The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Mrs Ternan still commanded leading and juvenile parts; she played opposite Pritchard as Lady Teazle, Lucy of Lammermoor, Mrs Haller in Kotzebue’s The Stranger, Pauline in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons, as well as her usual Shakespearean roles. It was Fanny, though, who was given the best billing, liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks, as ‘The Wonderful Dramatic Prodigy!’ Fair enough, because the prodigy worked quite as hard and probably harder than her mother, starring in a great variety of different farces and short plays especially chosen to show off her talents as a virtuoso mimic. They had names like The Young Actress, or the Manager Perplexed and required her to play characters as diverse as ‘a stage-struck Yankee’, a French itinerant musician (male), a Scottish lass called Effie Heatherbloom – she danced the Highland Fling – a quaint rustic and an old woman. She danced the polka with Maria and the hornpipe by herself. She played the young Napoleon with Nelly as her Josephine. She recited her own verses, sang songs of her own composition and played Richard III in a special presentation of Shakespeare’s final act.

  Maria had her glory, too, as General Tom Thumb – an imitation of the real American midget, who was touring England with his wife at the time to great acclaim. Together Nelly and Maria were the Babes in the Wood and the little princes in Richard III, and they filled in any other children’s parts needed by the company. Neither had Fanny’s extraordinary gifts, but both were thoroughly drilled and taught; by the time a part reached Nelly, it had usually been played by their mother as a child, by her Aunt Louisa, by Fanny and then by Maria. Shaped and smoothed by family tradition, it was something she could fit into as easily and naturally as a handed-down garment.

  (illustration credit 4.1)

  Their days and nights were passed in and out of lodgings, the backstages of theatres and the railway carriages that carried them from town to town. Where most of their peers were limited to a close and settled domestic circle, they were expected to be adventurous and resourceful; inevitably they saw and knew far more than other girls. This is how Fanny Kemble described life for two young actresses on a north-country circuit:

  I suppose that a merrier life than that of these lasses, in the midst of their quaint theatrical tasks and homely household duties, was seldom led by … girls in any sphere of life. They learned and acted their parts, devised and executed, with small means and great industry, their dresses; made pies and puddings, and patched and darned, in the morning, and by dint of paste and rouge became heroines in the evening; and withal were well conducted, good young things, full of the irrepressible spirits of their age, and turning alike their hard home work, and light stage labour, into fun.1

  It’s a sunny account, and so it sometimes must have been; but when Kemble came to describe her own touring experiences, she found almost nothing but discomfort, distaste and misery to report, and she was notably silent on her own mother’s history as a child performer, abandoned by her foreign parents in England to earn her living before she could even speak the language. Merriment there might be, but some loss of innocence too; precocity, toughness and a thick skin were likely to be developed by a stage child.

  The ability to negotiate a salary with the manager, to extract a decent wage and a benefit night, were basic skills for all players, which Mrs Ternan naturally exercised on behalf of her daughters; but drumming up business for their benefit nights was something they had to do for themselves. The recommended method was to keep a list of names of likely people in each town you worked in and to call on as many as possible, a procedure satirized by Dickens in Nickleby but an essential part of the players’ business; the benefit still offered the only hope of making something above the basic wage. In a country company the players might expect to rehearse for four hours in the morning and then be in the theatre for five more in the evening; there were forfeits for being late for rehearsals or failing to comply with an order from the manager. Pay day was usually Saturday, and the children were sent off to church on Sunday, though the adult members of the company were often too tired. If you were sick, you were not paid. All of them had to contrive and stitch their costumes for both on-stage and off, do their hair and copy out their parts; mother and grandmother would help the children if they had time. Lodgings were usually over shops – chemists, tailors, chandlers – and not always clean; beds had to be shared. They might contrive a few meals for themselves, but on the whole they took what the landlady sent up, carried sandwiches and cake on their travels or had the standard cold meat, bread and ale supplied at railway junctions. Over the next few years the Ternan girls got to know the stations of most of the great cities almost as well as the theatres. Where the railway stopped, they went on by coach; in Ireland, at any rate, they noticed that some of the actors still walked.2

  They had an occasional base in Birmingham, where Mrs Ternan’s sister Louisa and her husband were settled. He was a professor of engineering and also a music lover, acting as a music and drama critic in his spare time; and Fanny took singing lessons in Birmingham when she stayed with her aunt and uncle.3 The Rochester cousins, who were prospering in the barge business, also offered an occasional haven. Grandmother Jarman travelled with them and did what she could, though she was growing old and infirm. Increasingly Fanny took a commanding position, both because of her earnings and her shared care for the education of the two younger girls; Nelly was her pet, on whom she lavished protective love.

  In York in the spring of 1845 they reaped a good deal of praise in the local press. They had several benefits and sold their own tickets from their lodgings in Petersgate, in the shadow of the minster. When they were not working, they could enjoy the other shows: The Chimes was one, a goblin story by Charles Dickens, in which an old London father dreams of his daughter. Nelly was six in March; if she dreamed of her missing father, she was kept too busy to repine. Soon her memories must have become faint and confused.

  Before the company moved on to Leeds, its ladies were asked to perform with a group of amateur gentlemen. These were the stage-struck officers from several local garrisons, eager to play in a farce and show off their talents as singers and dancers. There was, of course, no question of their own wives or sisters joining them on stage; hence the need for actresses. ‘One of the most numerous and respectable assemblages which has ever congregated within the walls of the York Theatre’ came to see the hybrid show, and the evening was such a success that it was repeated, this time for the benefit of the manager. It may have been the Ternans’ first encounter with a custom that was to be fateful to them, that of mixing amateur gentlemen with professional ladies.

  They remained touring in the north all summer, and then Mrs Ternan was offered work by Macready, who was preparing a season at the Princess’s Theatre in London. It meant being near her husband, even if there was nothing to be done for him; and professionally it was very important, since Macready was by far the most respected actor of the time, and his approval and support were worth a great deal more even than the money he paid. Actresses complained that he became so absorbed in his tragic roles that they emerged black and blue from certain scenes, but none turned down the chance to work with him.

  Macready had also got involved with amateurs, albeit reluctantly, and found the encounter somewhat bruising. In his case he had been asked to coach a friend intent on performing Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. The friend was Dickens who, in a fever of enthusiasm for the enterprise, declared himself ‘born to be the Manager of a Theatre’.4 Macready’s loyalty was stretched, and he was more aggrieved still when Dickens’s production, which was played to a glittering invited audience at Fanny Kelly’s theatre, received a better notice in The Times than had ever been given to him.5 The Times believed, rightly, that ‘publicity will not be disagreeable to the persons immediately concerned’, and its review was reprinted in several other papers. Macready took to his bed for two days.

  He was up again to greet Mrs Ternan. The situation required tact. He was planning to put on both Hamlet and Lear in October, in whi
ch she had always played Ophelia and Cordelia; but now, for the first time, he offered her Gertrude and Regan. If she felt offended, she made no sign; at forty-three it may even have come as something of a relief to her. During the winter she accompanied him to Dublin, taking the children, to whom Macready showed a kindly face; he referred to Fanny as ‘a very sweet child’. Back in London he continued to give Mrs Ternan work at the Princess’s until the spring.

  After another summer tour in the north the Ternans returned, this time to the Surrey Theatre in the Blackfriars Road, again with Macready, for the autumn season of 1846. Mrs Ternan found a lodging above a fire-engine manufacturer. It was close to the theatre but had nothing else to commend it, and suggests that their poverty was now biting. The district left an unpleasant impression on Fanny, who later described its rows of dirty little houses, streaked with soot and rain, where tired men sat out on the steps in their shirt-sleeves and swarms of children tumbled about in the street.6 No one would have chosen lodgings in Blackfriars if they could have afforded something better; but there, on 17 October, when Mrs Ternan herself was playing Lady Macbeth at the theatre, came the news of the death of Thomas Ternan in the Bethnal Green Insane Asylum.

  A rumour went about that he ended his life by his own hand. If so, it was not entered on the death certificate, which stated simply ‘general paralysis’, and he was not denied Christian burial. His body was brought to Christ Church, Blackfriars, for the funeral, attended by his brother William from Rochester and a small cluster of friends. Children were not taken to funerals; they must have spent a cheerless day in their dirty Blackfriars lodging.

  Within a few days their mother was, necessarily, on stage again, appearing as Portia. Macready, much affected, wrote in his diary, ‘Heard of the death of Mrs Ternan’s husband – died in a lunatic asylum in Bethnal Green. How light are our woes when compared with such a weight of affliction! I think I ought to ascertain if I can at all assist or relieve her.’7 He was as good as his word, inviting her to visit him with her mother and all three children and offering them what help he could in the form of £10. Mrs Ternan insisted that it should be a loan, but Macready, ‘unwilling to hamper her with a sense of a debt’, asked that it should be transferred as a gift to her little girl; presumably this was Fanny.8

  An obituary notice spoke kindly of the qualities the dead man had ‘inherited from his birth and education … Poor Ternan, peace to his memory! A kinder heart never existed, and he was truly entitled to the character of an Irish gentleman.’ His widow, it added, had been ‘a prize in the lottery of life’.9 When news of the death reached Doncaster, the lodge of Freemasons gave a benefit for the family of ‘Brother Ternan’.10 Apart from these small charities, they continued to have only themselves to depend on. Nelly was now seven, Maria nine and Fanny eleven, growing rather big for an infant prodigy.

  But for the moment Mrs Ternan must continue. Again they moved, to Dublin first, where Nelly played the child Orestes to the Iphigenia of Helen Faucit and Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. Mrs Ternan appeared with Macready. They all acted with Fanny Kemble, back from America with her disastrous marriage behind her, separated from her two daughters and painfully reconstructing her career. They also performed with Vestris and Mathews.

  Another long litany of Irish and northern towns unrolled before them. They could not afford to rest for long, and soon sickness attacked the family again; grandmother Jarman fell ill and could no longer tour with them. They took her to Louisa in Birmingham, and there she died of cancer in the summer of 1849. Nelly was ten.

  That year Mrs Ternan was in Newcastle once more, playing Juliet to the Romeo of an American friend, Charlotte Cushman. Female Romeos were a commonplace of the nineteenth-century theatre, but none was more appreciated than that of the remarkable Miss Cushman, who was given a tremendous reception in England for her playing of male parts, including Hamlet. She carried off these feats with intense seriousness; and on this occasion the Newcastle Chronicle spoke warmly of both ladies, praising Mrs Ternan for her elegance and spirit, and adding that she was highly respected both on and off the stage.

  As for her children, Fanny delivered her usual stirring version of Collins’s ‘Ode on the Passions’ and also led in a musical farce called The Waterman, in which both her younger sisters sang, acted a pair of quarrelling rustic lovers and were thought exceedingly clever. So they doubtless were; they had been touring with the piece for at least four years, and Nelly, with her blue eyes and golden curls, usually brought the house down. In Wexford her performance – and parentage – had been celebrated in verse:

  Fair child of nature, young and gay.

  Sweet as smiling flowers in May;

  Say, has the germ of genius sprung

  Within thy heart so pure and young …

  But coming time shall see thee rise,

  The wonder of admiring eyes;

  Sharing still the well-known fame,

  That gilds thy honoured mother’s name.11

  Popular as the children were, Mrs Ternan and Fanny agreed that she could not stretch out her career as a prodigy any longer. Newcastle, where she had started, was the obvious place to announce her departure from the stage, possibly for good or at least ‘till she is of more mature age’. Fanny composed her own long farewell to her audience. It ended rousingly:

  For your past kindness, which my thoughts enshrine –

  Your generous patronage of me and mine,

  My fervent gratitude shall through life’s length

  Grow with my growth, and strengthen with my strength!

  And trust me, dearest patrons, the fond theme

  Of my day musings, and my nightly dream,

  Shall be that blessings may your wishes crown –

  Blithe be your lives and prosperous your town;

  May the full tide of commerce hither flow –

  Brisk be its trade, and ‘Merry the keel row’!

  And now farewell – my patrons and my friends

  For here, the drama of my childhood ends,

  Let it but end to recommence again –

  A second part, but of a higher strain.

  (illustration credit 4.2)

  The smiles that early woke the youthful flame,

  In after time the actress yet may claim,

  And let it soothe this moment’s deep regret,

  I go to learn – but never to forget.

  No wonder the people of Newcastle appreciated Fanny – she could turn a good couplet and not forget the essential matters of commerce and coal barges in the process. They cheered her, and the Chronicle printed the whole of her farewell verses.12

  For the next five years the Ternans continued their regular progression through the provinces and Ireland, with occasional London appearances. At times they disappear from sight altogether, either resting with cousins or working in theatres whose playbills have not survived. Macready’s retirement from the stage in 1851 meant the end of a useful association. Fortunately his place was taken by another actor, Samuel Phelps, whose Shakespeare productions gave Mrs Ternan a good deal of employment. Phelps took over Sadler’s Wells theatre in the mid-forties when it was in a state of Hogarthian brutishness.* By disciplining the audience mercilessly – he excluded babies, beer, pipe-smoking and food – and embarking on a programme of serious drama, he transformed the theatre within a decade into a respectable and, indeed, highly respected place. His particular enthusiasm was always Shakespeare, and he played almost the entire canon during his years at the Wells. His triumph was such that in the winter of 1854 he took his company, including Mrs Ternan, to Windsor Castle for a royal command performance.13

  Fanny’s farewell to the stage at Newcastle was not as absolute as she may have hoped. She continued to perform here and there, at Glasgow and Doncaster, and at the Lyceum in London; but her ambition was to become a singer, and she began to give modest song recitals after the plays on her mother’s provincial tours as well as a few concerts in Ireland. In the autumn of 1853 she a
chieved her first London concert, at the Exeter Hall in the Strand, a huge place seating 2,000; but although a kindly reviewer said she was ‘destined to be one of our first native singers’, the public failed to see her as another Jenny Lind or Adelaide Kemble. According to one of her father’s theatrical friends, she had lost the remarkable beauty of her childhood, taken to wearing green spectacles, and acquired the reputation of a bluestocking. ‘She lived in a world of her own … her selection of songs was the highest of high art, consequently caviare to the general public’ declared the old trouper, who probably liked nothing but a sentimental ballad himself.14 It was hard on Fanny, who laboured so energetically to fulfil her serious ambitions and had to keep falling back on the sort of work she did not want, playing minor theatrical parts at the Lyceum and the Olympic.

  Maria moved through the usual girl’s repertoire without ever becoming the star solo performer Fanny had been; but she was spirited, professional and popular with managements. She played the leading part of Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child at Drury Lane when she was fourteen and graduated to a permanent place with Charles Kean’s company at the Princess’s a few years later. If Nelly was working during her mid-teens, she made no particular mark; all the same she was being prepared for a stage career. What alternative was there for her? The girls had to be self-supporting; they had no money beyond what they earned, and they knew no way of earning money but the theatre. A young woman who had been on the stage was not likely to find a place as a governess or teacher in a school – respectable work but hard, lonely and, for girls who had been free, intolerably constricting. Their mother would not have allowed them to sink into the near-slavery of becoming a servant, seamstress or milliner. Through all her vicissitudes she seems to have clung to an ideal view of the theatre as a noble and civilizing profession – the theatre of Macready and Phelps – in which her daughters might follow in her footsteps. If in practice they did not find themselves playing Juliet or Lady Teazle, at least in the theatre they were known and among friends; they had a measure of independence and – in the London theatre especially – some degree of contact with the world of ideas and art.