Victorian touring actresses

Crossing boundaries and negotiating the cultural landscape

Janice Norwood

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526133328
• eBook ISBN: 9781526133342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Victorian touring actresses brings new attention to women's experience of working in nineteenth-century theatre by focusing on a diverse group of largely forgotten 'mid-tier' performers, rather than the usual celebrity figures. It examines how actresses responded to changing political, economic and social circumstances and how the women were themselves agents of change. Their histories reveal dynamic patterns of activity within the theatrical industry and expose its relationship to wider Victorian culture. With an innovative organisation mimicking the stages of an actress's life and career, the volume draws on new archival research and plentiful illustrations to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the women as they toured both within the UK and further afield in North America and Australasia. It will appeal to students and researchers in theatre and performance history, Victorian studies, gender studies and transatlantic studies.

1
Debuts and learning the craft

‘Miss Cleveland will make her first appearance in the character of Juliet’ proclaims an advertisement in the Era for a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Marylebone Theatre on 20 March 1854.¹ This example, though unremarkable in itself, is typical of the attention drawn to debut performances. They were marketed as notable events where the novelty of the newcomer and uncertainty about her ability were intended to pique the audience's interest. Success at these daunting occasions depended upon the putative actress's suitability for the role and whether she had been adequately prepared. Surprisingly little has been written about how she might accomplish the latter in the mid-Victorian era.

Earlier in the century in The Road to the Stage (first published in 1827 with a revised edition in 1836) Leman Rede offered advice to aspirant actors on how to obtain an engagement. The text provides the names of theatrical agents whose books the novice could seek to join as well as plentiful recommendations on working arrangements and performance, including the ‘Method of Expressing the Various Passions, Emotions, &c.’ (Rede, 1836: 76). Yet Rede is oddly silent on where his reader might receive training prior to working in the theatre. Agents, such as those Rede refers to, were paid to obtain positions, but they usually offered little in the way of nurturing acting talent (see Chapter 3). Opportunities with potential to develop vital theatrical skills included working as a child performer, taking part in amateur productions, giving dramatic readings or paying for tuition from an experienced professional performer. Later in the century an alternative option was to attend one of the growing number of dramatic schools. The various training routes into the dramatic profession presented different advantages and could not only influence the actress's initial reception but also have career-long implications. In practice, many actresses took more than one of these approaches.

Child performers and family connections

For the child of a theatrical family, the decision to take up acting may not have been voluntary, it being assumed that she would join her parents onstage at the earliest opportunity. This was particularly true when the child was a girl – Hazel Waters records that more actresses than actors began as child performers (Waters, 1996: 84) – or when the family ran a theatrical business. The ubiquity of such arrangements is attested to by Davis, who contends ‘Probably the most prevalent form of business in the British theatre is the family firm’ (T. C. Davis, 2000a: 243). She narrates the history of a number where members of nuclear and extended families contributed to the enterprise. One such was the Fisher family in East Anglia, several generations of whom operated a theatrical circuit in the first half of the nineteenth century (2000a: 243). Many other families included their children in smaller-scale ventures.

Julia Seaman's early history is a good example of this kind of family apprenticeship. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1837, she was the second child of William and Frederica Seaman.² Her father was a dramatist writing for minor theatres such as the Britannia in Hoxton, and her mother, Frederica, née Bentz, was an actress and dancer. During the early 1840s both parents were regular performers at the Royal Victoria, a minor London theatre previously known as the Coburg and later as the Old Vic. Its nicknames – ‘The Bleedin’ Vic’ and ‘the Blood Tub’ – attest to its standard fare of ‘Melodramas of the deepest dye and coarsest texture’ (Tomlins, 1840: 59). It was on the Victoria's stage that their daughter's first recorded performances took place in 1844, playing the child in Maurice the Woodcutter (most likely C. A. Somerset's three-act melodrama).³ Playbills record Seaman undertaking a number of juvenile roles in the theatre's 1847/48 season, including in the romantic drama Moyra the Doomed; or The Malediction of the Dead.⁴ Her part, Gilbert Donovan, is described on playbills as a farmer's ‘half-witted Son called by the Peasantry “a Fairy-changed Child”’.⁵ The disabled, often mute or mentally impaired child, was a staple of juvenile melodramatic performance going back to Thomas Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb; or, The Orphan Protected of 1801.⁶ It was also standard practice for a young girl to portray male and female characters. Alongside such named parts, Seaman may also have appeared as one of the uncredited supernumeraries in the Victoria's pantomime.

Since it was usual for children to support their family's business, Seaman almost certainly performed at the theatre in Deptford that her father took over in February 1849. Unfortunately, such venues were neither reviewed nor the subject of detailed advertisements in the press. There is, however, documentation to show that in November of the same year she had a two-week starring engagement at the Standard in Shoreditch. With shades of the ‘Infant Phenomenon’ from Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, she was billed as ‘The Prodigy of The Age’ and claimed to be ten years old, two years younger than her actual age.⁷ Her talent is lauded as on a par with that of earlier child stars, Clara Fisher and Master [Joseph] Burke (dubbed ‘the Irish Roscius’). The reference to Fisher is particularly suggestive in the light of the drama in which Seaman performed, An Old Man's Will; or The Little Stupid. This protean farce, written by her father, enabled her to display versatility by playing multiple characters of different ages and genders including an orphan child, a young gent, a nurse and a Mexican bullfighter. Demanding swift transitions between roles, the play emulates the successful format of William Oxberry's The Actress of All Work (1819) with which Mrs Edwin and then Clara Fisher had won acclaim earlier in the century (Schweitzer, 2016: 175). Seaman went on to perform An Old Man's Will at the Swiss Gardens, Shoreham (a Sussex attraction modelled on the lines of Vauxhall and Cremorne pleasure gardens) and at the Casino and Queen's theatres in Manchester in 1850. A rare review of her Casino appearance records: ‘She is a very precocious child and personates four difficult characters of opposite tendencies, with much credit.’⁸ Another critic more equivocally refers to ‘her peculiar abilities’.⁹ Despite the attempt to frame her reception as a new Fisher, Seaman failed to create a similar sensation. Yet the fact that in childhood she did not attract more attention was not necessarily a disadvantage for relatively few highly acclaimed juvenile performers maintained the same level of success in their subsequent careers. Anne Varty notes: ‘The adult lives of exceptional child stars are remarkable only because they are of no interest’ (Varty, 2008: 6). Fisher, for example, suffered what manager Francis Wemyss describes as the ‘mortification’ of a failed adult career (Wemyss, 1847: 149). The young Seaman did, however, gain valuable stage experience from her early roles and developed sufficient proficiency to procure engagements at the Albert and Garrick Royal Amphitheatre in Whitechapel from February to October 1855 and then at the Victoria where she remained in virtually continuous employment from December 1856 until March 1859. Frequently required to play at least one new role per week, Seaman thus completed her training in melodramatic, comedic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Debuts and learning the craft
• 2 Establishing a name
• 3 Working life in the UK
• 4 Touring North America
• 5 Long-distance colonial touring
• 6 Management
• 7 Offstage: family and personal life
• 8 Closing scenes: the ageing actress
• Short biographies
• References
• Index