The subsequent press resulted in a mad scramble to see the phenomenon. Coaches came up from London, and hotels were booked out by theatregoers curious to catch a glimpse of the boy they were calling the ‘Child of Nature’ and the ‘Young Roscius’. Interest and enthusiasm snowballed until, during a stint at Birmingham, Master Betty was invited to play at Covent Garden for the incredible fee of fifty guineas a night. His father used the invitation as leverage with Drury Lane, where Sheridan also wanted to sign the boy, eventually negotiating an unprecedented deal to appear at both venues on alternate nights.
Within sixteen months of his first performance, and only thirteen, William Henry Betty appeared before the London public at Covent Garden on 1 December 1804, playing Achmet in John Brown’s long-forgotten tragedy Barbarossa. Easily the most anticipated dramatic performance since Garrick’s farewell, by three o’clock the corridors and vestibules of Covent Garden were stuffed with eager fans, and by four the piazza was crowded as far as Russell Street. When the doors finally opened at five, the tickets sold out in seven minutes.
The noise inside the auditorium had reached a deafening pitch long before the play began and continued unabated even after the bell had been rung for the overture. ‘Even the power of the orchestra was drowned by the shrieks, screams, and vociferation from all parts of the Theatre,’ wrote one witness. The temperature was stifling, despite the stage curtain being raised to encourage a draught, and fights broke out in the dangerously overcrowded pit between patrons and the constables trying to keep order. People fainted, and were pulled from the crush by a detachment of Guards and passed up to the boxes, which had themselves been overrun, much to the fury of those who had bought tickets in advance. Both the prologue and the entire first act went completely unheard in the din, and only in the moment immediately before Betty’s first entrance did the clamour in the least subside, temporarily compressing itself into an agitated buzz until the long-anticipated entrance of the boy unleashed it again as a thunderous ovation.
‘His admirers’, wrote James Boaden, ‘made him their divinity.’ Similar scenes were played out at Drury Lane when the boy made his début there, packed houses that helped both theatres record their highest ever receipts. Betty’s fee was accordingly raised to a hundred pounds a night at a time when John Philip Kemble earned thirty-seven pounds a week. At first he played only youthful roles – Romeo and Young Norval in John Home’s Douglas – but when his repertoire expanded, he revealed a taste for tyrants like Richard III and Zanga in Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre. Each new role was greeted with the same intoxicated rapture, and when the boy was announced to play Hamlet, Pitt supposedly adjourned Parliament so that the Members could be guaranteed a seat. There was even talk of erecting statues in his honour. The boy was the toast of the ton, bundled up after each performance and escorted into a carriage to tour an itinerary of lustrous fêtes – Carlton House and Charles James Fox’s St Anne’s Hill among them – where the prodigy would be fussed over and plied with punch and trifle until well past his bedtime. On rare nights off he would steal the show by going to see other performers, or even unite the wonders of the season by taking in the water at Sadler’s Wells, which he enjoyed immensely.
Whatever he did, the money kept rolling in: eleven nights in Douglas earned Drury Lane seven thousand pounds – enough for Sheridan to pay the Duke of Bedford several years’ back rent and six months’ in advance. So consumed was London by Bettymania, it was as if the world had dissolved around him. ‘As for politicks,’ wrote Lady Elizabeth Foster, second Duchess of Devonshire, ‘though every day an account of Buonaparte’s coronation and Russia’s decision is expected, nothing is hardly seen or talked of but this young Roscius … In short, he has changed the life of London. People dine at f our, go to the play, and think of nothing but the play.’
Why was this boy so enormously popular, and what talents did he possess to fuel passions of such magnitude? In part, it was the simple effect of sharp publicity meeting natural curiosity, the same good showmanship that brought crowds to counting pigs and dancing hares. At its most idealised, though, Betty’s appeal drew on a Romantic belief in the proximity of childhood to unadorned nature. If the boy was its representative then, through his gifts, audiences might be granted a pure aesthetic experience stripped of all artifice.
But alongside the promise of communion there sat a more titillating appeal. Women didn’t much care for this ornate youth, and Thomas Dibdin, in the audience for his début, couldn’t help noticing that the people swooning over him were ‘principally men’. The Times, similarly noting that men had outnumbered women twenty to one, drew its own conclusions, snarkily writing that, ‘Master Betty’s success is very naturally the cause of much envy and heart-breaking amongst the Master Polly’s and Master Jenny’s of Bondstreet and Cheapside, who in all their attempts to distinguish their pretty persons and effeminate airs, have only Mis-carried.’
Betty was beautiful, his admirers praising his ‘youthful figure … graceful in the extreme’, a face that bore ‘all the smoothness of boyhood’ and his ‘full, bright and shining blue’ eyes. The blond tresses that fell in ringlets about his shoulders gave him a look of ‘extreme juvenility’, though he was tall for his age and lissom (the Morning Chronicle gushingly informed its readers that he was four feet ten inches high, and weighed six stone three). Men wanted to be near him. His dressing room, wrote John Northcote, one of several artists commissioned to paint him, ‘was crowded as full as it could contain of all the court of England and happy were those who could get in at the time his father was rubbing his naked body from the perspiration after the exertion in performing his part on the stage’.
Master Betty was a celebrated object of homoerotic desire, but though the exhibition of children for sexual titillation was a theatrical commonplace, his enormous popularity cannot be explained simply as an outbreak of mass pederasty. His sexuality was as nostalgic as it was provocative, a pristine youth who appealed to the golden days of dormitory and cloister before the introduction of women and the fallen world – in a sense not so dissimilar from the appeal of Joe Grimaldi’s Clown. It is also possible that his maleness and juvenility were incidental to his appeal, as dressed in frilly costumes and made up with rouge to accentuate his ‘young and girlish beauty’, Betty possessed a sexual ambiguity that enabled him to transcend dull, quotidian categories, an unreal, superlunary androgyne, perfectly shaped to fit the erotic ideals of Romanticism. It was, after all, only natural that they should find their expression in a boy, for, at a time in which women were of secondary importance and sexual segregation was practised at almost every level of society, the beautiful male body was an acceptable object of fantasy, less restricted and more accessible than the female form could ever be.
Finally, there was simple escapism. Across the Channel, the armies of Europe were squaring up, moved by new theories of battle that cast off eighteenth-century notions of conflict as discrete strategic encounters between men of honour to embrace the idea of absolute war. Sixteen thousand men were slaughtered on the field at Austerlitz while Master Betty cast his mesmeric spell, and for those unable to articulate their fears, what better expression of the dread that accompanies the responsibilities of adulthood than devotion to a child who plays at being a man?
Betty’s bizarre reign upstaged everyone and upset everything, especially those actors who were forced to appear with him night after night, grown men he dispatched in combat and mature women he woodenly wooed. Sarah Siddons had been judiciously ill throughout the entire craze, leaving the boy to act with her understudy, Mrs Litchfield. John Philip Kemble had been similarly indisposed, taking ‘frightful’ doses of opium for his asthma, and declining to legitimise the public’s foolishness by appearing on stage. This didn’t keep him from the theatre, though, for whenever Betty performed at Covent Garden, he would sit in his box, grey-faced and sclerotic, loudly expectorating ‘as if purposely for the chance of coughing down his paramount opponent’.
; Without the luxury of withdrawing from the stage, pantomimists were inevitably roped in. At Drury Lane, Old Harlequin’s Fireside saw Joe and Byrne performing in a cast that was doubled by children, including Byrne’s son, Oscar, and Louisa and Charlotte Bristow, two of Mary Grimaldi’s little sisters. As the phenomenon continued into the new year and showed no signs of abating, every theatre was promoting its own child genius, ‘some twenty or thirty young wonders, or infant prodigies’, wrote the actor George Cooke, covering every branch of the profession right down to the ‘Infant Candlesnuffer’. The papers jokingly consulted a ‘correspondent just arrived from Lilliput’, who proudly announced that ‘a second Jordan, only 18 inches high’ would shortly appear, and that ‘according to the calculations in different nurseries, seven Garricks, fifteen Kembles, twelve Siddonses, nine-and-forty Cookes, three Brahams, and six Incledons, will be ready to start before the next winter’. Somewhat predictably, Charles Dibdin declared himself ‘rather partial to the race’, and over the coming seasons brought an army of talented children to the Royal Aquatic Theatre until his ardour was finally cooled when a ten-year-old singer made off with the band-leader’s silver plate. Master Sloman, the first of his prodigies, however, ended up staying with the Wells into adulthood. Initially billed as the ‘Comic Roscius’, he débuted in what turned out to be a decidedly diminutive season that included Katerina Staberin, the ‘celebrated German Dwarf’, and a rowing match between six small boys in miniature boats.
Like all fads, it was ultimately unsustainable. ‘The town could not be kept at fever heat long,’ wrote John Boaden, as the dual miseries of exhaustion and puberty took their toll on Betty, forcing him to cancel performances as his health began to fail and his voice to break in the spring of 1805. Blame was levelled at his father, accused of mercilessly exploiting his son for profit, and explicitly demonstrating his greed and ingratitude by later dismissing the boy’s mentor, Hough. Public sympathy fell firmly on the side of the Belfast prompter, who hit back with the promise of a tell-all memoir featuring ‘curious and truly original Correspondence’ that would supposedly reveal the extent of Betty’s exploitation. Yet these allegations never came to light, as an annuity of fifty guineas was enough to silence Hough for life. That such a small bribe was sufficient in an enterprise awash with money raised its own suspicions. Perhaps Hough himself may have had something to hide. Charges were tacitly aired in the form of a mock application for the job of Betty’s new tutor in which a candidate called ‘Peter Pangloss’ presented his credentials – ‘L.L.D and A.S.S’ – along with ‘a wondrous rod in pickle/Your pretty little Bum to tickle’.
Between Betty and the water, Joe was feeling submerged. The positive steps he’d taken had been seriously overshadowed, added to which were the money worries that had plagued him since the peculation of Charles Newland. The fact that Jack Bologna was doing exceptionally well didn’t help. At twenty years old, Jack was flourishing. His abilities were fast approaching those of his father, and his passion for tinkering with tricks and machines was beginning to bear fruit, first in the form of his very own ‘Hydraulical Performance’, in which he choreographed jets of water and coloured smoke to music, and next with a residency at the Lyceum, the Strand theatre they had haunted as boys, where he produced a supernatural magic-lantern show he called the ‘Phantoscopia’, conjuring apparitions of wailing ghosts and dancing skeletons by projecting images on to smoke and gauze and magnifying them until the audience shrieked in distress. By contrast, Joe’s career seemed to have lost momentum, leaving him susceptible to feelings of helplessness, which eventually led to his departure from Drury Lane.
James Byrne had left the Lane in the summer of 1805 to join Thomas Dibdin’s troupe at Covent Garden, but finding Byrne’s replacement was proving problematic. It was usual practice to recruit dancers from France, and with the wars cutting off access to all but the few willing to make the arduous journey to London via Lisbon, they were at a premium. Having choreographed many occasional dances and entr’actes for the Sadler’s Wells ensemble, Joe was volunteered to tide them over. Byrne, though, had been earning ten pounds a week when he left, and Joe, taking home a measly four, thought it fair to ask for two additional pounds, a rise, he argued, that should be honoured for the rest of the season and not just until the new maître de ballet was found. It was a request to which the new stage manager, his old ally Richard Wroughton, was happy to accede, and when Joe went to collect his salary at the end of the week, he was pleased to see the commitment reiterated by the under-treasurer Richard Peake, who showed him a letter of confirmation from no less a person than Aaron Graham, the chairman of the Drury Lane Board of Management.
Joe worked through the extra hours perfectly happily until three or four weeks later when the Lane hired the squat and muscular James d’Egville as maître de ballet. D’Egville’s name might have looked appropriately French on the bills, but he was in fact a Cockney, whose real name was Jamie Harvey. His first production was a ballet called Terpsichore’s Return, intended to introduce to Drury Lane the ‘astonishing attitudinarian’ Celine Parisot, described by Leigh Hunt as ‘very thin and always smiling’. Joe was to play Pan in the piece, though with only a week of rehearsals left, he found his additional salary rescinded by order of the chairman of the board, a move that was doubly unjust as he danced many of his scenes with Parisot, who was on a salary of a thousand guineas for the season. Rightfully furious, he went to see Peake, who showed him an order from Graham stopping the stipend. His old fantasies of persecution rapidly re-formed, to which was added further humiliation in the form of the Monthly Mirror’s review that found his ‘grimace and gestures … offensively coarse’, before concluding that ‘such exhibitions, reflect disgrace on the stage’. It was the second time they had singled him out for criticism, calling his appearance in last year’s otherwise acclaimed ballet, Cinderella, a ‘blemish … of too base a metal to mix with a piece of such sterling value’.
Anyone could see that Joe was being misused at Drury Lane, and Mary tried to persuade him to find a place at Covent Garden. But Joe had grown up in Sheridan’s plush and oily kingdom and, though he liked to complain, acquiring the nerve to leave was a different matter. Eventually, though, he agreed to petition Thomas Harris, the Covent Garden manager nicknamed Jupiter for the omnipotent influence he had acquired through forty years in the business. Harris was known as a friend of pantomime in defiance of those critics who still held afterpieces to be an affront to the dignity of a Royal patent, and understood that by nurturing the talents of men like Thomas Dibdin and Charles Farley he could bring his theatre to an enviable profitability.
The day Joe chose to visit Covent Garden saw the thickest fog to descend on London in more than twenty years. Coaches moved at walking pace, their drivers hallooing to avoid colliding with each other or driving into shop windows, which even with their lamps blazing couldn’t be seen from the other side of the street. It was taking Thomas Dibdin for ever to find his way to Covent Garden too. Inching along with a hand out before him, unsettled by the muffled cries and sudden screams that seemed to come from all directions, he almost jumped out of his skin when Joe Grimaldi reared out of the mist. Joe had been lurking by the stage door in the viscous tunnel that was Hart Street, having given his name to James Brandon, the tough old doorman, in the hope of an interview.
Dibdin took him straight upstairs, delighted to hear what he was considering, having himself often pressed Harris to offer him a job. His last four pantomimes, he said, had suffered only for want of a good Clown. Delpini, Dubois and Bologna senior had all been given a run out, but all were irreversibly ‘on the decline’, suffering from cramp, bile and corpulence respectively. Things had grown so bad that even Farley had chanced his arm, though not with much success. Buoyed by Dibdin’s enthusiasm, Grimaldi cheerfully approached the manager’s door, but instead of being greeted by the kind and open face of Harris, he met the sacerdotal countenance of John Philip Kemble, and his mood instantly darkened.
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nbsp; ‘Well, Joe, I see you are determined to follow me,’ said the grave tragedian.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Joe, with uncertainty. Harris was behind his desk, keen to hear his answer. ‘You are a living magnet of attraction, Mr Kemble.’
This made Harris laugh, but Joe’s eyes remained fixed on Kemble. Luckily, the actor was feeling magnanimous, and instead of the sour purse of the lips and slow shake of the head he was expecting, Kemble acted as intermediary between his former employee and Harris, launching into a fulsome recommendation of his ability, praising the comic skill of the Signor, and declaring Joe a ‘true chip off the old block’ and ‘the first low comedian in the country’. This was unexpected flattery, especially as Kemble had disliked the Signor so much that he had not even bothered to publish an official company notice of his death until several weeks after the event. In the midst of all the Bettymania, Kemble no doubt appreciated the opportunity to hail a genuine performer, and this was sufficient recommendation for Harris, who signed Joe on the spot.
Shaking hands with Jupiter was a curious experience. Thomas Dibdin called it the ‘theatrical thermometer’, as on first meeting he shook hands only with his little finger, and then, on parting, gave ‘one, two or three fingers in proportion to the approbation he meant to bestow’. Joe doesn’t mention how much of Harris’s hand he got to shake, but he was content enough with five seasons starting at six pounds a week and incremental rises that would soon have him earning double his current salary.
It took about as long for the news of the deal to reach Drury Lane as it did for Joe to feel his way across Bow Street and start dressing for that evening’s performance of Terpsichore’s Return. The green room was already full by the time Joe walked in to discover Aaron Graham furiously pacing before the company. On seeing Joe, Graham launched into a loud harangue, accusing him of treachery and ingratitude. As well as being a member of the Drury Lane board, Graham was the chief police magistrate, and so full of his own authority that he flew into fits and rages at the merest hint of contradiction.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 15