In the spring of 1855 Mrs Ternan, Fanny and Maria were all three working in London, mostly at the Princess’s; and now for the first time they acquired something like a permanent home. They rented Park Cottage in Northampton Park: charmingly named, though the park was purely notional. There were brick fields and a cattle market nearby; the little house stood on ground squeezed between the Balls Pond Road and the North London Railway, and was neither central nor convenient, being part of the new, spreading northern suburb of Islington and surrounded by what had until lately been fields and market gardens, now transformed into a chaos of rank grass strewn with broken crockery, bricks and builders’ rubble, and marked out into ‘eligible plots of building ground’ with wooden poles: Fanny said they looked like gibbets.15 Few of the roads were made up, though Park Cottage was at least tacked on to the end of a neat terrace, St Paul’s Place.
The stucco face of the cottage looked north, and a twist of four railinged steps led up to the front door. Inside a steep flight of stairs plunged straight down to the basement, but to the left there was a pleasant small sitting room with one window facing north, and to the right a second room to match. Through this second room lay a third with a window to the west; this was all the accommodation above ground level. The basement rooms had only half-lights on to the pavement, again facing north, except for the flagged washroom opening into the tiny yard, where the outdoor privy stood. One basement room was a bedroom, one a kitchen. If you visit the house today, you wonder how four women squeezed in, together with the maid they must have needed.†
You can see what attracted the Ternans, because the little house has a certain awkward elegance, and the ground-level rooms are good, with their pretty fireplaces, wooden shutters to the windows, neat cupboards and unexpected connecting doors. But you can also understand why Dickens, when he saw it later, objected that it was unhealthy; hot summers and cold winters must both have been uncomfortable in such cramped and low-level quarters.16 Healthy or not, here Nelly seems to have lived from the age of sixteen. She must have slept with her mother, her sisters or a maid, possibly in the basement. She saw Fanny, Maria and Mrs Ternan off to Sadler’s Wells or the West End and woke to hear them arrive home in the night; she listened to the gossip of the theatre, and sometimes put on her bonnet and boots to accompany them to work through the crowded streets, to help them dress backstage and watch from the wings as they performed. She dreamed of her own future, as an actress, perhaps as a wife. She read every book she could lay hands on; all her life Nelly was a voracious reader. She wore her first crinoline, for skirts ballooned steadily as she grew up in the 1850s. Unlike Fanny she remained strikingly pretty.
* This is the description from Household Words, 4 October 1851: ‘Without, the Theatre, by night, was like the worst part of the worst kind of Fair in the worst kind of town. Within, it was a beer-garden, resounding with foul language, oaths, catcalls, shrieks, yells, blasphemy, obscenity – a truly diabolical clamour. Fights took place anywhere, at any period of the performance … Sickly children in arms were squeezed out of shape, in all parts of the house. Fish was fried at the entrance doors. Barricades of oyster shells encumbered the pavement. Expectant half-price visitors to the gallery howled defiant impatience up the stairs, and danced a sort of Carmagnole all round the building.’
† Park Cottage still bears the same name, but it has been improved inside and out, with extra windows on the east side. The present owners have made it into a charming house with an attractive garden. The essential structure remains unchanged, however, and the original disposition of the rooms is clear; the remains of the kitchen range and stone flagging for the washroom can be seen.
5
Gaslight Fairies
1856–1857
Mrs Ternan’s view of the theatre remained resolutely lofty, even when she or her daughters had to perform in productions that fell below the loftiest standards. In the same way she was always, in her own estimation, and in defiance of her origins and the general view of her profession, a lady. She impressed on her daughters that their father had been an Irish gentleman who could claim descent from the dispossessed O’Tiernans, and that they must always remember that they too were ladies. In the harsh circumstances in which they actually lived this cannot always have been easy for them; and the conflicts set up grew worse when they found themselves obliged to take work which was clearly in breach of what a lady would consider doing.
Perhaps this is why Fanny began to cast about for alternatives to the stage. There is some evidence that she and Maria made an attempt to set up a ladies’ school during 1856; or at any rate they acquired the use of a house in Rochester Villas, Kentish Town, which they declared a school.1 The project seems to have been begun in the summer in the manner of Mrs Micawber, with nothing more than a house and an intention, and it flourished no better than Mrs Micawber’s. They had no need to doubt their competence as teachers, for the education of girls was taken seriously by almost nobody in the 1850s and was more concerned with putting on a little social polish than with learning; if anything, the Misses Ternan were probably overqualified, since they could themselves offer the singing and dancing lessons usually provided by a visiting master. No doubt they dreamed that, if they could once get started with a few pupils, there would be plenty to occupy Nelly and a home for their mother too; the house was pretty and commodious. Only the pupils failed to appear. Possibly to interested parents these aspirant schoolmistresses looked too young and frivolous to be taken seriously, and the polish they were offering seemed not quite of the kind that was wanted among the solid householders of the district; there may even have been rumours that Miss Ternan and Miss Maria had been seen on the stage of the Lyceum.
With no pupils in prospect, Fanny and Maria could hardly turn down good offers of theatrical work for long, and the school plan was quickly dropped. They all crammed into Park Cottage together, and in the autumn of 1856 Fanny was acting again. Their failure must have cast some gloom over the end of the year; it was made worse by news of the illness of Mrs Ternan’s sister Louisa in Birmingham. She was hardly more than fifty, with four children, some younger than Nelly, but she died in December – a death that must have made all three girls more aware than ever of the necessity to earn their own keep and try to give their mother some respite from work.
Fanny was now appearing at the Princess’s Theatre under the management of Charles Kean and his wife Ellen. They were good friends and patrons: Mrs Ternan and Maria had been in their lavish Winter’s Tale, and they followed this up by offering Fanny the part of Oberon in an equally ambitious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whether she relished playing a fairy king or not, she took the work gratefully and stayed through the whole of the long run.
The production was remarkable in several ways. Bottom was played by a seventy-year-old comedian, John Pritt Harley, and Puck by another Nelly, the ten-year-old Ellen Terry.2 She described in her memoirs how, after each show, she was walked home by her father; it was miles to their suburban home through the dark streets, but he wrapped her in his cloak and just managed to keep her awake and on her feet by telling her stories. Few reminiscences give a clearer impression of the tough conditions in which the actors worked and of the stamina required of players of all ages. Old Harley laboured to the end, suffering a stroke while playing Lancelot Gobbo the following year; Ellen Terry, who was with him when it happened, never forgot how frightened she was by his twisted face and helpless gesturing; he died a few days later, penniless. Old men, women and children were all accustomed to rehearsing long hours in the day and then, if necessary walking for an hour or more through the night after the performance. Fanny was no exception to this rule, and though she was a strong and confident twenty-one-year-old, even she can hardly have enjoyed the nightly trek to Park Cottage. But in April 1857 she had company on her homeward walk when Nelly was launched on to her adult career as an actress. She had been offered work at the Haymarket.
Her role was not a very exalted on
e: it was a breeches part in a burlesque put on by the busy actor-manager Buckstone, who also wrote his own farces.3 On this occasion he had turned out a piece of spoof classical drama, a genre very popular at the time. It was called Atalanta, written in doggerel and full of puns and topical allusions, in which Nelly was to play Hippomenes, the young man who threw the golden apples in front of Atalanta to stop her running so fast. She was required to wear tights, to do some dancing and posturing, and to sing several solos. She also had to deliver long passages of pastiche Shakespeare. If – still less than Fanny’s fairy king – it was not what a Ternan daughter aspired to, again it was work, and she was as conscientious about it as Fanny; and Atalanta, rubbishy as it was, was a great success. It ran nightly from mid-April to July; Nelly, well trained like her sisters, did not miss a single performance. By the end of the run she must have taken home between £20 and £30 towards the expenses of Park Cottage and could count herself a fully fledged professional.*
Nelly was now eighteen, though, to judge from photographs, she looked younger. She was not a classic beauty – none of the sisters had their mother’s looks – but there was something delectable in her puppy fat, her wide blue eyes with their slightly puzzled expression, and her golden curls, beautifully arranged by her mother. Everything about her signalled innocence and vulnerability. In her neat little dresses and ringlets, she could have stepped out of a children’s fairy story. On stage in her boy’s costume, she gave the men in the audience something many of them relished – a glimpse of the shape of the female body, displayed by a girl who was visibly embarrassed at exhibiting herself in this way. There is a well-known story which stems from this period of Nelly crying because she did not like appearing in tights. She can’t, presumably, have cried nightly for three months; but, faced with one of the rougher audiences, it would not be surprising if there were times when she found the whole business hard to bear.
Drunks in the audience were not the only problem. When Fanny came to write of the life of an actress, she had some cutting things to say about the type of man who hung about backstage while they were trying to work – literary men, critics and the odd ‘idle, good-humoured fine gentleman’ – and no doubt she and her sisters had plenty of practice in fending them off. Nelly, for all her innocent looks, simply cannot have been as unaware as girls reared in a sheltered middle-class home – girls like her contemporaries, Mamey and Katey Dickens, for instance. She must have learnt her own technique of self-preservation, both backstage and while walking through the streets of London after the performance with a fixed determination not to notice, not to think about, not to respond to what she saw.
In the 1850s the sights of the London streets were something a nice young woman simply had to shut her mind to, even if she could not always shut her eyes to the drunkenness, violence and misery, and the prostitution of women and children. Such things, like the rats that swarmed in the scenery yard behind the theatre, were known to be there and frightening, but nothing could be done about them, so it was better to ignore them. The artifice of the stage, with its beautiful scenery, before which Nelly and Fanny were both appearing in male parts, was mirrored by the artificiality of the real world, in which so much happened which could never be mentioned or queried by any one who aspired to be taken for a lady.
A lady might worry about her gloves, which should have no holes showing, or her bonnet, which should be set straight, or her ankles, which should be more or less invisible; indeed, clothes, their neatness and good repair, the messages they sent to other people, were written about, and were a proper topic to take up with other ladies, who might offer useful and practical advice. But nobody talked, or wrote, about the messages sent by tights. And inside the clothes the body itself was as unmentionable as the rats or the night life in the streets of London. In her mind Nelly might determine to be a lady, but the body was a piece of secret machinery, sending out and receiving disquieting and shameful messages. They could be considered only privately; and there was no guidance available on how to decipher and deal with them.
Vanity was another problem. A lady must not be vain, but an actress was obliged to show off bits of herself to dazzle the eyes of the men who paid to come and look at her. Whatever Mrs Ternan said to Nelly, they both knew that she was being dressed in a particular way for a particular purpose. The roar of admiration she sometimes heard now was entirely different from the admiration accorded to her when she was a child actress. That had been jolly, even sometimes tender; this was brutal, voracious, with something contemptuous about it. Seeing a dancer on stage in flesh-coloured tights, wrote Thackeray, offered a thrill rather like the thrill of a public execution; it gives one some sense of the Roman holiday atmosphere that could be generated in the theatre.4 Daumier’s drawings of men watching the stage made a similar point. A strong, blithe actress like Vestris might face such an atmosphere, use it and subdue it; a nervous girl could hardly hope to.
And Nelly had no father and no brothers to take the mystery out of the male sex. Living in a house of women, it was easy for her to divide men into two distinct categories, on the one hand the brutes and ogres, on the other idealized distant figures, her lost father among them. In the audience and in the streets she faced ogres every night, while the ideal replacement for her father had yet to materialize. Still further away was the possibility that he too might turn into an ogre.
At much the same time Nelly faced her audience of ogres, Dickens produced a whimsical account of the little actresses he called ‘Gaslight Fairies’ in his magazine Household Words.5 He begins by describing the recruitment of girls to dance in pantomimes. His fairies are poor, good-humoured and patient, and they earn their money hard. Their age range is from ‘an anxious woman of ten, learned in the prices of victual and fuel,’ to a Miss Fairy of twenty-three, very pretty, and ‘makes up very pretty’ too. Some of the fairies live with their mother, an actress who was once a country manager’s wife and played ‘the whole round of Shakespearean beauties’, often with her children hanging out of a box as she did so.
Dickens’s tone is humorous, and his essay is a piece of light-hearted and sentimental entertainment, but it is not just that. He knows what he is talking about when he describes the backstage world. He knows where the theatrical families live and just how they have played Shakespeare in the provinces. He knows how anonymously shabby they appear off-stage, how the ‘fairies’ have to trudge through the mud in flimsy shoes to get to the theatre, what they are likely to be paid if they land a job – 12s. a week – and how it will have to go into the family housekeeping purse.
He also knows how the eldest Miss Fairy watches over her younger sister, ‘who might otherwise come to harm one day, in this hard and dangerous theatrical world’. Throughout the piece Dickens, too, takes a protective tone towards these young women of Drury Lane, Soho, Somers Town and Blackfriars. ‘Whatever you may hear to the contrary (and may sometimes have a strange satisfaction in believing), there is no lack of virtue and modesty among the Fairies. All things considered, I doubt if they be much below our own high level.’ In the face of a prejudice he finds objectionable he goes on to wish that ‘we were not so often pleased to think ill of those who minister to our amusement’. Finally he draws a touching picture of the devotion of one gaslight fairy to her family – the pretty Miss Fairy of twenty-three, with a drunken old out-of-work actor for a father, a sick mother and brothers and sisters all working in the theatre: the young John Kemble Fairy, Miss Rosina and Miss Angelica Fairy aged fourteen and ten, and little Master Edmund, eight.
The fairies of Park Cottage would not have accepted inclusion in Dickens’s pretty, vulnerable flock for a moment. They knew themselves to belong to a higher order, even when they appeared in remarkably similar fairy costumes before the same gaslights; even though they sensed how slender the dividing line could be between the higher and lower categories of fairy. Yet what he describes is, in fact, remarkably close to their experience and in more ways than one. Missing from his acco
unt, of course, is the gaslight fairy’s own point of view. It may well have been less quaint, less gentle and less resigned than he believed, or wanted to believe.
Fanny Ternan’s own account of the experience of being an actress was actually published by Dickens, though not until another decade had gone by, and then anonymously.6 Mabel’s Progess is not autobiographical in form but heavily disguised as fiction, and Fanny carefully made Mabel’s family connection with the stage remote. Her people come from ‘the upper half of the middle class’ – her grandfather is a clergyman – and it is only through the marriage of her uncle to an actress and his subsequent blindness, which forces him to depend on his wife’s professional exertions, that Mabel is put in touch with the theatre at all. Her mother and the young man who loves her are both horrified at the degradation involved in becoming a ‘strolling player’. There is talk of the necessity of shunning publicity if you are a woman and of her entering on ‘the broad way that leadeth to destruction’.
The Invisible Woman Page 8