The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  138 ‘made him their divinity’: Boaden, Life of J. P. Kemble, p. 485.

  138 Betty’s fee was accordingly raised: Reynolds, Life, vol. 2, p. 364.

  138 enough for Sheridan to pay the Duke of Bedford: Boaden, Mrs. Jordan, vol. 2, p.

  181; Life of J. P. Kemble, p. 487.

  139 ‘he has changed the life of London’: Giles Playfair, The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), p. 73.

  139 ‘principally men’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 386.

  139 ‘Master Polly’s and Master Jenny’s’: The Times, 5 December 1804.

  139 ‘all the smoothness of boyhood’: See Julie A. Carlson, ‘Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 95:3 (Summer 1996) 575–602; and Playfair, The Prodigy, p. 77.

  139–40 six stone three: Playfair, The Prodigy, p. 81.

  140 ‘rubbing his naked body’: Playfair, The Prodigy, p. 86.

  140 ‘young and girlish beauty’: Carlson, ‘Forever Young’, p. 590.

  141 ‘frightful’: Kelly, Kemble Era, p. 163.

  141 ‘coughing down his paramount opponent’: Reynolds, Life, vol. 2, p. 364.

  141 ‘Infant Candlesnuffer’: Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), vol. 1, p. 20.

  141 ‘according to the calculations in different nurseries’: Percival, vol. 3, n.p.

  142 ‘rather partial to the race’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 110.

  142 ‘celebrated German Dwarf’: Dibdin, Memoirs, pp. 97, 67, fn. 1.

  142 ‘town could not be kept at fever heat’: Boaden, Mrs. Jordan, vol. 2, p. 184.

  142 ‘truly original Correspondence’: Boaden, Mrs. Jordan, vol. 2, p. 190.

  142 ‘Peter Pangloss’: See Carlson, ‘Forever Young’, p. 593.

  143 ‘Phantoscopia’: See Altick, Shows of London, p. 218.

  143 London via Lisbon: Theodore Fenner, ‘Ballet in Early Nineteenth-Century London as Seen by Leigh Hunt and Henry Robertson’, Dance Chronicle, 1:2 (1977–8), 75–95, p. 79.

  144 Jamie Harvey: See Judith Milhous, ‘The Economics of Theatrical Dance in Eighteenth-Century London’, Theatre Journal, 55:3 (2003), 481–508, fn. 28.

  144 ‘astonishing attitudinarian’: Hunt, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 154.

  144 ‘offensively coarse’: Monthly Mirror, January 1805, p. 338.

  144 ‘too base a metal’: Monthly Mirror, May 1804, p. 56.

  145 Coaches moved at walking pace: The Times, 6 November 1805.

  145 ‘on the decline’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 400.

  146 ‘a living magnet of attraction’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 154.

  146 ‘chip off the old block’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 155.

  146 official company notice: Boaden, Life of J. P. Kemble, p. 219.

  146 ‘theatrical thermometer’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 289. Perhaps this was not so unusual for the period. Offering to shake hands with only one finger is one of the pompous affects of Vanity Fair’s Joseph Smedley.

  147 ‘Mr Peake … is a gentleman’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 155.

  147 ‘came off victorious’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 156.

  147 Graham threatened to sue: See Raymond, Life of Elliston, pp. 107–8.

  148 ‘something more than a public calamity’: Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1814), vol. 2, p. 191.

  148 ‘darling hero of England’: Southey, Life of Nelson, vol. 2, p. 237.

  149 ‘mad for Entertainment’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 68.

  150 ‘slim boy’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 66.

  150 ‘repaying its own purchase money’: Percival, vol. 3, f. 171.

  150 ‘pantomimic talent’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 399.

  151 ‘as socially as friendship’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 72.

  152 pirated by Parker’s comedian: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 74.

  154 ‘Joey Grimaldi, 1805’: Currently in the possession of the Museum of London, see M. R. Holmes, Stage Costume and Accessories (London: London Museum, 1968), p. 71, item 260.

  155 ‘English Rose’: de Castro, Memoirs, p. 45.

  155 ‘not a man to be intimidated’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 77.

  155 bound over to keep the peace: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 64.

  156 managed to break free: See Boaden, Mrs. Jordan, vol. 2, pp. 133–4, and Marius Kwint, ‘Philip Astley (1742–1814)’, DNB; see also de Castro, Memoirs, p. 48.

  156 a dogged and fierce competitor: Despite their rivalry, on 2 September 1803, Sadler’s Wells held a benefit for Astley’s performers put out of work by the destruction of the theatre, raising seventy pounds to be distributed among them (Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 96).

  Mother Goose

  157 bathed his feet in a tub of brandy: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 161.

  158 ‘influx of pygmies … epidemic nausea’: Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vol. vii, pp. 662–3.

  159 ‘in perfect astonishment’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 163.

  159 Fallow Corner: See Frank Marcham, ‘Joseph Grimaldi and Finchley’, reprinted from Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (London, 1939), p. 49.

  159 He already had an apprentice: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 97, fn. 1.

  159 Watts would also fall asleep: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 187.

  159 ‘the best on the English stage’: Unidentified clipping in Robert Wilkinson and William Herbert, Playhouses, Theatres and Other Places of Public Amusement in London and its Suburbs from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to William IV (London: R. Wilkinson, n.d.), extra-illustrated volumes, Library of the Garrick Club, vol. 6, p. 107; Marcham, ‘Grimaldi and Finchley’, p. 48.

  161 ‘a pupil and copyist of Dubois’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 163.

  161 devoted to his mother: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 401.

  162 ‘His voice is against him’: Percival, vol. 4, f. 245.

  162 ‘a short, sturdy person’: Hunt, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 148.

  162 Signor Colnagi’s: Farley’s colleagues often made fun of his lack of formal education and want of foreign languages. James Robinson Planché recalled that ‘So little did he know of the language of our lively neighbours, that he is reported to have waited day after day at the doors of one of the theatres in Paris in order to witness the first performance of a new grand spectacle, entitled, as he imagined, “Relache” [signifying the period between shows when the theatre was dark], mistaking the bills with that word only in large letters which he saw posted up there to indicate the production of some important novelty.’ Richard Henry Stoddard (ed.), Personal Reminiscences by Chorley, Planché, and Young (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876), p. 146.

  163 ‘she-bear’: Thomas Dibdin, Valentine and Orson, A Romantic Melo-drame (London, 1804).

  163 preferred Grimaldi’s Orson: William Hazlitt, Examiner, 23 July 1815.

  163–4 ‘stagger off the stage’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 164. Grimaldi’s suffering bears a remarkable similarity to that of the ballet-dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938– 93). Though working in different art forms, the demands they placed on their bodies were fundamentally the same. Nureyev’s biographer, Julie Kavanagh, reports that, ‘Since 1973, Rudolf had been dancing with a permanent tear in his leg muscle; he had destroyed his Achilles tendons by years of landing too heavily; he had heel spurs; the bones were chipped – so that even basic walking gave him pain. When he emerged from his dressing room, slowly limping in his clogs and full-length bathrobe, he looked more like a hospital patient than a ballet star, often making straight for the special chair put aside for him in the wings.’ Julie Kavanagh, Nureyev: The Life (New York: Pantheon, 2007), p. 485.

  164 ‘a most capital joke’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 36. The performance in question, The Triumph of Mirth, was comprehensively overlooked by reviewers, save for the theatre critic for the British Magazine and Review, who on the opening night onl
y managed to report that ‘The piece was executed with fewer blunders than generally happen on the first representation of a pantomime, and was well-received.’ British Magazine and Review, 1783, p. 57 (clipping in the collection of the Islington Local History Centre). On the structural function of this trope within the Memoirs, see Leigh Woods, ‘The Curse of Performance: Inscripting the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi into the Life of Charles Dickens’, Biography, 14:2 (Spring 1991), 138–52.

  164 an idea to which he would become superstitiously attached: Jane Moody comments that ‘Dickens’s inclusion of this miniature narrative of histrionic sensibility highlights the way in which the dramatisation of savagery seemed to hold in perilous tension violent tenderness and innocent destructiveness, the gentle and the diabolic.’ Illegitimate Theatre, p. 92.

  164 ‘We can in no way describe what he does’: Monthly Mirror, January 1807; Joseph Munden said that ‘It is impossible to describe what he did. A thousand masks would not portray the grotesque contortions of his countenance.’ Thomas Shepherd Munden, Memoirs of Joseph Shepherd Munden, Comedian. By His Son (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), p. 127.

  165 ‘drudgery’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 397.

  165 ‘parti-coloured jackets’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 397.

  166 ‘do the best you can’: Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 398.

  166 ‘as plain as possible’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 165.

  166 ‘proportionally rueful’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 165.

  166 just the words to the songs: See Larpent Plays, 1054, MS dated by Larpent, 23 December. For more on John Larpent’s character and abilities as the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, see Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, pp. 238–44.

  167 ‘If he is knocked down’: The Times, 27 December 1828. The pantomime was Little Red Riding Hood.

  168 ‘so wretched’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 165.

  169 ‘We do not know a single drama’: The Dramatic Censor: or, Weekly Theatrical Report, January 1800. Garrick first performed Barnwell before a pantomime in 1759 (Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, p. 290).

  169 ‘wretched cant’: William Hazlitt, ‘George Barnwell’, A View of the English Stage, in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 5, p. 269; Hogan, London Stage, p. xlvii.

  170 ‘can never lie long in bed’: Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, p. 127.

  170 initially cursed his luck: Boaden, Life of J. P. Kemble, p. 500.

  171 ‘a rich widower’: Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, p. 98.

  172 a small boy named Leonard: Goodwin, Sketches and Impressions, p. l8.

  172 ‘Regain the egg, and happy be’: All quotes are from Thomas Dibdin, Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg! (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 18–).

  173 ‘poor simple Welchman’: The Times, 27 and 28 January 1807.

  173 ‘skimble-skambled’: Thomas Hood, Hood’s Own; or, Laughter From Year to Year (London: Bailey, 1839), p. 263.

  175 ‘a naughty little dancing girl’: BDA, vol. 10, p. 190.

  175 rival Columbines: Raymond, Life of Elliston, pp. 172–5.

  175 sybaritic pleasures: Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 73.

  178 ‘simply a pair of flats’: Halliday, Comical Fellows, p. 36.

  179 ‘in a roar’: Monthly Mirror, January 1807.

  179 ‘JOHN BULL’: The Times, 30 December 1806.

  179 ‘had not been well accustomed’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 166.

  179 ‘We have not for several years’: European Magazine, vol. 51, January 1807, p. 54

  179 ‘dexterity’: The Times’s correspondent, even as he commends the fluidity of the stage-management, rather overstates the complexity of the scenery: ‘In the management of the scenery, which was very complicated, there was as little perplexity and mismanagement as could be expected on the first exhibition,’ The Times, 30 December 1806.

  179 ‘as perfect a performance’: John Fairburn, Fairburn’s Description of the Popular and Comic New Pantomime, called Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg (London, 1807), p. 29.

  180 ‘unceasing vivacity’: Frow, Oh Yes It Is!, p. 70.

  180 ‘His very excellent clown’: Fairburn’s Description of Mother Goose, pp. 30–31.

  180 ‘sublime impudence’: Findlater, Joe Grimaldi, p. 120.

  180 ‘the great master of his art’: Boaden, Life of J. P. Kemble, p. 500.

  180 ‘a genius’: Boaden, Mrs. Jordan, vol. 2, p. 201.

  180 ‘Grimaldi’s career’: Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, p. 99.

  181 ‘the principal cause of crowded lobbies’: Monthly Mirror, November 1806, February 1807.

  182 ‘pigeons are birds’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 146.

  182 ‘The fellow’s a humbug’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 146.

  182 ‘the slaughter was very great’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 146.

  182 ‘precious savage’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 147.

  184 ‘no chandeliers at all’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 168.

  184 almost certainly be put to death: John Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, 2nd edn (London: M. Jones, 1812), p. 74.

  The Forty Virgins

  185 ‘disgrace a booth’: European Magazine, vol. 51, April 1807, p. 294.

  185 ‘brilliant stupidity’: The Times, 17 April 1807, 18 April 1807.

  186 ‘redfire’: Redfire, a chemical compound of strontia, shellac, potash and charcoal, was to be used extensively in ‘blow-ups’ of this kind, the dramatic conflagrations and immolations that conventionally concluded many melodramas, and which were set to become all the rage in London’s minor theatres. No respectable house could afford not to end the evening without the spectacle of exploding citadels and burning minarets acting as a visual metonym for justice served on tyranny. That said, the most famous ‘blow-up’ of all was at Covent Garden – the explosion that ended Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men (1813). See Dibdin, Memoirs, pp. 90–91; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 98–106.

  186 ‘Sir Francis Drake’: The ship’s name is revealed by Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 440.

  186 ‘chaunt’: Charles Dibdin, Jan Ben Jan; or, Harlequin and the Forty Virgins (London, 1807).

  187 ‘That I can, and hear, too’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 176.

  187 if he valued his reputation: Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, p. 66.

  188 ‘Besides – the ladies’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 172.

  188 ‘none of those women are married’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 172.

  189 ‘protestations of regret’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 174.

  189 ‘Jack’s had a very long string’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 174.

  189 pick pockets in the pit: Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, p. 165.

  189 ‘former irregularities’: Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, p. 2.

  190 ‘ever accustomed to vice’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 177.

  190 Vilified in the witness box: Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, pp. 186, 191.

  190 regular supply of decoys: See Donald A. Low, The Regency Underworld (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), pp. 30–5.

  191 paid handsomely to lie: Mackoull, Abuses of Justice, p. 191.

  192 ‘Brummell of Clowns’: Percy Fitzgerald, Chronicles of Bow Street Police-Office, with an Account of the Magistrates, ‘Runners’ and Police; and a Selection of the Most Interesting Cases, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), vol. 2, p. 11; Dickens, Memoirs, p. 184, fn. 1.

  192 ‘if not fatal accident’: Miles, Grimaldi, p. 7; Dickens, Memoirs, p. 181.

  193 ‘it was all up with him’: Miles, Grimaldi, p. 134.

  193 ‘yielded his consent’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 180.

  193 ‘in great disorder’: Dickens, Memoirs, p. 181.

  193 a piece of Gothic embellishment: Henry Downes Miles, who bases the merit of his own text on its willingness to take issue with Dickens’s whenever it can, particularly relishes making this point (Grimaldi, pp. 137–8).

  194 ‘by his exertions’: Percival, vol. 3, f. 191.

 
195 ‘electricity, tracheotomy’: The Times, 21 October 1807.

  195 beside his wife’s corpse: Percival, vol. 3, f. 184, and Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 94.

  195 When she called to him, he disappeared: Percival, vol. 3, f. 184.

  195 None of them carried money: Percival, vol. 3, f. 199.

  195 corvine opportunists: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 95; Dibdin, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 404.

  196 ‘Fire! Fire!’: Percival, vol. 3, f. 193.

  196 ‘casually, accidentally, and by misfortune’: Percival, vol. 3, ff. 192, 199.

  196 Mary Vyne absconded: The Times, 1 August 1811.

  197 enough to seat at least a third of the London population: The number of places sold is speculation based on the capacity of Covent Garden at three thousand seats, multiplied by 122 performances. For a similar calculation, see Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, p. 385, n. 9, and Fairburn’s Description of Mother Goose, p. 58. The population of London in 1807 was just over one million.

  197 shared a summer benefit: See BDA, vol. 6, p. 412.

  197 ‘crack brained Boys’: Dibdin, Memoirs, p. 98.

  198 an array of merchandise: Mother Goose was adapted as a board game by James Wallis’s ‘Instructive Toy Warehouse’, at that time the most prolific producer of board games in Britain.

  198 sixteen hundred revellers: Morning Chronicle, 14 July 1808.

  198 to reserve him a box: George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973–94), vol. 1, p.152.

  198 ‘did what he liked with the town’: Miles, Grimaldi, p. 124.

  199 ‘foamings in solitude’: Miles, Grimaldi, p. 128.

  199 modern celebrity: See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), and Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

  200 ‘sack cloth and ashes’: The same paper suggested that Grimaldi ‘apply to the Foreign Office for the appointment of Ambassador or Missionary to some of the Continental States, as his powers are calculated to render them merry!’ Unidentified clipping, Augustin Daly’s Extra-Illustrated edition of The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (London: 1846), Harvard Theatre Collection, 4 vols, vol. 2, p. 81, facing (hereafter, ‘Daly ex-ill.’).