Life on the Victorian Stage: Theatrical Gossip

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Foreword

This book originated with my own family history. Having found out that my greatgrandfather’s three sisters were all on the stage and that two died young – at 18 and 26 respectively – I originally researched their life stories and found a complex tale of life on the Victorian stage. One sister, Alice Harper, eloped with the actor Fred Solomon – brother of the noted composer Edward – in Edinburgh, whilst touring the provinces with him; her sister Edith and Edith’s husband, fellow performer Lytton Grey, attended the unofficial ‘wedding’ in a private house. The night Alice died, in the City of Dublin Hospital, of typhoid fever a month later, she was all alone – her husband, sister and brother-in-law were all due to perform on stage at the Gaiety Theatre at 8 pm that night and did so. The show must go on, after all.

Their stories, like many of those involved in the Victorian theatrical world, were never recorded in the press. If you were a minor figure, your only hopes of getting a mention were to advertise your services in the classifieds, to get a review – bad or good – or to be the instigator or victim of an offence or scandal. Through trying to find my own theatrical family in the pages of the newspapers, I found many more like them, trying to make a living against all the odds. Some of their stories are given here, as well as some linked to my ancestors; Lytton Grey’s divorce from his second wife – an actress who fled to America with a colleague she had an affair with – featured in the press, as well as Fred Solomon’s brother’s bigamous marriage to an American star. This book is not about the plays they appeared in, or the development of the theatre over the nineteenth century – for those subjects, there are other books around that take a more intellectual look, perhaps, at the Victorian theatre. This book instead concentrates on the professional, personal and criminal lives of individual performers over the course of the era – focusing on the gossip that was integral to the nineteenth-century press and public alike.

A note about sources. I have referenced all non-newspaper sources, but to acknowledge every single newspaper and article I have used would make this book far too unwieldy. However, the newspapers looked at include, obviously, The Era, but also a range of regional and national papers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Newspapers in America, Australia and New Zealand have also been consulted. The majority of the cases here are concerned with provincial or London-based theatres, such as the former patent theatres; however, some music halls are also mentioned – for the purposes of this book, ‘theatrical’ covers both Victorian theatres and music halls. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, is commonly recorded here as ‘the Drury Lane theatre’, as the press similarly referred to it by this name. Similarly, the former Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, is also referred to as ‘the Covent Garden theatre’, as it was in the press, it reducing confusion between the two.

I would like to thank the Society of Authors for granting me a Michael Meyer award to help with research for this book. Thanks too to the staff at The National Archives (TNA), London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Dublin City Archives and the New York Public Library for their help and also to Janet Zimmermann. Lucy Bailey, Lucy Williams and Andrew Chapman have given me lots of support, encouragement and the occasional historical debate and I could not have written this book without the support of my family – my husband John and children Jake and Eva – and so the biggest thanks go to them.

‘Authentic anecdotes of eminent persons connected with the stage have ever been most welcome to the public, who generally find in them amusement while they gratify their curiosity’.

The Era, 28 September 1856

Introduction

Celebrity gossip is nothing new. Throughout the centuries, certain people in society have been singled out for attention and even adulation, their actions and speech, their clothes and hair, commented on and copied. In the eighteenth century, individual actors, actresses and even stage managers became the focus of such attention and the burgeoning newspaper industry duly covered their productions. Actresses were seen as rather risqué characters and were the focus of royal attention. Dorothea Jordan, for example, an actress said to have the most beautiful legs ever seen on stage, became the lover of the Duke of Clarence – later King William IV – in 1791. She was with him for two decades, giving birth to ten children. This was in addition to the other illegitimate children she had previously had by a police magistrate and a theatre manager.

The nineteenth century was a period that saw great change both in the world of the theatre and that of the press. In 1843, the monopoly of the patent theatres ended and this saw new theatres open that could undercut the prices of the old theatres such as Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The established Theatres Royal, such as the one in Cardiff, fought to prevent other theatres opening in their towns and taking trade away from them, but this was ultimately futile.

Cheaper tickets in the new theatres meant the working classes could increasingly enjoy the theatre – but alongside this, the development of the music hall put greater pressure on the theatre managers and owners, giving them greater competition and leading to theatres’ fortunes declining. They reacted to this in perhaps a surprising way in the later part of the century. Rather than by trying to get the working classes back to the theatres and away from the music halls and penny gaffs, they instead focused on the middle-class audience, making efforts to attract them in a variety of ways, including a clampdown on violence and disorder.¹

The development of the music hall in England went in tandem with the growth of theatrical reporting and gossip in the press. They had originated in taverns where, by the 1830s, music rooms were being established where singers performed while the audience drank. By the 1850s, purpose-built venues were sprouting up and by 1875, there were nearly 400 music halls in Greater London alone.² Alongside this, there was a ‘profound revolution’ taking place in the world of the newspapers, where there was an increasing number of readers and an increasing number of publications. The sheer number of daily, evening and Sunday editions of the newspapers needed items to fill their pages – not just hard news and breaking stories, but advertisements and gossip too. Filling pages meant an increasing reliance on soft news – theatre news, sports and gossip. Technological advances in terms of transport and telegraphy meant that news could travel both around the UK and around the world quicker than ever before; it also meant a wider world of gossip and scandal could be plundered for copy. The introduction of images – both illustrations and photographs – also changed the nature of the press. There was a recognition that readers liked them and they also gave individual publications a USP. The likes of the Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Police News gave their readers news and gossip that was presented in an attractive, dramatic way; the news was no longer focused on serious world events in dry, complex language or tone, but in shorter soundbites, with the focus on speech, description and drama. The rise in literacy rates in the Victorian era meant that the working classes were increasingly able to read these newspapers themselves and the cheaper newspapers were an affordable form of enjoyment for workers. Children, too, were able to read publications designed for them, that focused on gripping tales of adventure and crime that were worlds away from their own hard lives – and although the authorities worried about the effect these papers had on individuals, they were a reflection of the need for escapism and the desire to read about those with more exciting lives.³

It was the press that cultivated the theatrical celebrity, then, obsessing about the exploits of those working in the theatre. For example, Sarah Bernhardt, who became famous in the 1870s, was known as the ‘most famous actress the world has ever known’ and ‘the divine Sarah’, working with the press by lying about her origins to create a more exotic ‘back story’. Her affair with a nobleman, a rumoured lesbian affair and speculation that she had also been romantically involved with the future Edward VII, only added to her attraction for the press and public alike.

But it was not just those at the top of the acting tree who were written about; this was the age of the provincial theatre and the local and national press eagerly covered not only regional productions, but the off-stage antics of those who acted in them. These lesser actors and actresses provided a constant stream of stories for the increasingly gossip-driven press – the London weekly newspaper The Era, established in 1838 by Frederick Bond, just a year after Victoria became queen, became renowned for its theatrical coverage, even being known as ‘The Great Theatrical Journal’ and having a regular column entitled ‘Theatrical Gossip’, from which this book gets its subtitle. Its early editions were fairly limited in terms of their theatrical coverage; in the late 1830s, it was not dissimilar from other publications, with a blend of foreign and national news, political comment and letters – but even at this early stage, there was a hint of things to come, with cases drawn from coroners’ inquests, sheriffs’ and debtors’ courts and the London police courts, and gossip based on the latest dances and fashions. This gossip, as time went on, became increasingly focused on the theatrical profession.⁴

Taking their cue from the nature of American newspapers, these Victorian publications were ‘cheap, visual and by the standards of their time, often sensational’.⁵ Their readers wanted to read about what their favourite actors and artistes were doing, both in their public and private lives, and the actors and their managers wanted to publicise their shows to ensure good crowds and good takings in an increasingly competitive market. But this competitiveness and pressure led to problems for actors, actresses, managers and agents and the press were keen to report these, too. This did not just apply to the national press – the regional newspapers eagerly reported events not just locally, but those involving actors and actresses both in London and overseas. The railways enabled the rapid distribution of the London newspapers to the regions (and vice versa). In addition, the development of the telegraph over the nineteenth century led to speedier communications and with the establishment of the transatlantic telegraph in the 1850s, telegraphy to Australia in the 1870s and the increasing popularity of telephones in the 1890s, gossip from around the world could be transmitted to the British press and on to their readers quicker than ever before.

Debts, unemployment, personal problems – all were leapt on by the gossipy Victorian newspapers. Some actors resorted to holding their ex-girlfriends up with guns to extort money from them; others killed themselves. Travel was integral to the lives of many actors – in 1895, for example, it was noted that Queenie Leighton, who at that time was performing in the pantomime Sinbad the Sailor in Middlesbrough, had had ‘tempting offers recently to play in foreign parts – South Africa and South America’. Some actors took advantage of performing around the world to leave their partners, or to marry new ones whilst failing to remember that they already had a spouse back in England. They were involved in civil and criminal cases, they seduced or were seduced; they married, divorced, died – in sometimes tragic or difficult circumstances. Their complex, erratic, peripatetic lives led to a wealth of stories that the Victorian press, with their increasing focus on gossip and theatrical gossip in particular, were only too eager to exploit.

This was all set within the context of continuing political debate over the morality of the theatre and those involved with it. It has been suggested that ‘moral prejudices against actors and more particularly against actresses, were stronger in the provinces than in London and only started to decline late in the century’.⁶ Actresses were viewed in one of two ways, though. Some felt threatened, as the Victorian stage offered opportunities to women that they were not able to gain elsewhere, particularly in economic terms.⁷ These were independent women, making their own money and having the freedom to travel for work.

Yet they were also viewed by some as innocents who needed protecting, for fear that they could be seduced by immoral actors. Critic Clement Scott had criticised men who allowed their wives to become actresses if they failed to accompany them on tour; such a husband must be ‘either a fool or a knave’. ⁸ This was also applicable to children; when the age at which children should be allowed to take on paid theatrical work was debated in the House of Commons in 1889, the Cirencester MP Arthur Winterbotham had to apologise for earlier comments he had made about the morality of actresses (he had implied that when actresses came to the end of their careers, they became prostitutes). However, he added, ‘I do not desire to withdraw my grave protest against this door being specially opened to little girls to enter a profession full of danger to their purity and morality.’⁹ At around the same time, in 1896, the Chief Justice of Victoria, Australia, Sir John Madden, discoursed on the theatrical profession during a divorce case, where an actress on tour was charged with having had affairs with three itinerant actors. Although she didn’t deny the facts, her husband was refused a divorce, the Chief Justice stating that he had ‘contributed to the domestic catastrophe by permitting his wife to go on tour for a prolonged period without adequate safeguards’. He noted that the wife ‘had to travel about and constantly associate by night as well as by day, with a class of men often attractive and not unfrequently lax in their views of sexual morality. Of course, there are many actors and actresses of the highest principles and circumspection, but notoriously, there are many who are otherwise.’

In the same year, Lord Russell, the English Lord Chief Justice, stated that he was ‘thankful’ that he had nothing to do with the stage in a professional capacity, because there were ‘thorny questions’ relating to it ‘as to whether the drama ought to be attractive or repulsive, according to nature or according to imagination, or whether certain plays are to be forbidden or not forbidden’. He added that some said actors did not ‘live always as they ought to have lived and so forth. Well, I leave these things to moralists.’¹⁰

This association of the theatre with sex and perceived immorality was perhaps part of the attraction both for the press and for its readers – and newspapers including, but by no means restricted to, The Era, duly filled columns with a range of theatrical gossip. And here, for the modern reader, is just a sample of that theatrical gossip, which shows, above all, how the Victorians were as much driven by celebrity culture as we are today.

PART 1:

BUSINESS LIVES

C

HAPTER

1

Licensing the Theatre

Theatres were not, despite what some newspaper writers and readers thought, places of simple enjoyment and fantasy. They were businesses – and ones that were difficult to make money from. Everyone involved in the theatrical way of life, from managers, lessees and agents to actors, actresses and chorus girls, hoped to make money – but more often found themselves mired in financial complications, or even penury. It was only a small percentage of actors who became stars of the day and were able to enjoy a certain lifestyle; and fortunes could be as rapidly lost as gained. Dickens, in Nicholas Nickleby, gave a more prosaic view of the theatre when he wrote that in a touring company, ‘the actors depend in the most direct way on the patronage of their audience – for their benefit nights, they have to go round selling tickets’. He also stressed the gap between the actor’s public persona and ‘the sometimes dingy realities of his life’.¹

Actors’ lives were, as they are still today, precarious. This is why they had to work hard to get engagements and to promote themselves. The Era, throughout much of the Victorian age, was full of advertisements placed by theatres, managers, agents and the actors themselves, publicizing their latest productions and the availability of individuals for roles. Actors’ adverts were a ‘valuable channel of self-publicity’, stressing their successes so far.² Yet they also had an element of pathos, as can be seen in repeated ads placed by actors who were ‘unengaged’ or who highlighted minor roles in provincial plays as evidence of their achievements. Nobody wanted even a brief break; they were constantly seeking work and had to diversify in order to make a living. In 1860, for example, The Era included an advert placed by the Misses Maskall – as the singing sisters Elizabeth Wadd Maskall and Mary Malkin Sherwood Maskall were known – wishing to notify readers that they would ‘make their last appearance at Scarborough this season, on Monday evening, Sept 17th, when, having completed their Summer Tour in the North of England, they will return to their town residence, 11 Norland Square, Notting Hill, where all communication respecting concerts, public or private pupils, &c, must be addressed’. It was sent to the paper from Tynemouth in Northumberland, with four days left of their northern provincial tour.³ Actress Mrs Moreton Brookes advertised in the same edition. She put her ‘provincial and metropolitan theatre’ experience at the top, but then added that she was ‘prepared to receive pupils for the stage and qualify them for the profession according to the best received rules’. These women shared what we would call the classified ads pages with a host of others all about to be ‘unengaged’, from Henry Cooke and his circus troupe of dogs and monkeys, to Herr Christoff, the tightrope walker and Monsieur Oriel, the French clown and chair performer. There was not just a performer for every occasion – there were too many performers, all scrabbling to get regular – or semi-regular – work and having to diversify in order to support themselves when roles could not be found.

It is interesting that, in the ‘wanted’ section of The Era, were lots of positions for practically-minded people – scene painters, props men, watchmen and fencing teachers (to teach swordfighting to actors). Acting roles were fewer, although one can imagine thespians leaping on the odd advert for ‘an entire theatrical company’. Henry Butler’s Dramatic Agency, which was located at 21 Bow Street, Covent Garden, placed a large advert in The Era, stating, ‘artistes in every line and of every kind, required for London and Provincial Theatres of standing. Wanted, first-class English and Italian Vocalists for a Metropolitan Theatre; Principal Singing Comedy and Burlesque Ladies; Leading Actors and Actresses; Heavy Men; Juvenile and Walking Gentlemen; and Pantomimists of every description.’ There were certainly a huge variety of performers that the Victorians wanted to watch; but there were also a huge number of performers who would only get a rare chance to perform at a London or provincial theatre, regardless of their skills. Then, as now, it was a competitive and precarious occupation.

Those who were the lessees of theatres could also face an uncertain career. The complexity of theatre licensing meant that a production could be refused a licence, or have it withdrawn, as a result of complaints or concerns about morality and behaviour – not just within the theatre, but outside, too, as moralists expressed concern about the impact of theatres on their neighbouring communities. The history of the licensing of theatres and other establishments in London is a long one. The Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 meant that places of entertainment either within the City of London or Westminster, or within 20 miles of them, had to get a licence from a magistrate in order to carry on staging entertainment for audiences. These licences were not a foregone conclusion – they could be issued or renewed, but they could also be refused. Where theatres got into trouble, reneging on the terms of their licences, their proprietors could find themselves hauled before the magistrate at the General Sessions. These were known as Quarter Sessions outside of London as they met four times a year – however, in London and Middlesex they met more frequently due to the higher number of cases needing to be processed.⁴

In 1737, the Licensing Act (10 Geo II c28) was passed and this set out to control travelling actors considered to be rogues and vagabonds, thus putting actors under the remit of the various eighteenth-century Vagrancy Acts as well. The Act stipulated that anyone acting in a play, or involved in its performance, who did not have either a letter patent or Lord Chamberlain’s licence, or who did not have a legal settlement in the place of performance (likely for itinerant provincial actors) could be convicted as a vagabond. The Act also set out that a copy of all new plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at least two weeks before the first performance was scheduled. Therefore, the Lord Chamberlain was a censor of plays; he could ban all or part of a play and refuse to grant a licence. His jurisdiction did not just apply to Westminster, but also to royal residences and public houses. By 1800, as Jacky Bratton has commented, there were only two theatres – Covent Garden and Drury Lane – catering for an expanding population in the winter, with the Haymarket Theatre covering the summer season. A few small theatres were allowed to perform plays with music and others opened outside the Lord Chamberlain’s geographical remit, such as on the South Bank, operating under the jurisdiction of local magistrates.⁵

The Licensing Act was repealed in 1843, when the Theatres Regulation Act (6 & 7 Vict c68) was passed. However, this had a similar function and under its remit, the Lord Chamberlain and Justices of the Peace had responsibility for the licensing of theatre managers (in 1788, JPs had already been given some responsibility for licensing within their areas of jurisdiction, under 28 Geo III c30). All London and Westminster theatres could apply to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for a licence to perform drama, as could the boroughs of Finsbury, Marylebone, Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Southwark. New plays had to be submitted for approval – for a fee – at least seven days before a first performance and licences could be withdrawn for inappropriate behaviour. However, matters were not simple. Small saloon theatres (including public houses) could apply for either a magistrate’s licence that enabled their customers to drink on the premises but not watch dramatic performances, or a Lord Chamberlain’s licence, that enabled an establishment to put on dramas, but not allow drinking in the auditorium. This situation resulted in theatres and music halls developing separately, catering to those who wanted ‘serious’ drama and those who wanted more varied entertainment.

These attempts to regulate theatres and other places of entertainment hint at what the authorities really didn’t want people doing – entering into prostitution, or using prostitutes. As Frederick Burwick has noted of the 1788 Theatrical Representations Act, ‘moral supervision was the rationale’ behind it and subsequent legislation.⁶ From the attitude that female actresses were little more than prostitutes or loose women developed the Victorian conceit that theatres, and their environs, were hotbeds of iniquity, where prostitutes gathered. The newspapers and archives are full of cases involving theatres having their licences refused or rescinded. For example, in 1866, the Oxford Times recorded that Charles Moralli had his application for a theatre licence refused, after the mayor had spoken out to say that ‘he did not think that theatres were beneficial to the interests of the young men of the town and therefore he could not be a party to such things’. A majority of Oxford magistrates consequently decided to refuse the licence. The licensing of theatres, music halls and dance halls was a popular issue; when Middlesex magistrates gathered to hear applications in October 1850, it was noted that ‘the court was crowded with parties interested in and connected with, the musical and theatrical professions and places of public entertainment’. Although many establishments had their licences approved or renewed without objection, the Catherine Wheel in Great Windmill Street was not so lucky. The churchwardens and overseers of St James, Westminster, petitioned the court, asking for the licence not to be renewed. It emerged that they had decided to oppose every music or dancing licence submitted by an establishment within the parish, as it thought ‘the granting of such