The Fruits of English Victory

So the ordeal was over. There was nothing to do now but acknowledge the compliments of the newly respectful actors backstage, shuffle off the heavy costume, and let Sallie hand her into a cab for the ride back to her rooms. So much had happened so quickly that the only thing she wanted now was the dark oblivion of her own small walls.

By the time she had arrived there, she was dissolved in tears. Miserable, more lonely than she had ever been, filled with sudden revulsion at the foolish life she had chosen, she could only cry weakly in her chair while Sallie cooked her a chop and forced her to gulp it down. She scratched a laconic line in her diary, "Acted in London, triumphantly successful, flowers, etc."; she managed a few quick lines to Mary Eliza and Rosalie, then fell into bed coughing, with her throat on fire.

At dawn, a knock at the door brought a note from Maddox.

My dear Miss Cushman,
I heartily congratulate you on your splendid success last evening, and it affords me the greatest satisfaction in being able to convey to you the most unqualified approbation of some of the most able critics of the day of your performance of the character of Bianca. I assure you it is to me a most pleasant task to state that I was never more delighted,
Very truly yours,
J. M. Maddox¹

The papers accompanying the note rang with Charlotte's praises. The London Herald cried: "Miss Cushman is tall and commanding, having a fine stage figure. The expression of her face is curious, reminding us of Macready, . . . But that is nothing; she soon proved that she was a great artist on her own account. . . . It may be easily foreseen that her career in this country will be a most brilliant one."²

The Times added its own raves: "The great characteristics of Miss Cushman are her earnestness, her intensity," her power to dart rapidly from emotion to emotion, "as if carried on by impulse." In the play, at the instant when Bianca suspects that her husband's affections are wavering, "Miss Cushman's career was certain." For real, impestuous, irresistible passion, "she has not at present her superior."³ If the London Era felt she needed to "smoothe off some of the angles, and give a polish to the stone which here and there indicated some of its native roughness," the fact remained that "she is a great acquisition to our stage."⁴

As Charlotte would soon discover for herself, the London Sun expressed an opinion that rapidly swept over London and all of England. "America has long owed us a heavy dramatic debt for enticing away from us so many of our best actors. She has now more than repaid it by giving us the greatest of actresses, Miss Cushman. . . . Since the memorable first appearance of Edmund Kean, in 1814, never has there been such a debut on the boards of an English theatre. She is, without exception, the very first actress that we have." England had ladylike, accomplished artistes, but between them and Miss Cushman stretched a wide and impassable gulf, the gulf which divides talent, even of the very highest order, and genius. "That godlike gift is Miss Cushman's."⁵

Reading the words, Charlotte knew she could now face the world, calmly assured that her own name was indeed added to the rarefied list of Americans who had journeyed to Mecca and received its accolade: James H. Hackett in 1827, Edwin Forrest and George H. Hill and Josephine Clifton in 1836, and now in 1845--if the Age and Argus spoke truly--Charlotte Cushman, "the best importation from the New World that we have yet had amongst us."⁶

After such praise, contrary views hardly mattered. In the Examiner, Macready's friend, John Forster, complained that Miss Cushman's artistry was obscured "by a cloud of mannerisms and inelegancies."⁷ The Spectator found Charlotte's stage deportment "ungraceful," her attitudes "inelegant," her movements "angular," her style "rude and violent."⁸ But throughout London, playbills soon fluttered the magic words, "The Modern Siddons," and drawing rooms echoed, "the sensation of the year," "the greatest English speaking tragedienne of her time."⁹

She wrote home her excitement to Mary Eliza. "By the packet of the 16th I wrote you a few lines and sent a lot of newspapers, which could tell you in so much better language than I could of my brilliant and triumphant success in London. I can say no more to you than this: that it is far, far beyond my most sanguine expectations." If she had failed, she would not have hesitated to tell her mother her griefs--"for no one could have felt more with me and for me"--so now she would not hesitate to tell all her triumphs. Together, all her stage successes in America could not come near her success in London. "I only wanted some one of you here to enjoy it with me, to make it complete."¹⁰

With her debut safely behind, she could turn her thoughts now to the immediate days ahead. Macready, back in England for a tour of the provinces, had missed her debut, but her interview with him in Paris had left her no reason to expect his goodwill. Her success could only increase his hostility. On Monday, February 17, she played Emilia to Forrest's Othello. The play had been announced as an "immense attraction," and though for Charlotte it seemed an anticlimax after her debut, for Forrest it was a chance to show London anew the impelling power of an actor willing to challenge Macready.

The evening brought him total dismay. At his every appearance, the applause could not mask an ominous, snakelike hiss.¹¹ And it could not be lightly dismissed as anti-American hostility, for unbridled cheers greeted Charlotte. There was no mistaking Forrest's obvious fury at her when the performance was over.

The papers next day brought no relief to him. Charlotte had "electrified the spectators by her outbreaks of passion, and malgré her personal disqualifications," her unfortunate looks, "it is clear that she is hourly making fresh way in the estimation of the public."¹² As for Forrest, Macready's "parasite" John Forster took him to task for his plodding delivery, his annoying pauses. The next Sunday, the Times added further injury; Forrest's Othello was very good, but it showed "little genius." Reading Forster, Forrest blamed Macready for the whole adverse reception, though Charlotte was not long in sensing that he included her in some fancied conspiracy against him. His resentment became almost a "mania," linked somehow to his awareness of Macready's interest in her.¹³ At one curtain when the audience cried, "Cushman! Cushman!" Forrest sat blackly sullen backstage. When Maddox demanded that Forrest take her out for her bow, Forrest exploded. "Damn Miss Cushman, she can go to Hell!"¹⁴ Charlotte gladly pushed her way through the curtain without him.

In Forrest's temper, Charlotte saw a clear threat to her own position. She begged Maddox to break her engagement with him, to bill her on Forrest's alternate nights so that London's obvious preference for her would not so pointedly discredit the actor. Delighted by all the fireworks, Maddox refused. After Macbeth on the twenty-first, the Illustrated London News condensed its scorn for Forrest into a cryptic "Miss Cushman is the chief attraction of the evening,"¹⁵ inflaming forever the actor's hatred for this female who insisted on electrifying the crowd with her own carefully created "points," her own elaborate pauses and "freezings" under the applause.¹⁶ So, for all her wish to avoid entrapments, Charlotte had both egos, Forrest and Macready, solidly ranked--albeit separately--against her.

She could feel no sympathy for Forrest. "Susan will not be sorry to hear that Forrest has failed most dreadfully," she wrote Mary Eliza. "In Macbeth they shouted with laughter and hissed him to death. It appears, when he was here before, old Stephen Price quashed all the critics by keeping all out of the Theatre except those who would speak well of Forrest. Now he has no such support. The papers cut him all to pieces." But Susan must watch how she reported the matter; coming from Charlotte, "it would sound badly."¹⁷ When Edward Everett, American minister to the Court of St. James, extended her a flattering invitation to dinner, she politely refused: "The Forrests were invited and I would not meet them."¹⁸ When the onerous run ended at last, Forrest was convinced she was "not a woman, let alone being womanly," and she was equally certain that Forrest was "a butcher."¹⁹ Nothing would ever persuade her to act with him again.

Offstage, she had other interests. In letters to Philadelphia she poured out her joy--"No American has ever succeeded as I have"--and her misery--"I feel so sick for home that I don't know what to do." If some of the family could only join her, perhaps the loneliness would pass. "I think I should feel a great deal better if I had Charles with me. . . . I am going into the provinces after the 1st of May and should so like to have him with me."²⁰

Back home, the family had had full report of her progress. The Spirit of the Times had reprinted the London critics and the acclaim that continued to shower upon her. And to the Spirit the matter was deeper than an actress' personal victory. Porter's paper could now see in her triumph a new phase in British-American cultural relations. In Charlotte's success, America's pride had been touched. Like a fighter on a battlefield, "Our Charlotte" had shown the disdainful Britons the true worth that could come out of the colonies. "Our Charlotte" had stormed the ramparts of arrogance and opened humility's eyes.

On the strength of such American reports, Philadelphia friends would surely lend Charlie his passage money. He could get a packet ship in New York direct to London. "God knows how long I remain here, it depends upon circumstances entirely," and if Charlie disliked the move, he could go home whenever he liked, "but he would be a great comfort to me now." The soreness in her throat had deepened into a persistent cough--she had had her throat burned nine times already with nitric acid--and she had little money, too little to send home copies of the newspaper reports about herself: "every newspaper costs me at the rate of 12 1/4 cents." But closer contact with the family would make her much happier. "Please," she wrote Mary Eliza, "write me nice long letters, and tell me all, but don't find fault with me or reproach me for anything. I do the best I can and I love you all more than you think I do."²¹

Her best suffered no lack of praise in London. About her Rosalind in As You Like It on February 27, one paper wrote, "If ever we looked upon, heard, conceived Rosalind, it was upon that occasion. If we ever listened to the playful wit, the sweet mocking, the merry laugh of Rosalind . . . her merry eye, her arched brows, her changing looks, it was then and there."²² If Helen Faucit's Rosalind was all wit and mirth and beauty, "Miss Cushman was Rosalind." With the American actress on stage the whole corps dramatique at the Princess's seemed to play better. "Her genius embraced the whole stage"; together with a few other such men and women Miss Cushman could work "a notable revolution on the English stage." With Forrest out of the way, Maddox extended her contract. He did not offer to raise her salary, and Charlotte broached no question about it.

At a different theatre, she might have exacted a price to match her sudden fame, but now was no time to move, to risk any delays in appearing. There was a certain security in acting almost nightly before an audience willing to make its way to the Princess's rather out-of-the-way location. She stayed on for an almost unprecedented eighty-four nights to play Bianca, Rosalind, Mrs. Haller, Lady Macbeth, Emilia, Beatrice, and Portia.²³ On March 4, when the curtain ended her performance of Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, the London Times had "hardly ever known such audible weeping in an audience."²⁴

Of her Julia in The Hunchback, the Illustrated London News was certain "no actress since Miss Fanny Kemble has rendered the part in so admirable a manner,"²⁵ partly due to Charlotte's new skill at makeup. If good acting and makeup could make Garrick look six feet tall, Charlotte had mastered a trick at her dressing table that could soften some of the plain heaviness in her face. As Julia she looked "lovely and elegant, even espiegle." When London society began opening its most prominent doors to this new American sensation, Charlotte began savoring the highest delights and expenses of fame.

Arriving on the twenty-seventh of April, "as handsome as any nobleman over here,"²⁶ Charlie Cushman found his sister surrounded by an admiring throng. She had taken new quarters at 92 New Bond Street; for three pounds a week she had a drawing room, a bedchamber, a storeroom for her trunks and costumes, a place for Sallie, a private water closet, and a small additional room for Charlie. She had hired a grand piano.

Since her hit, people almost vied with each other to see who could shower the most attention upon her. "I have been so crowded with company that upon my word of honour I am almost sick of it."²⁷ During the days, she had to fight for privacy. Breakfast was seldom finished before visitors came calling. It was a rare day that found her in a room with less than six people. At times, to free herself, she resorted to tricks--"Must rush to rehearsal."²⁸ Edward Everett sought her again for breakfast; she must accept an invitation to come any time. Robert Browning's friend, Mrs. Jameson, wanted to meet her.

Success was wearing, but the attention was sweet. London society was so much freer, more natural than any she had known at home, blessedly untroubled by her profession. "The playbills that are out about me would astonish the nerves of the quiet Philadelphians." As an American, she could feel perfectly at ease, not at all apologetic like some of her countrymen for differences in dress and pronunciation. People here relished her "accent," the "Americanisms" in her conversation, her wit, her energy and drive that seemed to typify the young country she came from.

Having Charlie in London made her wish now that the others could join them. With the whole family nearby, she might even consider staying two or three years; by then she ought to have amassed enough money and reputation to come home for a year, able to collect at least $40,000 from "being thought so much of here." The Unitarians had practically adopted her; a Mr. Coleman, former minister at Salem, came to call almost daily. Thomas Noon Talfourd wanted to write her a play. Milman himself had praised her Bianca. She had let herself be persuaded to sit for five different painters, though she could give them only an occasional half hour. Soon she could send one of the portraits home.

She filled her letters to Susan with gossip about the London theatre and the plays she was seeing, descriptions of the scripts she could send her, excited comments about the amazing bargains she saw in the shops, Scottish woolens cut crossway for cloaks, the handsome silk stockings one could have made to order in Manchester. "Feathers are dear here, but I will be on the lookout for a cheap plume for you." Her friend Creswick, now living in Liverpool, was having a splendid stage sword made for her, crosshilted like Hamlet's, made of bright steel. Would Susan like a strand of Roman pearls? "I won't buy anything unless it is cheap," though if her plans held firm, she ought to have saved $50,000 in the three years she was considering staying. "The Americans here are as proud of me as they can be."²⁹ To her mother she enclosed a note to be taken to Sully's: "give into nobody's hand but Miss Rose." Her diary notes a daily "letter to Rose, letter from Rose," however much Mary Eliza disliked the friendship: "I wish you would not mention the Sullys to me in your letters. The spirit in which you do it is most painful to me."³⁰

Charlie's own reports described the wide swath Charlotte was cutting in London. Illustrating a point in court, Talfourd had referred to Charlotte as "the second Siddons." Judging by the newspapers, Charlotte Cushman was "the greatest creature in the greatest city in the civilized world,"³¹ a large compliment indeed in a city where one could witness the Queen and Prince Albert riding in glittering state to St. James Palace and watch the nobility, equipages and all, canter grandly in Hyde Park.

She was not long in receiving a summons to breakfast with the banker-poet, Samuel Rogers. At eighty-two, the author of "The Pleasures of Memory" presided over one of the choicest breakfast tables in London where, beginning at ten, literary wit flowed as bountifully as his fish and cutlets, brown breads and toast, coffee and tea, and strawberries in season. Surrounded by his paintings and his marbles, with his "pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow," Rogers followed the proceedings with large blue eyes that could dull in sorrow one moment, flash in joyful cruelty the next, while his venomous tongue punctuated the bright talk around him.³²

Charlotte was already aware of Rogers' position in intellectual London. In the Spirit of the Times, his puns had been famous for years. His friendship with Byron and Shelley was legendary. His composure within the past year had made him universally envied: when his bank was robbed of 40,000 pounds he had retained his poise. "I should be ashamed of myself, if I were unable to bear a shock like this at my age."³³

At Rogers' parties, usually for no more than ten, the conversation encompassed the group; it never broke up into tedious monologues or forced chatter. And if Rogers himself tended to be pointless in some of his stories, his histrionics and vivid figures saved his guests, many of whom, like Thomas Carlyle and Dickens, might have otherwise found an invitation to breakfast unthinkable.* To his friends the Rogers personality spanned a wide gulf; Fanny Kemble found his bitterness of tongue no more apparent than his kindliness of heart. To him Dickens dedicated his Old Curiosity Shop. And soon Charlotte could write, "Breakfasted twice with Mr. Rogers in two weeks . . . how kind he was to me . . . he is a dear old man and I like him consumedly."³⁴

* Dickens could write in 1870, "I have only accepted two invitations to breakfast in my life, one from Rogers five and twenty years ago; one from the Premier [Gladstone] for this very week" (The Letters of Charles Dickens [Bloomsbury, England, 1938], 3,772).

Entering his wide doorway on St. James Street overlooking the Green Park, Charlotte had her first encounter with the value of wealth to a person of taste. The invitation had been amusing: Would Miss Cushman honor with her presence an old man who might be able to introduce her to some interesting people, a few friends who wished to meet her, over the humble fare of his board? When she was ushered into the drawing room and presented to the cadaverous old figure in his chair, a new chapter in her life opened.

That first morning Rogers regaled her with recollections extending as far back as Dr. Johnson and personal reminiscences of Mrs. Siddons in 1795. Stumping among his treasures, he referred offhandedly to the stories behind the Raphaels and Michelangelos, the Rembrandt self-portrait, the Velasquez and Tintoretto on his crimson walls. In his third-floor library he showed her letters by Johnson and Sterne, Burke and Gray, and Milton's agreement for the sale of Paradise Lost, a display that amazed and delighted her no less than it did Elizabeth Barrett on another occasion.

Seated at Rogers' board, Charlotte's own stories and firm opinions found a ready audience. Though Rogers enjoyed the spotlight of his table, he happily shared it with aggressive intelligence. When Bryan Wailer Procter agreed with Rogers that ballet as art was hardly admirable though theatre managers were wholly justified in offering it as long as it paid, Mr. Lumley, manager of Her Majesty's Theatre, took up a spirited defense. With such stars as Fanny Ellsler and Taglioni, ballet was not only a great art form but also the popular adjunct to opera that could make opera pay.

Charlotte agreed in theory with Lumley, though if the programs he had offered lately were fair examples, ballet could be "meretricious and immodest," and the pleasure it afforded was "animal, not intellectual." Unlike high drama, it served no moral purpose and therefore was hardly worth a decent community's support.

Another guest saw no reason to praise ballet as "poetry in motion," when all it was was shapely legs. Folk dances were certainly poetry in motion, but where was the poetry in a pretty woman standing on one toe, with the other straight out in the air, "more suggestive of the acrobat than of the dancer?"

On the mornings Charlotte would be present Rogers made it a point to choose his guests from names she wanted to meet, from names that Rogers knew could help her, like Bulwer-Lytton, who had written his warm congratulations after her debut. Would Miss Cushman consider playing the poisoner in a dramatized version of his novel, Lucretia? From such meetings, other meetings and invitations followed.

With Rogers' rival as a breakfast host, the "very agreeable, kindly" Richard Monckton Milnes, Charlotte found a common bond. "Dickie" Milnes was heir to lands in Yorkshire from which Pilgrims had emigrated to Plymouth. A dapper little man at thirty-six--a "pretty little robin-redbreast," Carlyle called him--with long blond hair and very little chin, Milnes' major purpose was cultivating wits and talents at his home in Upper Brooke Street. Carlyle teased him: "If Christ were again on earth Milnes would ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the good things Christ had said."³⁵ When young Henry Adams recalled him at breakfast, "behind his almost Falstaffian mask,"³⁶ he remembered his broad intelligence, his relish for the contacts and collisions of society. Unlike most of the wits of London, Milnes' social position led straight to a peerage. Few ever declined his invitations, least of all an ambitious young actress who ten years before had helped run a boardinghouse.

Milnes took a special interest in likely Americans. His long critical review in 1839 had launched Emerson seriously in England; he counted Charles Sumner an intimate friend. Toward the United States in general, he took an almost paternal view; while criticizing its "genius for hand" over "genius for head,"³⁷ he could welcome all signs in London that he might have underestimated it. His invitation to the American Miss Cushman followed naturally.

And Charlotte's flirtatious friend from Detroit and Buffalo, Captain Marryat, reentered her life with invitations and an introduction to the formidable Lady Morgan, intellect and novelist, who bade her attend a great evening party in William Street. Lady Morgan's high humor and rouged cheeks and wig put Charlotte at ease among the great names in English society. With a wide-eyed Charlie in tow, she moved down a receiving line dotted with fashionable names. Circulating, she met a man whose promise impressed her immediately, young Lieutenant Disraeli.³⁸

Charlotte soon found herself at the center of such gatherings, invited at times as a kind of lioness to attract other names. From her own small parties at 92 New Bond Street, word spread that Charlotte Cushman was a marvelous party entertainer, especially impressive as a singer. Though she had never regained her upper notes, she talk-sang her way through a long list of dramatic ballads. An early friend, George W. Bell, noted the interest that centered in Charlotte when she started to sing. At some grand soiree, where "all London" was assembled, the chatter and laughter might continue through the singing of some distinguished amateur, but when Charlotte seated herself at the keys or assumed a dramatic stance, ready to recite "Lord Ullin's Daughter" or sing "We Were Two Daughters of One Race," the chatter died to a silence. If it was not the beauty of the voice, it was Charlotte's "intensity of feeling"³⁹ that riveted her audience. Her Spanish ballad, "The Avenging Child,"⁴⁰ set the crowded rooms into tumult.

In the background, Charlie noted the words of praise that were never expected to reach her ears, "but they did."⁴¹ At table, she set the diners laughing with her imitations of a hen being chased and caught, a cork being pulled, the cawing mistrust of a parrot, quick stories told in brogue. At a party given by Dinah Mullock, Charlotte recited Kingsley's "The Sands o' Dee" so disturbingly, with a voice like "a skipper at sea,"⁴² that the prolific young novelist Margaret Oliphant was rather frightened.

Other names came calling. The young poet Eliza Cook deluged her with poems. "To Charlotte Cushman" extolled her for flinging new laurels on Shakespeare's brow. At their meeting, Charlotte recognized in Eliza an intuitional bond. Eliza's taste in dress proclaimed a determination to be herself: "staring" red plaid, sable cuffs two inches deep, hair cut short like a man's, neck encircled in frills extending to her waist. Eliza expressed herself as freely. Tilting back in her chair, planting both feet on the fender, she bluffly ordered a glass of beer.⁴³

Like Annie Brewster and Rosalie Sully, young women in England found in Charlotte a strong attraction. The magnetism that audiences applauded carried over into her social relationships with women her age who came to "kneel" at her feet.⁴⁴ If none could define the quality, few doubted her force and self-possession, her manner that clearly announced, "I know what I'm doing." For Victorian girls such a young woman held unique interest, a kind of wish fulfillment. That she could amuse and entertain only strengthened her hold, a bond that did not always please Charlotte herself.

Two years her junior, Eliza Cook soon became a constant companion. And in that fact centered a buzz of comment that eventually reached Philadelphia. Charlotte's diary for May 10 carries the cryptic results, "Letter from Rose, breaking my heart." Rosalie's letter of May 11 brought further tears. "Oh, forgive me, dear Charlotte, and believe me when I tell you again and again that my love for you remains firm and unshaken spite of all the cruel reports that are circulated against you." Parted for years, they must drag along a wretched existence until time proved to the world Charlotte's innocence. Charlotte must remain assured that "I am as fondly yours as ever I was the 6th of July last--that pledge I still wear." Since her departure, the bracelet had never been unclasped. Her father had made a bracket for the cardinal's cage outside the north window. "In the afternoon your mother brought me a letter which explained all."⁴⁵

Cruel or not, the reports surrounding her friendship with Eliza Cook did little to lighten the social pressures upon her. And her work at the Princess's occupied her now more than she wanted. On three different nights she did her best to breathe life into a play James Kenney had written for her. But though the applause was considerable, despite the shower of bouquets that had rained down from the boxes, Infatuation had failed.⁴⁶ "It may, perhaps, do me some little injury, but I can afford a trifle, and my next play will bring me up."⁴⁷ On May 18, Maddox extended her run again. "The idea of acting an engagement of forty-seven nights in seven old plays," she wrote her mother, "and being called out every night, then to have one's engagement renewed for thirty nights more, is a thing that would astonish the natives on the side of the world you inhabit now, but which I hope won't hold you long."⁴⁸

If wanting the family with her in England had something to do with a desire to cancel the difficult rumors, it also had much to do with a flowing heart, for with her joy in having Charlie in London, she was more and more strongly convinced that the good life here had to be shared. "I have given myself five years more, and I think at the end of that time I will have $50,000 to retire upon; that will, if well invested, give us a comfortable home for the rest of our lives."⁴⁹