answer to this. “No!” A well-brought-up girl would react to the stage in one of two ways, either recoiling in disgust at “life behind the scenes” and fleeing, or else succumbing to its corruption “until the fixed lines of the moral boundary have become blurred and faint”.’12 Punch grudgingly conceded that women brought up from childhood within the theatre might in some way be immunized against its moral infection, though it is hard to see how this process was meant to come about. In the next decade another journalist returned to the attack. ‘It is nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession … There is no school on earth so bad for the formation of character,’ wrote Clement Scott in 1898.13 Essentially his attitude was not very different from that of the encyclopédistes of the 1790s.

  The truth is that, to succeed as an actress, you needed to be a woman of exceptional courage, intelligence and self-reliance. You had to be prepared to work yourself to the bone, to ignore sickness, pregnancy and childbirth as well as bereavement and any other personal distress. You had to be tough enough to endure the harsh opinion of the world as well as homelessness and discomfort. You had to know how to be a queen or a model of ladylike composure on stage just after emerging from a dressing room with the rain pouring through the ceiling. Being an actress meant, more than anything, that you were prepared for a life of risk. Freedom – of a kind – and real work that was not domestic work, these set you apart from the general condition of women.

  Marriage outside the profession almost always meant giving it up and disappearing into obscurity, even if it was aristocratic obscurity; it seemed a good bargain to many, though some, on being widowed, returned to the stage, and one at least – Miss Paton – ran away from her aristocratic husband, Lord William Lennox, fled to America with an actor and became a working woman again. The actress heroine of Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse turns down the well-born diplomat who proposes marriage and opts for a nonentity of a husband who is in the theatre and will serve her and promote her career instead of detaching her from it. The scene in which she asks her diplomat if he would give up his career for her is, incidentally, a remarkable and brilliant statement of the feminist case. It was written in 1890, and James was clear that an actress was the right mouthpiece for these ideas; perhaps some had come through his friend Fanny Kemble, who found herself penniless, homeless and deprived of her children when she divorced her husband.

  Outstanding women appear as actresses throughout the century, sometimes among the most obscure provincial players. Mrs Charlotte Deans, who published her memoirs in 1837, ran away from a prosperous home to marry an actor and spent seventy years tramping the north of England and Scotland as a strolling player, appearing in theatres, trade halls and castles, to which she brought Molière, Shakespeare, Schiller, Otway, Vanbrugh, Centlivre, dramatizations of Walter Scott and even Coleridge’s play, Remorse. The family walked from town to town, sometimes carrying their children through snowdrifts. When she had borne ten children in these circumstances, her first husband died. She was thirty-five, and quickly remarried; her second husband was another actor, aged twenty-two. They continued to act together; she had seven more children and outlived him too; she was still touring on foot in her sixties and died at the age of ninety in 1859.14

  Marriage to a younger husband was not unusual among actresses. Lucia Vestris took Charles Mathews as her second husband in 1838, when he was thirty-five and she forty-one. It was said that the marriage was made primarily to enable them to visit America together without causing scandal; and that Vestris made full confession of her other previous lovers to Mathews (causing one fellow actress to exclaim at her remarkable memory). In spite of this it seems to have been a happy marriage, was highly productive professionally, and lasted until her death in 1856. Yet Mathews’s biographer, writing in 1879, came close to eliminating Vestris from his account of Mathews’s life. The biographer was Charles Dickens junior, and his attitude was after all a common enough Victorian one.

  This long preamble is necessary to the story of the Ternans if we are to see them in context and understand something of the world into which Nelly was born, to a mother of thirty-eight who throughout her life had never stopped travelling, in England, Scotland, Ireland and America; who was still better known to her public as Miss Fanny Jarman than Mrs Frances Ternan, though she had already given birth to two children; who was still playing Portia, Cordelia, Desdemona and her usual repertoire of youthful leading roles a few weeks before the birth and was ready to return to the stage again a few weeks later; who had been born into the Tate Wilkinson company, grown up in the Regency theatre, acted as a child with all its great names, and observed its values, rewards and dangers with a clear, intelligent eye.

  * In the next generation another royal prince, the second Duke of Cambridge, did actually marry an actress, Louisa Fairbrother, and lived in domestic happiness with her and their sons in Mayfair for the rest of his life; but even though he was not in the direct line, it had to be a morganatic marriage, which meant the children could not succeed to his title.

  3

  Family Saga

  1790–1845

  This is how Nelly’s grandmother started her stage career and her married life. A Yorkshire girl, she applied to Tate Wilkinson for work when she was twenty-one, calling herself Miss Errington, though her real name was a more down-to-earth Martha Maria Mottershed. Wilkinson took her on partly because there was a gap in the company caused by the sudden death of one of the company’s leading actresses, Mrs Georgiana Jarman, in the full bloom of her youth.

  The bereaved husband, John Jarman, was the company prompter. He had been with Wilkinson for a decade and is said to have been a lawyer before he took to the stage. His job was a good one, for a prompter did very much more than hold the book. He regularly played parts, understudied for all the men and made casting decisions in the manager’s absence; he kept a list of all the lodgings in the towns on the Yorkshire circuit; and he was the person who knew everything about the affairs of the company and to whom everyone turned when they had a problem. Evidently he took the new actress under his wing, and soon she was filling the gap left by Georgiana not only on stage but in private. Within a very short time Martha Maria was pregnant by Jarman. He was less quick to save her honour than he had been to attack her virtue, and the wedding took place, only three months before the birth of the child, by special licence in Doncaster on 15 October 1801.1 Wilkinson gave the whole company a free day.

  They moved straight on to Hull and ‘Miss Errington’ continued to travel the circuit and to appear on stage until three days before her confinement. On 8 February 1802 she gave birth to a daughter, Frances Eleanor Jarman, in her lodgings above a shop in Elephant and Castle Yard, Hull. Downstairs her husband continued to sell tickets for the night’s performance; within eight weeks she was back on stage again. Wilkinson grumbled at how often his ladies were ‘in the straw’, but he was kind-hearted, tolerant and worldly-wise; and the other women of the company were not going to despise Miss Errington
for a circumstance which was common enough, even if Miss De Camp, who was to marry Charles Kemble, and Miss Jackson, who was to marry the comedian Charles Mathews, did not allow themselves the same licence.

  Jarman put himself down as twenty-five on his wedding day, but since he’d been married for at least ten years to his first wife, this was probably a slip of the pen. Mrs Jarman continued to act and continued to bear children; a second daughter, Mary Anne, was born and died when Frances was one, and a third, Louisa, followed soon after. Before that – in fact, before she was two – Frances was appearing on stage as the child in Sheridan’s drama Pizarro and as another child in Monk Lewis’s musical pantomime Raymond and Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun. She was billed formally as ‘Miss Jarman’. Her professional début was evidently more important than her reception into the Church, for it preceded her christening by some months; this took place only in November 1804, at St George’s Church in Doncaster. Either her parents had been too busy to remember to arrange it or too much on the move to find time for it; religion seems to have played a very small part in the life of the family.

  Other children were born to the couple, but the only ones known to survive were Louisa and Frances, who was her mother’s pride. By the time she was five she was playing a whole range of parts. Wilkinson knew his audiences loved to see children on stage and obliged them whenever possible, though his own son John was nine before he started. Even where there were no lines, children could be sent on as pages, or fairies, or part of a crowd; and so they grew up knowing the business from the start, moving from lodging to lodging, with the backstage as home and the company as family. They learnt to dance and sing and devise their own costumes. They absorbed the language of Shakespeare and Sheridan. They worked by night and slept when they could; from the time they could walk, work and play were almost indistinguishable in their lives. They lived apart from the other world of people with settled homes and habits; and very early must have understood that, while they commanded applause and admiration, they were also sometimes reviled. Wilkinson always gave his players their honorary title of ‘Their Majesties Servants’ on the playbills; he also noted in his memoirs the view of a certain Mr Garwood, a Low Churchman, who declared that no player, or child of a player, was entitled to Christian burial, because all were damned eternally.

  Wilkinson went to meet his maker’s judgement in 1803, before Frances was launched. Soon she was playing the Boy in The Children in the Wood, Fleance in Macbeth, Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, the small Duke of York in Richard III. The company continued under young John Wilkinson; and, as before, its most successful members continued to move away to London, where Covent Garden and Drury Lane offered more glittering rewards; but the Jarmans were a fixture. They travelled the same circuit, usually going from York to Leeds, on to Pontefract; back to York, then Wakefield, Doncaster and Hull; with occasional stops at Beverley or forays as far as Sheffield. They did the same plays – Shakespeare, Otway, Sheridan, Mrs Inchbald, sometimes Milton’s Comus – and then innumerable farces, pantomimes and musical entertainments, whose authors were never named on the playbills. Sometimes there were dancing dogs; sometimes trick effects, like the ‘Italian Shadows’, in which lights were used to make the characters appear as tall as leaping giants. Moonlight was produced by getting a boy on a ladder to hold a pair of candles behind some gauze. Young actresses recited William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Passions’ as a set piece between plays, performed comic or patriotic monologues, danced the hornpipe or put on military uniform and went through mimic manoeuvres. The company continued to receive visits from the great, among them Mrs Siddons, with whom little Frances acted in Leeds in 1805. In 1810 came Mrs Jordan, whose charm and beauty no other comic actress could equal; with her both Mrs Jarman and her daughter acted on several occasions.

  Mrs Jordan wrote her own account of conditions on the Yorkshire circuit at this time.2 At Leeds she found her dressing room floor so wet that she had to stand on her great coat while she was changing. At Hull the audience cracked nuts and threw the shells at the stage; ‘they drink porter and about 10 o’clock actually eat bread and cheese … By the time the performance is over, the House and stage smell like a taproom’. The following year, in the same city, there was ‘a set of drunken sailors in the boxes, who wanted to come behind the scenes, and there was very nearly a riot … Wilkinson behaved very resolutely and well by sending for the constables and having them forced out of the House. We could not go on with the play, which I was very glad of, as I got home very soon.’

  Drunken sailors were not the worst she had to face. One letter from an unknown correspondent, received while she was in Yorkshire, told her that God had ‘allowed me to make use of magic for a certain time, and that he was only watching for a good opportunity to send me to the gulph of hell’. ‘What an idea to entertain of the mercy and justice of a great Being!’ remarked this intelligent woman; all the same, hatred and malice like this is disconcerting.

  Frances Jarman was nine when she played in Andrew Cherry’s The Soldier’s Daughter with Mrs Jordan as the Widow Cheerly – it was normally her mother’s part – at the Theatre Royal, York. In her letters from York that August of 1811 Mrs Jordan commented that the houses were poor, and it seemed that young Wilkinson was on the verge of ruin. She was right. He kept the company going for a couple of seasons more but with increasing difficulty. In January 1812 the whole Jarman family twice appeared in Hull with Mrs Siddons; it was her last season on stage and the last season of the Wilkinson management, which was disbanded in 1813. The actors scattered, picking up what work they could in other travelling groups. Jarman seems to have found nothing, perhaps because he was ill; and by 1814 he had either died or disappeared from the scene, leaving his young widow or wife and children to fend for themselves.

  What they felt about his loss is unrecorded; but Mrs Jarman and her daughters made a brave and determined little team. Frances was twelve, Louisa ten. They moved south to Bath, where there was a flourishing resident company. For the mother there were no more leading parts – she was glad to play Nurse to young Macready’s Romeo – but there were prospects for the daughters. And in Bath Frances, blonde, fine-featured, graceful and obviously gifted, was nurtured through the awkward years, playing a rather mature Duke of York to Edmund Kean’s Richard III in 1815 and giving valiant recitations of the popular poems of the day. At seventeen she graduated to Perdita and Jeanie Deans in one of the innumerable adaptations of Scott, and was found ‘highly interesting’ by John Genest, the historian of the British stage, who resided in Bath and acted as self-appointed expert on the status and progress of British actors and actresses; he described her as ‘somewhat above middle size, slender’ and noted her ‘flexible and intelligent features’.

  The following year she played Juliet to her mother’s Nurse, and then a whole range of young Shakespearean parts was open to her – Miranda, Ophelia, Cordelia, Beatrice, Rosalind – together with all the Scott heroines. She got an offer from Covent Garden, but either she was too shy or her mother held out for more money and better parts than they could promise. At twenty her mother took her to Dublin, where she was an immediate success. People spoke of a second Eliza O’Neill, whose beauty had been such that men were supposed to have fainted at the sight of her, and whose prudence was such that she kept her head through it all, made a good marriage and left the stage for ever. But there was no husband in view for Fanny Jarman, and after triumphing at Dublin she embarked on a tour of Ireland, still accompanied by her careful mother.

  In Sligo she proved especially popular, playing Juliet, Belvidera and Lady Teazle to an audience bulging with the bored gallants of the neighbourhood, officers and landowners’ sons; on at least one occasion they were so rowdy that, as in Hull, the police had to be called out to quiet them. Still, she enjoyed herself, was invited to the houses of the gentry, and made the acquaintance of a good number of local people. Her engagement was for a fortnight, but at its end a deputation arrived to press her to give the
m another fortnight. The gallery joined its voice – ‘Arrah, Miss Jarman! Won’t you give us six nights longer?’ – and she agreed to stay on. A few nights later, after the performance, a gentleman she had already met several times called at the stage door. His curricle and horses were outside, he announced: would she allow him to escort her to the house of his cousin, a nobleman residing nearby, who was most eager to entertain the visiting star?

  Flattering as the invitation was, and pressing as it became, Miss Jarman declined and would be neither persuaded nor hustled. The next day her mother made inquiries and found that the supposed host was not in his Sligo house at all but away in England. Soon Sligo buzzed with the true story: that the gentleman had planned to abduct and disgrace Miss Jarman – in short, to have her raped. He was acting for one of his gambling creditors, who offered to cancel the debt if he would deliver the actress into his hands. It suited most men to believe that a virtuous actress was as likely as an honest thief. Mrs Jordan was raped as a girl by her Irish manager, Richard Daly, at the outset of her career; her biographer commented that ‘brutal seduction’ was a common practice with Irish gentlemen, who considered themselves above the law in this respect, and added, ‘Who would have believed in the virtuous resistance of an actress?’3 What made the affair of Fanny Jarman and the gentleman of Sligo notable was not his attempt but her successful self-preservation. She became a byword for purity.

  For the next four years, Fanny Jarman worked steadily as a touring star all over Ireland and England. In 1824 she acted with the rising young tragedian Macready at Dublin; it was the beginning of a long professional collaboration and personal friendship. In the same year her mother retired from the stage, and Fanny became the breadwinner of the family. Her sister attempted to follow in her footsteps, but she never achieved the same success.