A Star in the Provinces

Already, Charlotte could visualize the day when Susan herself would make a London debut. Opposite her hot-blooded Romeo, Susan's willowy Juliet would create a sensation. On that point, when several steamy June nights withered London's interest in theatre, she ran into trouble with Maddox.

Casting about for some novelty, Maddox remembered Charlotte's American success as Romeo; the sight of a woman in unlikely tights and doublet just might perk up the crowd. His note to her about it brought her up short. Without tipping her hand, the reply she sent by Charlie mentioned other roles that seemed "more appropriate." Charlie himself could make suggestions, though he must positively not bring up Meg Merrilies. The gypsy hag was too crude, surely, for the Londoners she had met at the Princess's.

The report Charlie brought back, however, confirmed an unhappy fact she had long known about this brother. Confused, Charlie had let Maddox believe somehow that his sister actually wanted to play Meg. Maddox had debated. In itself, Scott's tired old piece could hardly attract anybody, yet who could predict the stir Charlotte Cushman might cause as the hag? He had gambled on her before.

Hearing this, she could only look at her brother amazed. Charlie was clearly no man to depend on. The sooner she placed him in some clerk-type position that could accept his shortcomings, the happier it would be for both of them. He could preen himself in her light as long as he liked, but she would look beyond him for any practical help.

Still, Charlie had committed her to Meg, and this was the fact that troubled her. Like Nancy, the ragged gypsy was surely too coarse and raffish. Yet when she saw Charlie's crestfallen look, his shame at having failed her, she shrugged: "It can't be helped. I will do it as it has never been done before!"¹

By June 10, when she sprang into the moonlight as the tattered old hag, she had worked changes. With adequate time to prepare, she had carefully planned the costume and used all her new skill at makeup. With Sallie's help, painting her skin took a full half hour. Under the brush, her firm flesh became shriveled cheeks and projecting bones, withered neck, and sinewy arms and hands. Donning the drab rags, stuffing her own hair into the tangled gray wig and binding it all with a cloth took the rest of the hour.² To the forlorn old beldam she had created in New York, she had added a blend of pathos and mystery, an element weirdly psychic.

With Meg's silent leap to the stage, London saw a towering sibyl with bony arms extended, tense, rigid in fluttering rags, coils of hair escaping the folds of a twisted kerchief. When she darted a claw at Henry Bertram, when a voice "from another world" began crooning a lullaby, Madame Vestris, who had come over from Covent Garden, felt her blood turn "cold."³

Standing on tiptoe, thrusting her crooked staff over her head, her eyes flashing, her weird cries rose to a shriek. One critic saw the performance, not as acting, but as inspiration "as great as anything Rachel ever achieved."⁴ When Meg charged old Dominie Sampson to admonish Henry not to forget her, but to build up the old walls in the glen for her sake, the conviction behind her words suggested the ghostly light that would flicker over the stones.

Standing in the wings, Charlie watched the faces staring up out of the chill that Meg's dying agonies spread over them. Women unable to watch the terrible writhing covered their faces. Transfixed, awe-struck expressions followed the ragged heap's final quiverings.

When the curtain ended the play, Charlie witnessed a London triumph. The audience burst into "screeches" of applause; hats peppered the air. A few moments later when Charlotte bounded through the curtains with her own dark hair brushed free of the wig, her face washed clean of its swarthy wrinkles, a new frenzy shook the house. Afterward, Eliza Cook gave her more poems and an amusing sketch of herself as Meg, fierce-eyed, standing triumphantly erect with staff in one hand, a trumpet bedecked with an American flag in the other. She called it "Yankee Hanging Out Her Banner," a declaration that Charlotte's new victory heralded all Yankeedom's challenge to the world.⁵

On the strength of this new ovation, Charlotte expected a sellout benefit the next week. But the muggy weather was against it, and, as Charlie reported it, Maddox had worked hard to spoil her house, to convince her the public "did not like her," lest she demand more money. Clearly the time had come to break with Maddox.

Immediately she contracted an agent, Mr. Lea of Bow Street, to book her acting dates for a tour in late summer and fall through the provinces. In the meantime, nearly exhausted from the labors she had forced on herself, she had a vacation coming, and the arrival of her family next month to anticipate. She would do some reading, make a few calls.

The feminist Anna Jameson, a friend of Fanny Kemble, the Carlyles, and the young poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, wanted to meet her. At the visit "the most charmingly delightful woman I have ever met"⁶ put Charlotte at ease, though Mrs. Jameson's flaming red hair, fierce eyes, square mouth, and freckles at first disturbed her. Other visits followed, in spite of Mrs. Jameson's admonitions to slow down. "Do you mean that I am too energetic?" Charlotte asked in a note. "Alas, I wish I could conquer my restlessness," but a sort of "Jew destiny hangs over me, and I find the one word whispered into my ear at every turn, 'on!'"⁷ much as her energies flagged.

Through a letter from Mary Howitt, she met Mary Mitford, author of Rienzi, in which she had played at the Park. Mrs. Howitt's letter sang her virtues: Charlotte was a "glorious creature,"⁸ as superior in character as in talent, and if ordinary young men did not cause a furor over her looks, the sound-hearted kind would acknowledge her power and greatness, her beautiful intellect.

The meeting with Miss Mitford among her roses and hollyhocks at her home, Three Mile Cross, near Reading put Charlotte in the presence of a silver-haired little woman with an ugly face, a Victorian lady not at all repulsed by the outpourings of her friend Elizabeth Barrett: "Love me, dearest Miss Mitford, my dear kind friend--love me, I beg of you, still and ever, only ceasing when I cease to think of you."⁹ Charlotte was enchanted with the playwright. When Miss Mitford left the room for a moment Charlotte remarked to another guest: "What a bright face it is!" a face that in spite of its plainness carried "a summer brightness."¹⁰ And Mary Mitford was no less enchanted with Charlotte in the letters she wrote of the visit to Elizabeth and to her friend Mrs. Partridge: "I have had a very interesting American visitor, Miss Cushman, the tragic actress--a very superior woman. They say she is an actress of great genius."¹¹

In the busy months since her London debut, none of Charlotte's joys matched that of planning the family's move. She was still the focal point of their interests, the major support of their needs, and no stronger reason kept them in Philadelphia now than had earlier kept them in Boston. By June, she had their passage to England fully arranged; they would arrive in London by mid-July.

As the time drew near she balanced her excitement with house-hunting. "I am getting quite nervous as the time draws near to expect my mother and sister (they must be here in a day or two), and quite long for them."¹² She wanted a garden with birds for Mary Eliza, play space and trees for young Bub, ample rooms of her own for entertaining. She settled at last on a furnished cottage at 1 Garway Road in rural Bayswater, five miles from Covent Garden. She and Sallie and Eliza Cook had the garden paths swept and the house shining and decked with flowers when her mother and the others finally arrived from Liverpool, distraught from the rough ocean passage, overjoyed like herself that the separation had ended at last.

After the laughing embraces, Charlotte held each one back at arm's length. Mary Eliza had aged, but under the lace of her cap, her face held the same old Yankee firmness, her eyes the same doubts that anything could ever come right outside of Boston. In Susan she sensed a new maturity, a rounding of character that work and time had given her. And Hub was now a tall boy of seven. The lad was much too manly for such a baby name. From now on his Auntie would call him Ned.

If she sensed a coolness in her mother and Susan toward Eliza Cook, she tried to think little of it. Her mother had never grasped the charm of the gentle Rosalie; she could hardly appreciate the flamboyant Eliza. In time, the reserve might thaw, though it would not be easy explaining Eliza's eccentric dress, her outspoken manner, and vigor. In time, the family might see the change in herself, the determination to be the person she truly was in a land where intelligent women confessed more and more their irritations under society's foolish restraints. Eliza proclaimed her own independence a little too loudly perhaps, but Charlotte would not say no to her.

Once settled, she was ready for guests at the Bayswater cottage. In some nervous response to the recent excitement, the family had all been ill the first few days. Mary Eliza had gone weakly to bed; Susan came down with a cough; Charlie dragged himself each morning to his new job with an insurance office in Chancery Lane. But they had all regained their strength when Westland Marston and his wife came calling. To the English, Mary Eliza was a homely, genial example of American women, confiding at once her hardships in trying to keep house--where everything was so "strange"--on a weekly budget under "three pounds and a half,"¹³ an expression the Marstons found quaint.

Returning their visit, Charlotte found a person no less strange at the Marstons'. "Among our guests was a man of great erudition and worth," Marston recollected, "who had written one or two creditable dramas in verse, liked and respected in spite of his delusion that nature had meant him to be a great actor." B---- had a terrible voice, but the fact had never deterred his "elocutionary displays." When he begged Charlotte to do a scene from Macbeth with him, Charlotte refused. He then offered to do a scene, solo, from Othello. Charlotte whispered to Marston. "You're a friend of poor B----'s; . . . don't allow him to make himself absurd."

But when some of the guests encouraged him out of politeness, Charlotte would have none of it. "Mr. B----," she said, "You may think me uncivil for interfering, but please remember that acting is the work of my life, and that I seek the society of my friends for a little change. Please don't set the example of recitations." When someone suggested the recitation should be the only one of the night, B---- was delighted. "Oh, it's a shame!" cried Charlotte. She looked around at the others. "Mr. B----, I tell you the truth. You can appreciate dramatic poetry, and you can even write it, but you cannot declaim it. Nature has not fitted you for it. Do sit down, then; don't give your friends, who so much admire you, the pain of seeing you attempt what you cannot perform."¹⁴ Still undiscouraged, B---- bowed to Charlotte's candor.

During that same visit, Marston gave Charlotte a message from Bulwer-Lytton: he was still eager to rewrite his Lucretia for her if she ever cared to consider it.

Early in August, the Athenaeum's music critic, Henry Chorley, brought Charlotte and Robert Browning together at a musicale. Charlotte was only partly prepared for Browning. In spite of the awe she felt in his presence, he hardly looked masculine. As Mary Mitford had said, Elizabeth's bearded poet could have been a "girl drest in boy's clothes . . . about the height and size of a boy of twelve,"¹⁵ with brown wavy hair to his shoulders. But Charlotte could forgive him; he had given her the words from "Paracelsus" to help her withstand her ocean ordeal.

When Charlotte finally met him, she mentioned the proofs she had just seen of Hans Christian Andersen's new novel, Only a Fiddler. Browning thought a few moments. "Now I think of it, I seem to have written something with a similar title--nay, a play, I believe,--yes, and in five acts--'Only an Actress!'"¹⁶ Later at home, Browning wrote Elizabeth that he had found the American Miss Cushman "clever and truthful looking."

Wending his way through the cheering provinces, William Macready had kept an eye on Charlotte's success in London. When Benjamin Webster approached him with a Haymarket offer, asking what assisting performers he would require, Macready replied, "No one," though if asked to suggest, "I should name Miss Cushman."¹⁷ And Edwin Forrest, swallowing his pride, told a theatre manager in Bristol that Charlotte Cushman might welcome an offer to appear there with him.

But neither actor could tempt her; she could do well enough without them. When Maddox sought Charlotte for early September in a joint appearance with Macready--"Miss Faucit I am told won't go"¹⁸--she remained firmly opposed. Her country engagements would "not admit of it." To his diary Macready complained of "the woman's perfect inconsistency."¹⁹

The only appearance that interested her now was the Romeo she soon hoped to do with Susan. Before Charlotte left London, they ran quickly through their Romeo lines. And she reassured Charlie once again that his mistake with Maddox had worked out well enough. After London's raves, Meg Merrilies should go well in England's lesser houses; with it she would test her real drawing power.

Acting to top houses in the provinces, she soon found that her London agent had served her ill. Interested only in his cut, Lea had ignored all geography in arranging her tour, and, strange to the territory herself, she wasted valuable time retracing her steps on trains and muddy coaches through Dover and Brighton, Bath and Swansea, Manchester, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. When the theatre "Royal" in Norwich turned out to be a disreputable "low" house, she broke the contract and mollified the manager with cash: playing it might damage her reputation. She fared better in Hull, where her Bianca caused tears to flow "unbidden, not only from those of her own sex, but from eyes altogether unused to the melting mood."²⁰

On September 22, she took her success to the Queen's Theatre in Manchester, where conditions seemed right for a test run before London with Susan, though some of the other actors appeared second-rate.

"Who is your Mercutio?" she asked the manager.

"There I think we shall be all right; I have got young Wallack."

Charlotte looked at the playbill. "I don't see his name."

"No, he calls himself Mr. Lester."

"Very inexperienced, I am afraid."

The manager agreed, "But he is said to have a good deal of promise."

After the performance, Charlotte agreed that the classically handsome Mr. Lester would bear watching. Throughout the Manchester run, she became increasingly sure of his talent. Before she left town, she called him to her. "Young gentleman," she said, "there is a great future before you, if you take care and do not let your vanity run away with you."²¹

Lester took Charlotte's advice to heart. Her letter of recommendation to Benjamin Webster at the Haymarket got him his first acting job in London, his first encouragement toward a notable career in later years, when England and America knew him as Lester Wallack.

By the time Charlotte left Manchester she had sealed an important friendship with Geraldine Jewsbury, who had come crowding toward her in the greenroom. Geraldine's recent novel Zoe had shocked staider sensibilities in England; even Jane Carlyle, who had been her good friend since 1840, had found it "too strong," and the dour Carlyle had tossed the volume aside as "George Sandism," the work of a school teaching "phallus worship," with Balzac and Sue for prophets and Sand herself "for a Virgin." For a time "the ardent little provincial" with her untidy red hair had been more ardent than Jane Carlyle knew how to manage. "My dear," Geraldine had written, "let us look at our lot boldly in the face at once; if it has been given us to love--for it is not every woman who receives that terrible gift--let us submit without vain struggling."²² To all of which Carlyle had snorted: "I wish she could once get it fairly into her head that neither woman nor man, nor any kind of creature in this universe, was born for the exclusive or even for the chief purpose of falling in love, or being fallen in love with."²³

To Geraldine, Charlotte was the complete embodiment of "protection and strength,"²⁴ a nature capable of the engulfing friendship Geraldine relished. And in the correspondence that soon flourished between them, Charlotte disclosed her appreciation. As a forthright champion of women's rights in England, Geraldine saw ample proof in Charlotte that female determination could triumph in a masculine world, even one presided over by a Queen determined to keep women forever bound in the chains of domesticity. If Geraldine in her novels could damn the restraints society imposed on her sex, Charlotte as the brilliant new star of the English stage could stride boldly through England, the shining example of woman's right to live as her nature ordained. Their appreciation of each others' efforts toward recognition fully balanced the passion in the friendship.

When Charlotte confessed that her ceaseless pace since arriving in England was beginning to tire her, Geraldine offered an essay of advice: "You have had enough to drive to destruction a whole regiment of men, let alone women." When Charlotte confessed that the social artificialities in London had depressed her at times, Geraldine could sympathize: "Living in London society does under any circumstance make one exquisitely sad."²⁵ Charlotte must accept as normal her revulsion to the glare of popularity and triumph in which she had moved for the last few months. No nervous system ever born of woman "could stand it."

When Charlotte mentioned a deeper concern, her friendship with Eliza Cook, Geraldine understood fully. "Now for what you darkly allude to. I know something of that worry too, but yr. way of putting it makes me doubtful the sort of friends that are grumbled at . . . if you know them to be worthy, if they are true and faithful as well as loving, follow yr. own instincts. You need love to keep you up in yr. daily course more than other women. You are essentially true and noble-minded yourself, and second motives will never hold you. If they are worthy, cling to them. You are quite strong enough not to get entangled in any undesirable adjuncts." Society had never yet thanked anyone "for minding its clamor, rather despises them for being moved," said Geraldine. But this of course depended on circumstances. "If those they want you to give up are true and faithful and sterling, and deserve yr. love, then I shd. say keep to them thro' evil and good report, but don't go making a grievance for people who don't deserve it."²⁶ Jealousy pervaded the lines, but Geraldine could only conclude, "Miss Cook wd. think me very good if she cd. believe that another person might love you as well as she does."²⁷

As for Charlotte's Romeo, Geraldine admitted that valid arguments might question a woman's taking the part, but in her opinion, "it was a most effective performance."²⁸ London would surely acclaim the skill and insight of the new team of sisters playing the leads.

October found Charlotte in Edinburgh's Theatre Royal, no longer the wide-eyed American tourist, but a name written large on the billboards. A sixteen-year-old actor, John Coleman, spoke for Edinburgh's reaction. When the curtain went up on Fazio, he discovered a massive woman towering above a man of medium height, Bianca's unbecoming costume contrasting sharply with Fazio's elegant doublet and fine hose. Her head was plastered with huge coils of tow-colored, lusterless hair. Between her eyes and her defiant mouth "which opened and shut like a vice" yawned a "chasm, in the centre of which a minute pimple suggested an apology for a nose."²⁹ About her "strange, weird figure" Coleman saw no trace of feminine charm; when she spoke, her voice, instead of sounding "an alarum to love," was guttural.

By the end of the first act, Coleman was thoroughly bored, but the curtain for the next act caught him before he could leave the stage box. He was still bored at the end of the second, staring back dully when Bianca's eyes fell squarely on him as she delivered her lines. But with the beginning of the third act--"wondrous glamour of the actor's art!"--from the moment Bianca came to denounce her faithless spouse, "I had eyes and ears only for the poor demented creature whose face was transformed into the mask of Medusa, and whose eyes glittered with internal fire."³⁰ Bianca's frantic "There's dancing here! And I--yes, I--have been dancing, too!" left him "shivering and shuddering" until the bell heralding Fazio's death sounded the knell for his wife.

For a long moment, a silence "awful and profound" filled the hall; then the audience "arose like one man," their voices mingling in an acclamation one might hear "only once or twice" in a lifetime. "I think they must have gone mad; I know I did," wrote Coleman. "With tears streaming down my cheeks, I waved my handkerchief and shouted myself hoarse." When the actress came forth for her bow, "all nods and becks and wreathed smiles," the ungainly apparition of the first act had become a woman--"yea, a woman of rare and radiant beauty!" From that time on, Coleman "never noted the lack of comeliness in Charlotte Cushman."³¹

Next morning, Coleman overheard a conversation in the manager's office. "The audience was so cold and apathetic," said the voice of Bianca, "that I really believe I should have 'dried up' altogether if that beardless boy in the stage box, with his insolent airs, hadn't so stung me to the quick that I made up my mind to 'go' for the puppy. For the first two acts I might as well have tried to thaw an iceberg; but in the third I hypnotised the young cub, and, when I went forward at the end, he waved his handkerchief and shrieked and shouted like a maniac!" "They were not so demonstrative to Mrs. Siddons when she made her debut here,"³² Murray rejoined happily.

Coleman, hat in hand, was waiting to apologize when Charlotte left the manager's office.

"You here? An actor?"

"Not yet, madam," he replied. "But by-and-by I hope to be one."

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast!" said Charlotte.

Playing a brief supporting role in Guy Mannering, Coleman was waiting for his cue "when lo! there swept on like a whirlwind a great, gaunt, spectral thing," clad from head to heel in shreds and patches. Its locks were iron gray; its face, arms, and neck were like a mummy's "new risen from the sepulchre"; its eyes flamed fire. "Then came my cue, and upon the instant I was kneeling at her feet. About to rush away to do her bidding, she seized me by the throat, and with a man's strength," Meg hurled him to the ground. "Who could have thought that those withered arms had such strength in them?"³³

Another actor was hardly so lucky. The man playing Dandie Dinmont was much too small for the role, and at the final curtain, when "la grande Charlotte" tumbled into his arms, his legs gave way, and down he went on his back, "clinging valiantly to Meg as she fell on his stomach." Stifling his laughter, Coleman had never seen two more grotesque objects--she "dead above, he alive, all alive! below" struggling for air.

Safe behind the curtain, the cast exploded into laughter. They were still laughing when the curtain went up for the call. Charlotte sprang to her feet, hands clenched, teeth fixed, eyes glittering. Dandie thought she was about to strangle him. "And she culd have din it tae, laddie!" he said later.

But the roaring out front was still "so loud, so enthusiastic, and so long continued that it seemed as if the mere concussion of sound must have rent the roof from off the building." Charlotte suddenly burst into joyous laughter herself, playfully slapped Dandie's face, "and ran off to her dressing room, like a two-year-old." Coleman called her "a deuced good fellow." From her lips Shakespearean lines which "in this superfine age we have suppressed as indecorous" lilted joyously.

Among the admirers who came crowding to her door were the Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe and his wife Cecilia, daughter of Mrs. Siddons. In delighted response to their invitation, Charlotte soon found herself in their elegant home with its "glorious fires." Over tea and Madeira, if the subject was Cecilia's mother and her concept of Lady Macbeth ("fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile . . . captivating in feminine loveliness"³⁴), the Combes' flattery in launching Charlotte socially in Edinburgh interested her almost as much.

When Susan came north for another trial run of Romeo before London, the Combes further extended their hospitality, though some of their eagerness cooled when their staid neighbors objected strongly to Charlotte's "masculine" demeanor as Romeo, her straight limbs as "strident as those of a youth," her amorous advances toward her sister so erotic "that no man would have dared to indulge in them" publicly.³⁵ In due course Combe was writing Cecilia's cousin Fanny Kemble for details about Charlotte's family, reputation, and "private virtue." "Why the deuce doesn't he look for it in her skull?"³⁶ complained Fanny.

Combe's advice about Romeo brought a detailed reply from Charlotte. "I can only assure you the ideas you have been kind enough to give me are entirely new to me." Had Combe spoken earlier, she could have used his help. "As it is, your hints have only plunged me into trouble, for I find the subject, in a new light entirely, and myself bound under a penalty of 200 pounds to fulfill my engagement." Unable to forfeit her contract, she could "only hope for the indulgence of my friends in the mistake which, without the slightest notion of indelicacy, I have made."³⁷ Combe must understand that she had only wanted to give Susan the support "I knew she required and would never get from any gentleman that could be got to act with her." Surely there was less indelicacy in two sisters performing the roles than in father and daughter, as Charles and Fanny Kemble had done on occasion. Combe and the offended people of Edinburgh must recall her precedent in Mrs. Kean, who acted Romeo and Ion repeatedly without bringing down any cries of "indelicacy."

Privately, however, Charlotte had to confess that more was involved than mere support for Susan. Her Romeo had created objections before; Philadelphia had whispered against it. Yet the whispers had not obscured the public's very real interest in an actress performing the role. The public had expressed itself at the box office.

The matter posed a dilemma. In every sense, she meant to be a respectable actress; her vows to Mary Eliza and herself stood as sound now as ever, but a public performer sooner or later yields to public interest if she wishes to attract paying houses. Not willingly would she offend anyone's moral sense on stage, but at the box office her Romeo was surefire. Newspaper reactions to her work so far hardly bore out her fears, but, rightly or wrongly, as an American she felt a special handicap when facing the world's best drama critics. For all her debt to James Barton and Macready, she could not claim to be the product of any of the great English acting traditions; her "want of school" worried her. To make her mark, she must tackle roles she could clearly identify with her own name. "I must act in parts where comparisons cannot be instituted or I fall . . . unless in some such out of the way thing as Romeo."³⁸ And no less to the point, she could act Shakespeare's passionate youth with all the sincerity and respect any actor had ever brought to the role. The compromise ignored none of her principles.

Unfortunately, her explanation to Combe did not settle the matter. Edinburgh continued to wonder about an actress, intent on social acceptance, who would display herself so "questionably": was there more in the young actress' motives than met the eye? Charlotte herself put up no further defense, but the matter involved a complex of reasons. She would be an honest performer; she would be an honest woman. She could bring understanding to the role; playing it, she could satisfy most of her audience. As Shakespeare's star-crossed lover, she could vent a level of emotion that she recognized more and more as basic to her own nature. Romeo was more than a role.

She sent Susan back to London, rounded out her own work, then filled her last afternoon with a ride in the hills and frank talk over supper with John Coleman. In the long conversation between them, she revealed more of herself than she normally exposed to anyone. Coleman found her full of advice: "No actor should ever marry till he's forty; no actress should ever marry at all, or, if she does, she should quit the stage!"

To Coleman's complaint that he was getting nowhere as an actor, she retorted, "You don't smoke, you don't drink, have the torso of a young Hercules, a voice like a trumpet and not seventeen!" He should count himself lucky--doubly so on this fabled stage where so many English stars appeared every season, where, unlike Shakespeare's day, the heroines were now played by real girls, not by beastly, scrubby, louts of boys. Playing opposite them, "you villain," Coleman could have the "pick of creation to make love to!" Then in a rare moment of self-revelation, a shadow flickered across her heavy features as she finished her little speech. "My god," she said to Coleman, "were I a man, instead of a wretched, miserable woman with a face like an owl!"³⁹

At Glasgow's Theatre Royal on Dunlop Street, John Alexander welcomed her as the "immense" new find of the season. Charlotte respected Alexander. When Forrest had failed to attract large houses, Alexander had decreased the number of supernumeraries for his plays. Forrest had shouted, "You are an ass!" but Alexander had stood his ground: "You, Mr. Forrest, are simply a guest; and, judging from your behavior, a very disagreeable one you are."⁴⁰

When the playbills went up for Meg Merrilies, throngs jammed the box office. Playing one of the gypsy boys, J. H. Stoddart considered Meg's death--"all of a heap on the stage, looking more like a bundle of old rags than a human being"--the most "effectively dramatic piece of business"⁴¹ he had ever witnessed. The Glasgow Dramatic Review labeled the new star a performer "after our own heart, the most original actress we have ever seen."⁴²

En route back to London, Charlotte could agree with Sallie that the trip had boosted her stock. From these first attempts in the provinces she knew what it was, at last, to be rated a star--"more varied and alive,"⁴³ a Glasgow critic had cried, than Helen Faucit. Determined now to demand star treatment and a salary to match, she could return to London ready to introduce Susan as a second contender for English praise.

In the meantime, she settled herself for a few quiet weeks in the Bayswater cottage, played hide-and-seek in the hollyhocks with young Ned, bore up under Mary Eliza's steady complaints of discomforts in this alien land, and coached Susan for the night in late December when they would appear at Benjamin Webster's Haymarket Theatre in Romeo and Juliet--Edinburgh's whispers notwithstanding.