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 The Victorian Actress
in the Novel and
on the Stage

5872_Miller.indd i 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys

Recent books in the series: Dickens and Demolition: Literary Allusion

Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic and Urban Change in the Mid-Nineteenth
Spaces Century
Lizzy Welby Joanna Robinson
The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in
Symons and Dowson Victorian Literature and Science
Kostas Boyiopoulos Philipp Erchinger
British India and Victorian Literary Culture Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the
Máire ní Fhlathúin Literary Periodical
Caley Ehnes
Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian
Liberalism and Literary Form The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on
Frederik Van Dam the Stage
Renata Kobetts Miller
Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the
Nineteenth-Century British Imagination
Jenn Fuller Forthcoming volumes:
Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality
Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s
Jonathan Cranfield Fiction
Tatiana Kontou
The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of
Modernity The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature:
Marion Thain Encrypted Sexualities
Patricia Pulham
Gender, Technology and the New Woman
Lena Wånggren Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print
Culture, 1883–1920
Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Clare Gill
Alexandra Gray
Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph
Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life
Word and Image Johnathan Buckmaster
Lucy Ella Rose
Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in
Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Genre and Subject
Synergies of Thought and Place Amber Regis
Kevin A. Morrison
Culture and Identity in Fin-de-Siècle
The Victorian Male Body Scotland: Romance, Decadence and the
Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Celtic Revival
Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in Michael Shaw
British Literature and Art Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of
Fariha Shaikh Writing
The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Thomas Ue
Eleonora Sasso The Arabian Nights and Nineteenth Century
The Late-Victorian Little Magazine British Culture
Koenraad Claes Melissa Dickson
Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth
Century Century British Literature, 1851–1908
Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr Giles Whiteley

For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECVC
Also available:
Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Diane
Piccitto and Patricia Pulham
ISSN: 2044–2416
www.eupjournals.com/vic

5872_Miller.indd ii 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 The Victorian Actress
in the Novel and
on the Stage

Renata Kobetts Miller

5872_Miller.indd iii 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-
edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce
academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our
website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Renata Kobetts Miller, 2019

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by

IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 3949 7 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 3951 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 3952 7 (epub)

The right of Renata Kobetts Miller to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).

5872_Miller.indd iv 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Contents

List of Figures vi
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
A Note on the Cover xii

Introduction: Setting the Stage – Views of Victorian Theatre 1

1. An Actress’s Tears: Authenticity and the Reassertion

of Social Class 36
2. The Actress at Home: Domesticity, Respectability and
the Disruption of Class Hierarchies 72
3. The Actress and Her Audience: Performance, Authorship
and the Exceptional Woman in George Eliot 106
4. Novelistic Naturalism: ‘The Ideal Mother Cannot
Be the Great Artist’ 146
5. From Playing Parts to Rewriting Roles: Actresses and
the Political Stage 173

Epilogue 226

Bibliography 229
Index 242

5872_Miller.indd v 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Figures

0.1 ‘The Great Bespeak for Miss Snevellicci’, Hablot

Knight Brown 4
1.1 Peg makes herself up 55
1.2 Peg in a painted miniature on the title page 56
1.3 Peg framed within theatrical architecture 57
1.4 Portrait of Fanny Stirling as Peg Woffington,
used in the original productions of Masks and Faces 58
2.1 Act 2 of Caste. ‘Scene from Caste by T. W. Robertson,
Prince of Wales Theatre, probably 1867’ 99
5.1 Salomé, Tailpiece, Aubrey Beardsley 181
5.2 ‘Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911, the Actresses’
Franchise League’ 199
5.3 ‘Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911, Actresses’
Franchise League Banner’ 199
5.4 ‘Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911’ 201
5.5 Elizabeth Robins on the cover of Sketch, 17 April 1907 203
5.6 Diagram of the box set for act 1 of Votes for Women 211
5.7 Act 2 of Votes for Women, Sketch, 17 April 1907 213
5.8 ‘Mrs. Pankhurst at NWSPU [National Women’s
Social and Political Union] meeting, Trafalgar Square’ 213

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 Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined con-

cept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all mean-
ingful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist
about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s
Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a byword
for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought,
belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in
nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institu-
tional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at
the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question
the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-
called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian
and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a
breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an inter-
rogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner,
which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects.
Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innu-
merable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into
suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the
approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical,
empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be
incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the
Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed
off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital
interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part,
even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pur-
sued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between
different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the
service of reading the nineteenth century.

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 viii The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up

both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from
convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed
for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’
(in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’
purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdis-
ciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely
and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and
identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning
what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read
at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleido-
scope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thought-
ful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion
of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically
and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity
of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader
provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar
and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original
sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical
models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not
simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth cen-
tury, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional,
strategic redrawing of those borders.

Julian Wolfreys

5872_Miller.indd viii 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from connecting with the textual and the-
atrical past through rich archival resources, and I am grateful to the
staffs of the Theatre Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum;
London Guildhall Library; the Fawcett Library which is now The
Women’s Library, London School of Economics (LSE), London; the
Manuscripts Department of the British Library; the Mander and
Mitchenson Theatre Collection; the John Pierpont Morgan Library;
the Fales Collection at New York University; and the Lilly Library at
Indiana University for their assistance. Closer to home, I am grate-
ful to the staff of the City College Library, and especially Special
Collections Librarian Sydney Van Nort. This work was supported
in part by grants from the City University of New York PSC/CUNY
Research Award Program.
I am warmly grateful to Patrick Brantlinger, Susan Gubar, Joss Marsh,
Andrew Miller – mentors without whom this work would not have
come into being – and to Johanna Frank for her encouraging friendship.
Elaine Showalter, my first academic mentor, remains an inspiration and
a support. The Adaptation and the Stage Colloquium at the University
of Warwick in Spring 2015 and discussions that occurred at confer-
ences of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)
have contributed to my thoughts in this manuscript. Sharon Aronofsky
Weltman has changed the field of Victorian Studies by building new
communities of theatre researchers, and I am particularly appreciative
of the NAVSA Theater Caucus that she founded.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Exceptional
Woman and Her Audience: Armgart, Performance, and Authorship’ in
The George Eliot Review (2004), 38–45, and I thank the George Eliot
Fellowship for permission to republish it here. Early versions of other
portions of this book appeared in ‘Child Killers and the Competition
between the Late Victorian Theater and the Novel’ in MLQ 66.2 (June
2005), and I thank its editorial staff and anonymous readers for their

5872_Miller.indd ix 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 x The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

suggestions. Anonymous readers for Edinburgh University Press helped

me to see this project in new ways. Michelle Houston, Ersev Ersoy,
James Dale, Eliza Wright, Camilla Rockwood and their colleagues at
Edinburgh University Press, as well as series editor Julian Wolfreys,
made the final preparation of this book a pleasure.
While working on this book I served as chair of the City College
English Department, and I was deeply appreciative of the coopera-
tion and good will of its faculty. I would like to thank department
programme directors and staff, in particular: Barbara Gleason, Yana
Joseph, András Kiséry, Harold Veeser, Elizabeth Mazzola, Keith
Gandal, Salar Abdoh, Emily Raboteau, Linsey Abrams and Rosaymi
Santos. As current chair of English, Elizabeth Mazzola provided
advice and support for the completion of this work. City College col-
leagues from within my department and across the college provided
support, advice or inspiration, most particularly: Felicia Bonaparte,
Bruce Cronin, Kevin Foster, Ellen Handy, David Jeruzalmi, the late
Norman Kelvin, Christine Li, Rajan Menon, Glen Milstein, Mark
Mirsky, Paul Oppenheimer and Josh Wilner. I would like to thank my
undergraduate and MA students at City College for their thoughts
and enthusiasm in discussing Victorian literature, especially Clara
Boothby, Tyleen Kelly, John Kofron, Megan O’Donnell and Laura
Wallace.
I am grateful for the support that I have received from deans in
the City College Division of Humanities and the Arts over the years.
J. Fred Reynolds provided opportunities and support that were criti-
cal to my professional growth. Geraldine Murphy has been a mentor,
supporter and friend. Eric Weitz motivated me by example and pre-
cept to think ambitiously. Doris Cintrón is a model of feminist leader-
ship and mentorship. Erec Koch has provided me with an opportunity
to do useful, challenging work, and I am grateful for his support of
my research and teaching.
In my own balancing of the worlds of work and home, I am for-
tunate to have family that have supported and nurtured me. Much
reading, writing and revision for this project was undertaken while
spending time with a warm family circle that gathers at the home
of my father-in-law, Joel Miller. My mother, Patricia Kobetts, and
my mother-in-law, Nan Miller, have given of their time and energy,
enabling me to pursue my career knowing that my children were in
the care of loving grandmothers. Both my mother and my father,
Joseph Kobetts, devoted their lives to service in the New York City
public schools. My father’s love of history lives on in this book
(and I wish he were here to read it), while my mother provided me

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 Acknowledgements xi

my earliest view of women’s work in the public world. My hus-

band, Jethro Miller, and I met as undergraduates, and he has been
a partner throughout the intellectual journey that lies behind this
volume. His constant support as we have developed, pursued our
respective careers and raised a family has made the worlds of work
and home manageable and joyful. Finally, Sophie and Noah are
my greatest passions and sources of pride. This book is dedicated,
with much love, to them.

5872_Miller.indd xi 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 A Note on the Cover

The cover photo of The Victorian Actress is of Ellen Terry read-

ing a book over her mother’s shoulder. The Terrys were a theatri-
cal family, both women pursued stage careers, and Ellen became
one of the Victorian era’s most iconic actresses. She enjoyed both
popular celebrity and cultural prestige as the leading lady of Henry
Irving’s management at the Lyceum Theatre even as she belonged
to a profession that had not entirely moved beyond its questionable
standing with regard to respectability. (In 1895, Irving became the
first actor to be elevated to knighthood, emblematising the shift-
ing position of the theatrical profession in the nineteenth century.)
The curtain-like photographer’s drape behind the women reveals
this photo to be a staged representation. In light of that, the fact
that they are reading from a text that may or may not be a script
evokes one of the central concepts of this book: that the figure of
the actress was manipulated and controlled by how she was writ-
ten in novels and plays of the Victorian period. Moreover, that this
photo was taken by the writer Lewis Carroll speaks to the fascina-
tion that novelists had with actresses.
On the one hand, this is an intimate scene, domestic in nature as
it depicts a mother and daughter intimately connected in the private
act of reading. But these are actresses, striking a pose before a curtain.
Whether intentionally or not, the full frame of the image reveals the
edge of the curtain, playing up the performed nature of the image
for consumption by an audience’s gaze: there is a world outside of
this photo, beyond the curtain’s edge. This invites questions about
authenticity and ascribes potential agency to the figures in the image.
To play a part does not enforce passivity. Ellen Terry was a woman
who mediated between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her
daughter, Edith Craig, was a suffragette in the early twentieth century,
and Terry appeared in suffragette theatre.

5872_Miller.indd xii 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 A Note on the Cover xiii

Like this photo, this book is about generational connections,

bonds between women, performance, authenticity and relation-
ships between the private and public spheres. The Victorian Actress
examines how the figure of the actress played a critical part in the
development of the novel and the theatre and how, in turn, these
literary forms shaped the actress as a cultural figure for women in
the public sphere. From the mid-Victorian period through to the use
of the theatre for the suffragette movement in the early twentieth
century, it traces how the novel and the drama variously constructed
the actress’s authenticity and her ability to foster sympathetic bonds
through affective and narrative strategies.

5872_Miller.indd xiii 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 For Sophie and Noah, with love

5872_Miller.indd xiv 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage –
Views of Victorian Theatre

The Victorian actress was magnetic. For Victorian writers, she was
a critical figure in defining their own work. Her engagement with
popular audiences made her emblematic of women participating in
the public sphere, investing her with a significance markedly dif-
ferent from the actor, whose masculinity granted him rights of citi-
zenship and public participation without being on stage. For this
reason she encapsulated what Victorian writers saw, variously, as
the theatre’s allure and its weakness: its intimate but dependent
relationship with its audience. As a result, cultural understandings
of actresses both shaped and were shaped by the competition that
existed between the Victorian theatre and the novel – a competition
that has remained neglected because of the consequent and endur-
ing disregard that Victorian theatre suffers in the study of literature.
The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage is a literary and
cultural history about the actress as a figure in social and literary
struggles, and it examines the interrelations between these fields as
they informed each other. Using novels, plays, a short story, a closet
drama, poetry, non-fiction prose, dramatic criticism, visual images
and archival materials of suffrage organisations, it examines how
writers, drawing on cultural understandings of the theatre and the
actress in order to define their own formal, cultural and political
positions, in turn shaped beliefs about the theatre and the actress.
Crossing the disciplinary divide between criticism that focuses on
novels and criticism that focuses on the theatre, it traces a gene-
alogy of Victorian cultural attitudes towards female performers
that culminated in the centrality of the theatre and actresses in the
early twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement. In doing so, it
identifies important shifts in the novel and the theatre, and ways in
which these two forms were responsive to each other. Thus, while
the cultural significance of the actress cannot be fully understood

5872_Miller.indd 1 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 2 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

without examining the cultural history that defined her, the figure of
the actress also helps to shed light on the ways in which the novel
and the theatre developed – and developed in relation to each other –
during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Redressing theatre’s neglect in literary study, this book treats
the theatre not only as a figure in the Victorian imagination, but
also as an active participant in the literary culture of its time. In
the context of contemporary studies of Victorian theatre that can
usually be classed either as the work of theatre historians interested
primarily in the stage or the work of literary scholars focused on
Victorian theatricality and the idea of theatre, Sharon Aronofsky
Weltman has argued for ‘the importance of researching theater in
order to grasp more fully the culture that helped create the era’s
flowering of fiction, poetry, and art’, David Kurnick has sought to
redress how scholarship ‘has hypostatized the novel and the the-
ater as independent traditions’, and Richard Pearson has explored
‘what the mid-nineteenth century drama can tell us about the writ-
ers of the period and what they can tell us about the drama’, seek-
ing to ‘open up new ideas about the integration of literature and
drama, and a more symbiotic relationship between them’.1 Gail
Marshall’s Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance
and the Galatea Myth is another notable exception to which this
study is indebted. Marshall’s analysis of various kinds of cultural
texts, from drama to novels to theatre criticism to autobiogra-
phy, demonstrates that the actress was a hot spot of sorts in the
Victorian period: a figure at which different cultural forms or influ-
ences converged. Jacky Bratton has pointed out that the current
neglect that Victorian drama suffers has its roots in the Victorian
period itself, when cultural critics largely believed that the British
stage had reached its nadir. While many of the participants in the
debate about the theatre’s problems were novelists who arguably
had a vested financial interest in attacking the theatre, the public
conversation that appeared in print delineates some of the central
concerns with which playwrights, as well as novelists, grappled,
and these views of the theatre provide a critical backdrop to the
give-and-take across cultural forms on the subject of the actress.
Although Charles Dickens dedicated his Nicholas Nickleby
(1838–9) to the actor W. C. Macready, ‘as a slight token of admira-
tion and regard’, the novel shows neither admiration nor regard for
playwrights, and it lays out many of the most prominent complaints
about the theatre that others would amplify and expound upon
throughout the century.2 En route to Portsmouth to become a sailor,

5872_Miller.indd 2 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 3

the title character encounters the theatrical manager Vincent Crum-

mles, who recruits him for a variety of miscellaneous duties. The fact
that these include playwriting, and the fact that he is instructed to
‘introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs’ because Crummles
had ‘bought ’em cheap’, parodies both the low esteem in which the
theatre held writing and the secondary position of the dramatic text
to concrete matters of stage production.3 Dickens satirises trends
in stage ‘realism’ in the person of Crummles, who says, ‘That’s the
London plan. They look up some dresses, and properties, and have
a piece written to fit them. Most of the theatres keep an author on
purpose.’4 Nicholas must also write the play to accommodate the
demands of various members of the company and meet a deadline of
a few days. Writing, however, turns out to be translating a play from
French, as Dickens participates in propagating another commonly
held belief about the nineteenth-century English stage: the depen-
dence on Parisian drama for plots. George Henry Lewes noted the
prevalence of French adaptations in Spain, England and Germany
in 1867: ‘French pieces, more or less adapted, hold possession of all
stages.’5 The French play that Nicholas translates is both absurdly
sentimental and contrived. Yet Dickens is also satirical about crit-
ics who are nostalgic for earlier drama. Mr Curdle, for example,
says, ‘As an exquisite embodiment of the poet’s visions, and a realisa-
tion of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy
moments, and laying upon a new and magic world before the mental
eye, the drama is gone, perfectly gone.’6
Moreover, in addition to depicting actors, playwrights and crit-
ics, Nicholas Nickleby suggests that the drama is determined by the
audience’s taste. Nicholas and the actress Miss Snevellicci secure
audience members for her benefit performance by agreeing to their
requests. In fact, Hablot K. Browne’s illustration of ‘the great
bespeak for Miss Snevellicci’ depicts the audience as seen from the
stage, rather than the action on the stage, suggesting the central
importance of the audience to theatrical production.7 The illustra-
tion’s perspective echoes the effect of the mirrored curtain at the
Royal Coburg Theatre, a transpontine house that, arguably, per-
formed melodrama steadily to meet audience demand.8 Similarly, in
Great Expectations, Pip’s description of Wopsle’s Hamlet is devoted
to recounting the running commentary provided by the audience,
most notably its responses to questions that Hamlet asks in his
soliloquys. The physical presence of the audience that is realised in
each of these novels was absolutely at the heart of the debate about
Victorian theatre.

5872_Miller.indd 3 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 4 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

Figure 0.1 ‘The Great Bespeak for Miss Snevellicci’, Hablot

Knight Brown (Mary Evans Picture Library)

An 1858 Household Words article by Wilkie Collins, for example,

suggested that theatre managers, in contrast to publishers of novels,
cater to the lowest tastes in the audience:

I read at home David Copperfield, The Newcomes, Jane Eyre, and

many more original authors, that delight me. I go to the theatre, and
naturally want original stories by original authors, which will also
delight me there. Do I get what I ask for? Yes, if I want to see an old

5872_Miller.indd 4 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 5

play over again. But, if I want a new play? Why, then I must have the
French adaptation, or the Burlesque. The publisher can understand that
there are people among his customers who possess cultivated tastes,
and can cater for them accordingly, when they ask for something new.
The manager, in the same case, recognises no difference between me and
my servant.9

Collins’s argument that theatre managers make no attempt to

bring those with ‘cultivated tastes’ back into the theatre because
‘the increase of wealth and population, and the railway connection
between London and the country, more than supply in quantity
what audiences have lost in quality’ has become a chestnut of how
Victorian theatre was shaped by rapid demographic and technologi-
cal change.10 Collins goes on to execrate the lack of discrimination
in this broad-based, working-class audience. According to Collins,
theatre managers cater to a

vast nightly majority . . . whose ignorant sensibility nothing can shock.

Let him cast what garbage he pleases before them, the unquestioning
mouths of his audience open, and snap at it. . . . If you want to find out
who the people are who know nothing whatever, even by hearsay, of the
progress of the literature of their own time – who have caught no vestige
of any one of the ideas which are floating about before their very eyes –
who are, to all social intents and purposes, as far behind the age they live
in, as any people out of a lunatic asylum can be – go to a theatre, and
be very careful, in doing so, to pick out the most popular performance
of the day.11

Such scathing criticisms of the theatre and its audience were not lim-
ited to mid-Victorian novelists. Writing as one of the foremost the-
atre critics of the fin de siècle, William Archer praised J. T. Grein’s
private theatre society as a British version of Paris’s Théatre Libre,
but deplored the state of British theatre in terms that echoed those of
Dickens and Collins:

If such an institution was needed in Paris, how much more in London!

Here we have not a single theatre that is even nominally exempt from the
dictation of the crowd. Here the actor-manager reigns supreme. Here the
upholsterer runs rampant, and it takes a hundred performances to pay
his bill. Here the Censor swoops down on unconventional ethics, while
he turns his blind eye to conventional ribaldry. Here the average intel-
ligence of ‘the drama’s patrons’ is much lower than in France, and there
are far fewer loop-holes of escape from its dominion.12

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 6 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

While Archer and other theatre critics may have been influenced by
the criticism that novelists had levelled against the stage, novelists
were also explicitly invited to help shape the public image and the
future of theatre. This essay and another by Archer that addressed
England’s lack of a ‘literary drama’ led the Pall Mall Gazette in 1892
to pose the question: ‘In France and in Germany almost all the great
novelists have been playwrights as well. . . . Why is it that in modern
England, on the other hand, scarcely any of the popular novelists
are known as writers for the stage?’13 The series of responses that
followed, in which novelists enumerated their concerns, dramatises
how the cultural position of the drama was shaped by a give-and-take
between the institutions of the theatre and the novel, with novelists
playing a prominent role. In turn, it also reveals how the definition
of the genre of the novel by novelists depended upon the abjection of
the drama and how theatre, thus, could speak back, as it were, and
shape the novel. Kurnick challenges the use of ‘contest’ and ‘compe-
tition’ as ways of understanding the relationship between fiction and
theatre, and observes ‘that writers do not always know what is good
for “their” genre, or even which genre is theirs’, yet such relation-
ships between the drama and the novel emerge with some force in the
Victorian periodical press.14
In various ways, the novel was defined in contrast to the material-
ity of the theatre.15 Some of the responding novelists, like Thomas
Hardy, described the apparatus involved in the staging of a play as
inimical to artistic control and to the messages that they sought to
convey. Echoing Nicholas Nickleby, Hardy cited the materiality of
‘the play as nowadays conditioned’, as a source of its weaknesses:

parts have to be moulded to actors, not actors to parts. . . . The presen-

tation of human passions is subordinated to the presentation of moun-
tains, cities, clothes, furniture, plate, jewels, and other real and sham-real
appurtenances, to the neglect of the principle that the material stage
should be a conventional or figurative arena, in which accessories are
kept down to the plane of mere suggestions of place and time, so as not
to interfere with the required high-relief of the action and emotions.16

A recurrent theme in the novelists’ responses was the qualitative differ-

ence between a reading audience and a theatre audience – a difference
that is consistently linked to the audience’s physical presence. While
Ouida isolated ‘the quality of the acting and the unintelligence of the
audiences’ as the reasons that ‘writers of eminence [have stayed] off
the English stage’, Lucas Malet (Mary St Leger Kingsley) hit on the

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 7

physical presence of the audience as a key difference between fiction

writing and playwriting. In contrast to ‘the Stage’, which demands
compliance with ‘difficult and circumscribing’ conventions,

our Reading Public is so trustful, so divinely patient and amiable.

It bears with us when we are lengthy and reflective; it cheerfully permits
us to deal with any and everything except the matter in hand; it swallows
down our rudimentary science, our crude art, our revivals of extinct
heresies, our fatuous spiritual speculation, without gulping; it honours
us alike where we are profane and puzzle-headed; it worships us when
we are brutal, and reverently adores us when we are dull. Above all, it
is unseen.
How can we leave it? Is it not too much to ask that we shall present
ourselves before dreadful rows of a completely visible concrete public,
which has a right to clap its hands, audibly and materially right in front
of us, and produce other and less engaging sounds at will?17

While Malet’s description of sympathetic novel readers who willingly

accept anything sounds like an ironic suggestion that the theatre
audience might be more discriminating, most novelists were more
clearly in agreement with Collins and with Margaret L. Woods, who
argued that ‘the novelist in England has the advantage of appealing
to an audience not only larger than the dramatist’s but somewhat
more discriminating’.18 In asserting the size of the novel’s readership,
Woods highlighted the dominance that novelists possessed in Victo-
rian culture – a dominance that was both the cause and the effect of
the novel’s successful campaign against the theatre. She also avoided
the elision, typical in Victorian characterisations of theatrical audi-
ences, of a large audience with an audience that is indiscriminate and
unsophisticated.
The notion of the novel having a larger audience than the theatre
is counterintuitive to a reader in the twenty-first century, when ‘a best-
selling book may reach a million readers; a successful Broadway play
will be seen by 1 to 8 million people; [and] a movie or television adap-
tation will find an audience of many million more’.19 A best-selling
nineteenth-century novel certainly reached much more than a million
readers. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7) had sold 800,000 copies
by 1879, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s blockbuster import Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852) sold 1,500,000 copies in England and the colonies in
its first year alone. Neither of these statistics accounts for the promi-
nence of the circulating libraries in the distribution of novels: each copy
purchased by a circulating library would have had numerous users.20

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 8 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

In contrast, William Archer suggested by his ‘Law of the Hundred

Thousand’ that the mark of a play’s success was a run of at least one
hundred nights. At a theatre seating 1,000 this means a minimum of
100,000 needed to see a play, yet ‘it is absurd to imagine that there are
in London, at any one time, 100,000 playgoers of keen intelligence
and delicate perception – capable, in short, of appreciating the highest
order of drama’.21 While Woods imagined an intelligent, far-reaching,
novel-reading public, even a drama critic suggested that any large the-
atre audience – even one several times smaller than the readership of a
best-selling novel – must be an inferior one.
George Gissing descried the unintellectual taste of theatre audi-
ences in much more extreme terms, and his rhetoric provides a
good example of the vitriol that motivated novelists’ attacks on
the stage:

The acted drama is essentially a popular entertainment; author and

player live alike upon the applause of crowds. When the drama flour-
ished in England, it was by virtue of popular interests, for in those days
the paying public was the intellectual public. . . .
Nowadays, the paying public are the unintelligent multitude. The peo-
ple who make a manager’s fortune represent a class intellectually beneath
the groundlings of Shakespeare’s time. . . . When Johnson, or when Lamb,
sat in the pit, they had no such fellow playgoers about them as now crush
together at the unopened doors, but a majority of men who with us would
merit the style of gentle. Our democratic populace, rich and poor, did
not exist. What class of readers made the vogue of the Waverley Novels?
Those books were never popular, as the word is now understood; price
alone proves that. Nor was Sheridan popular in this sense. The spiritual
mates of those who now pay for a stall at Drury Lane or the Adelphi sat
then in stalls of another kind – cobbler’s or huckster’s – and recked not of
dramatic literature.
Our thronging multitude, with leisure and money undreamt of by
their predecessors, must somehow find amusement after a daytime of
more or less exhausting labour; to supply this amusement is naturally a
profitable business; and so it comes about that the literary ideal of the
stage-play is supplanted on the stage itself by the very practical notions
of a popular impresario. Hence the sundering of theatre and literature.22

In contrast to Wood’s practical view that the novel attracted more

readers, Gissing’s rhetoric exaggerates the numbers of theatre-goers
as he evokes the notion of ‘popularity’ to mean an appeal to a crowd
that is large, working-class and uneducated. Patrick Brantlinger has
provided an astute analysis of nineteenth-century novelists’ anxiety

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 9

about mob-like reading audiences.23 Novelists employed the drama

as a convenient scapegoat on which to project anxieties about their
own relationships to an audience, and this projection accounts for
their magnified notion of the masses that attended London theatres.
Indeed, just as Gissing resented the ‘democratic’ theatrical audience,
Harold Frederic’s central thrust against the drama was that it was
subject to majority rule. In Frederic’s view, for a play, ‘nobody cares
about its merit qua merit. The only question is whether a theatre-
going public will like it.’24 The novelist, on the other hand,

writes for just the audience that he feels in touch with, and need not
think of the others. If, on a given day, of 500 people reading his book
there are 50 who like it and are glad it was written, the fact that the
other 450 yawn affects nothing. The book was not written for them,
that is all; and it will go on finding its way to those for whom it was
written. . . .
The work of the novelists is never wasted or lost. The hostile major-
ity I have assumed above cannot prevent the appreciative minority from
enjoying the work written for them. In the playhouse absolutely the
reverse is true. There the hostile majority can, and does, decree that the
play it does not like shall be seen no more of men.25

Yet even as he bristled against the control that the theatrical audience
exercises, Frederic paradoxically believed that an advantage of the
novel is that it is less distanced from its audience. Describing how the
publisher of one of his novels suggested that he cut a scene but ulti-
mately indulged the author’s desire to leave it in, Frederic concludes:
‘Nobody stands between the novelist and his audience.’26 In contrast,
Frederic offers an anecdote about a theatre manager who refused
to produce a play of Frederic’s unless his unreasonable requests for
revision were met. Frederic’s view of the theatre manager standing
between writer and audience once again represents the theatre as
fully embodied materiality.
Amid the panoply of feelings about why the theatre falls short of
fiction – the audience is more demanding, the audience is less discrimi-
nating, the audience is more immediate, the audience is distanced from
the writer by the manager – most novelists writing in the Pall Mall
Gazette agreed that the theatre’s ‘democratic’ audience was less exclu-
sive than the novel-reading public. Mary Elizabeth Braddon specifically
described the heterogeneous audience of the theatre in contrasting ‘the
kindly public of the circulating library’ with ‘that triple-headed mon-
ster of the stalls, pit, and gallery whom the playwright has to please’.27

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 10 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

Just as Braddon used the theatre’s ticket levels to stand metonymi-

cally for the economic strata that comprised the audience, J. Henry
Shorthouse elided the physical properties of the theatre with the social
class of its audience. He believed that ‘vast theatres, and mechanical
apparatus’ were responsible for ‘the decadence of the English stage’,
and argued that if

there [were] maintained in London a very small theatre in which all

the ‘pit seats were stalls’, and there was no gallery, or a very small,
high-priced one, and in which no mechanical apparatus was allowed
excepting scene-shifting – and that very seldom and occasional – . . .
such a theatre might become a school for a class of English actors who
would recall the past, and might perchance attract the highest genius
to write for the stage.28

Shorthouse’s desire for assigned, individual seats rather than com-

munal benches in the pit reveals a classism, because stalls would
have been higher-priced seats like the small gallery that Shorthouse
envisions. Because the stall seat physically recognises and delineates
an individualised subjectivity, Shorthouse’s preference for the stall in
contrast to communal benches also belies Victorian writers’ fears of
mob-like popular audiences.
In addition to stage technology and the class of the audience,
Shorthouse views the quality of performers as a precondition for
attracting high-calibre writers. There is no logical foundation for
why the actor or actress should be the single impetus that would
improve the stage: one could just as easily argue that higher-quality
playwrights and plays would attract a better class of performers.
Perhaps writers were more inclined to blame actors, rather than
other writers, for the stage’s shortcomings. More importantly, the
fact that the actor or actress was viewed as the narrow end of the
wedge for improving the theatre reveals how the performer met-
onymically served as a personification of the stage and all of its
shortcomings.
Although Jonas Barish identifies the theatre’s reliance on actors as
central to the nineteenth century’s ‘antitheatrical prejudice’, the belief
that dramatic writing would improve if theatrical performers were
not only more proficient but also more respectable precedes the Vic-
torian period.29 Denis Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting was written
in 1773 and published in 1830, but the influence that it exerted over
the Victorian era is most apparent in the fact that it was reprinted,
with an intensely defensive preface by the eminent actor-manager

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 11

Henry Irving, in 1883. In Diderot’s dialogue, the first speaker char-

acterises those who pursue a career on stage:

What makes them slip on the sock or the buskin? Want of education,
poverty, a libertine spirit. The stage is a resource, never a choice. Never
did actor become so from love of virtue, from desire to be useful in the
world, or to serve his country or family; never from one of the honour-
able motives which might incline a right mind, a feeling heart, a sensitive
soul, to so find a profession.30

From this position, the speaker develops his theory that, ‘if players
were people of position and their profession an honoured one’, then
the lines that playwrights would pen for them ‘would soon attain to
a purity, a delicacy, a grace’.31 Following Diderot, Victorian writers,
seeking either to improve the respectability of the stage or to chal-
lenge it, focused their energy on the social position of actors. More
particularly, because the actress’s public performance and profession-
alism was positioned against the Victorian equation of respectable
femininity with domesticity, the actress became the central figure in a
battle between the novel and the drama.
Very little attention has been paid to such interactions between
the Victorian theatre and the novel. Despite the recuperative work of
theatre historians, which this book draws on throughout, and despite
outstanding works of recent literary criticism that have drawn atten-
tion to the centrality of theatre in the Victorian imagination and
in the minds of novelists in particular, Victorian theatre continues
to receive short shrift in literary studies, where the novel continues
to control the image of the stage.32 This explains why Victorian lit-
erature survey courses seldom venture beyond the drama of Ibsen,
Wilde and Shaw – examples of the ‘literary drama’ that Archer hailed
in the 1890s – and why students do not read Dion Boucicault, T. W.
Robertson or Henry Arthur Jones alongside Tennyson, Dickens and
Ruskin. Two studies in particular, however, have established how the
novel and the theatre developed in relation to each other, and The
Victorian Actress is indebted to and develops out of them.
First, J. Jeffrey Franklin’s Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the
Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (1999) considers books in the
context of a marketplace that, he argues, was shaped by competi-
tion between the novel and the theatre. To Franklin, ‘The pervasive-
ness of the figure of the theater in the 1840s to 1860s . . . expresses
an historical contest that reaches culmination in the first half of the
nineteenth century between two, major, competing cultural forms:

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 12 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

the realist novel and the popular theater’, and ‘the so-called rise of
the novel was materially related to the decline of the drama, and the
decline of the theater was in part a result of the cultural and commer-
cial success of the form of novelistic realism’.33 This accounts for ‘the
repeated juxtaposition of non-theatrical and theatrical figures’ in Vic-
torian novels, because such figures stand for the contrast between the
novel and the theater and allow the novel to consider its own ‘formal
assumptions’.34 Franklin’s study concludes with 1860, ending before
the significant break in theatre history that Katherine Newey identi-
fies in the early 1860s with the emergence of sensation drama, the
long run of a theatrical production, increasingly middle-class audi-
ences, and the greater mobility of audiences. It was also in the 1860s
that the theatre became both more respectable and more realistic. Fol-
lowing Franklin’s logic that the rise of the novel depended on the fall
of the theatre, an alteration in the status of one form surely would
elicit a response from the other form. The Victorian Actress traces
not only the rise of the novel against the theatre, as Franklin does,
but also the theatre’s response as it regains respectability and cultural
capital, the novel’s response to that in turn, and the emergence of an
early twentieth-century political theatre that was shaped by the give-
and-take between these literary forms. Franklin points out that the
nineteenth-century novel defined itself as ‘a model for the ideal spec-
tator and the ideal citizen’, identifying how novels reflected changes
in the theatre’s audience during the first half of the nineteenth century
– from the 1900 Old Price riots ‘toward an audience form that is
more discrete, civil, and ideally distanced, not only from the action on
the stage but from social and political action as well’.35 The Victorian
Actress demonstrates how the political theatre of the early twenti-
eth century developed a model for ‘the ideal spectator and the ideal
citizen’ that was imagined as fluid, potentially disruptive, and both
elided with the action on the stage and directly involved in political
action. In keeping with the view of novelists in the Pall Mall Gazette
series, this theatre was also conceived as democratic and less exclusive
than novel-reading audiences.
Second, Emily Allen’s Theater Figures: The Production of the
Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2003) provides further attention
to the literary marketplace that Franklin explored and examines ‘how
novelistic representation of theater and theatricality helped manage
relations among novels, readers, and the market’.36 Allen provides a
view into the nineteenth-century novel as a hotly contested field of
sub-genres by analysing how the figure of theatre was used to claim
‘cultural capital and literary value’ for individual novels that were

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 13

competing with and distinguishing themselves from other types of

novels.37 According to Allen, the centrality of theatre to the novel
has much to do with the female reader, ‘whose figure must negotiate
the conflict between women’s multiple ties to the voracious appe-
tites of the market and the consuming fiction of women’s private,
readerly, removal from the public sphere’.38 Allen’s historical analysis
reveals that ‘the nineteenth-century ideal of domesticated, privatized,
female subjectivity’ displaces ‘a model that held particular sway in
the eighteenth century, an account of woman as sexually voracious,
highly changeable, and inherently theatrical’.39 This leads Allen to
articulate a relationship between genre and gender that forms one of
the foundations of The Victorian Actress: ‘in the nineteenth-century
novel, generic competition between the theater and the novel (and
among novels) works to focus and manage competing representa-
tions of woman. This is also true the other way around – conflict
between competing models of female gender works to focus and
manage underlying generic conflicts.’40
Realism and melodrama, formal terms that are commonly aligned
with the Victorian novel and the drama respectively, are also of founda-
tional importance to my study of how Victorian cultural works define
themselves and draw on these modes, often using them in complicated
and overlapping ways. Melodrama has so successfully been restored to
literary and cultural study that its prominence in these fields has all but
obliterated other threads in Victorian theatre, including what theatre
historians know and challenge as the familiar, traditional narrative
of development from melodrama towards realism.41 I build on recent
and established critical work on these concepts, including that of Peter
Brooks, Matthew Buckley, Rae Greiner, Elaine Hadley, George Levine,
Teresa Mangum and Carolyn Williams. Among studies of novelistic
realism, Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century
British Fiction offers a definition of realism that eschews melodrama’s
emotional affect through visual display. The sympathy that ‘produces’
realism, according to Greiner, is based on Adam Smith’s view, in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, that sympathy ‘facilitated special modes
of thinking about feeling even when feeling itself did not develop’,
and ‘is grounded in the pursuit of narrative effects rather than epis-
temological certainty’.42 Greiner contrasts Smith’s view of sympathy
with David Hume’s: ‘Smith’s sympathizer abstracts feeling, routing it
through cognition, while Hume allows for sensation to be transmitted
both directly and unconsciously from one person to the next.’43 Key
to Greiner’s distinction between Smith and Hume is ‘that sympathy
and feeling are not the same’.44 If, as Greiner argues, Smith’s view of

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 14 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

sympathy is a realistic mode, then I would argue that we may associate

Hume’s direct transfer of feeling as melodramatic or sensational. While
melodrama, as theorists such as Peter Brooks have argued, depends on
visual display, Greiner holds that for Smith, ‘The mere sight of violent
feelings, happy or sad, is inimical to sympathy as Smith understands
it; time and again, he calls on the abstracting powers of figuration to
mitigate the deleterious effects brought on by strong visual and emo-
tional display.’45 Yet, as we shall see in the chapter that follows this
introduction, the notion of genuine feeling and affect was itself an area
of concern for Victorian theorists of acting.
Jacky Bratton has discussed how the binaries of text versus con-
text, high versus popular culture, and literature versus theatre have
their roots in the Victorian period and maintain their force in criti-
cism today, even when the privileged term in the binary is reversed as
it is in studies of melodrama as popular culture. In tracing influences
between the novel and the stage, this book uncovers and interrogates
the classifications that Victorian writers and the critics that followed
them have drawn between the Victorian novel and drama, as well as
those that have been made among the novel’s various authors and
sub-genres. Novelists used the figure of theatre to define and distin-
guish their work, but the theatre itself can be used to trouble these
distinctions. As George Levine has pointed out, ‘Realism exists as a
process.’46 Realistic novels, according to Levine, are driven by ‘an
attempt to use language to get beyond language, to discover some
non-verbal truth out there’, but they are also responsible ‘to an audi-
ence that requires to be weaned or freed from the misnaming lit-
eratures past and present’.47 A critical aspect of realism’s process,
however, is that it was at work in print literature and the theatre
simultaneously. In fact, while the theatre often functioned as the
novel’s abjected other, as Allen has shown, this relationship is com-
plicated by the fact that the novel served a similar role for the theatre,
and that the novel and theatre influenced each other in more concrete
ways. As the novel and the drama each strived for greater realism
and defined its relation to the other, the actress’s relationship to the
domestic world came to serve not only as a way of representing the
actress’s – and the theatre’s – respectability or lack thereof, but also
served as a figure for the play or novel’s realistic representation.
The Victorian Actress traces the ways in which the novel employed
melodramatic conventions of signification as well as realistic meth-
ods of fostering sympathy, the ways in which the theatre’s increasing
claims to realism and naturalism in the nineteenth century competed
with the novel, and the ways in which developments in the novel

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 15

influenced changes in the theatre. It argues that the increased respect-

ability and realism of the stage in the 1860s was a contributing factor
to the rise of novels that attempted to attract an avant-garde, rather
than popular, audience. Suffrage theatre, in turn, developed out of
the theatre’s emerging avant-garde movements and attempted to bal-
ance formal and political innovation with appeal to a large audience
through the familiar conventions of melodrama. This study also pro-
vides a finer-grained view of the trajectory of the actress’s increased
respectability over the course of the nineteenth century.
In a rough chronology by decade, the chapters of this book focus
on particular movements or motivations in the novel’s and/or the
drama’s representations of actresses: seeking to establish the actress’s
authenticity through melodramatic conventions of expression and
doing so by maintaining her status as an outsider to respectable class
hierarchies in the 1850s; using domesticity as a source of authenticity
that challenges class hierarchies in the 1860s and, in so doing, estab-
lishing both a new realism and respectability for the stage; explor-
ing the particular ways in which talented women who performed
for public audiences, in George Eliot’s novels of the 1870s, could
command tenuous power outside of the domestic sphere; and seek-
ing a more select, intellectual audience in novelistic sub-genres in
the 1880s and 1890s. The fifth chapter turns to how this history
was appropriated and confronted by flesh-and-blood actresses in the
early twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement, as they became
playwrights who used drama to appeal to a mass audience, writing
new dramatic and social parts for women.
While some of the reactions and responses between fiction and
theatre occur within chapters, many of them occur across chapters
and over time. Although this book does hold that there are critical
moments of response and large-scale trends that can be traced over
time, it does not argue for a strict linear chronology or clear lines of
demarcation between different phases, as attitudes and beliefs linger
and remain in the cultural consciousness, particularly since novels
remained in circulation and plays lived on in repertoires and revivals.
Chapter 1 begins with critical discussions of the extent to which
actors and actresses must feel in order to perform effectively, includ-
ing Denis Diderot, George Henry Lewes, William Archer and Henry
Irving. These provide a context for how Victorian novelists and play-
wrights asserted the actress’s authentic identity as they grappled with
the mutable class identity that she enjoyed, both as a working woman
and as a woman who could convincingly perform various class roles.
The acting theories and the plays in this chapter qualify the concept

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 16 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

of ‘imaginative sympathy’ that Rae Greiner argues is not the trans-

mission of feeling but, rather, an intellectual bridging of the distance
between individuals that is at the core of Victorian novelistic real-
ism. Even as the Victorians theorised that acting could not be the
direct expression of felt emotion, but rather required a double con-
sciousness or, as Archer put it, ‘imaginative sympathy’, the theatre
employed the melodramatic conventions of strong feeling, sentimen-
talism and the reliability with which physical symptoms express inner
feelings, in order to assert authenticity. Although this book will trace
the degree to which later works employ such melodramatic conven-
tions in their representations of actresses, this chapter examines those
conventions in their strongest instantiations in dramas that cluster
around the 1850s.
It first uses Edward Lancaster’s brief interlude ‘The Manager’s
Daughter’, produced at the Haymarket in 1837 and later adapted by
Dion Boucicault into ‘The Young Actress’ (1860), which thematises
the actress as a protean mimic at a time when the theatre increasingly
focused its attention on the Victorian mass audience of various and
changeable classes, rather than on the patronage of the gentility. The
chapter then focuses on a cluster of plays – and one novel adapted
from a play – from the 1840s and 1850s that curb the actress’s abil-
ity to undermine class structures. Boucicault’s Peg Woffington (1845)
depicts an actress who can make or break men’s stations, while she
herself, having risen from poverty, remains a social outsider despite
her wealth, as she trades on her perceived sexual availability and
tenuous social standing. Boucicault’s The Prima Donna (1852) takes
up the orphan actress whose lack of family origins, as in Peg Woff-
ington, is both a concrete and symbolic instantiation of the actress’s
lack of fixed social position. This melodrama, about an actress
whose adopted sister is coincidentally pining away after the noble-
man whom the actress loves, thematises authenticity: the nobleman
falls in love with the actress’s sister in actuality only after he has been
compelled to feign love for her. The play balances this suggestion
that performance can create a new reality by using the actress’s love
for her adopted sister – the only family she has known – to serve as a
source of authentic feeling and, in turn, to maintain the actress as an
outsider by preventing her marriage into a respectable social stand-
ing as she sacrifices her own happiness for that of her sister.
Tom Taylor and Charles Reade revisited Boucicault’s Peg Woffing-
ton in their co-authored play Masks and Faces (1852) and in Reade’s
subsequent novelisation of the same story, Peg Woffington (1853),
working more aggressively with the themes of her class status in order

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 17

to explore the actress’s authenticity. In both the play and the novel,
Taylor and Reade employ the melodramatic convention of the leg-
ibility of physical emotions to establish the actress’s genuine feelings,
which are grounded in her working-class origins, in order to reclaim
Peg from her changeability and prevent her from disrupting class hier-
archies. A comparison of the play and its novelisation reveals chal-
lenges that the stage poses to establishing authenticity for the actress.
Although Chapter 2 continues to examine how Victorian writers
sought to establish the actress’s authenticity, it focuses on works of
the 1860s, which do not curb the actress’s challenge to traditional
class distinctions but rather embrace such challenges. Actresses,
whose public performances transgressed gender expectations by tak-
ing them out of the domestic sphere, were far more socially problem-
atic than actors. Attempting to improve the prestige of the theatre,
therefore, included refiguring the actress as compatible with domes-
ticity. In order to establish the actress’s authenticity and, by exten-
sion, respectability, the novel and plays that this chapter examines
employ family and the domestic – even when they are not part of
the actress’s origins. Thus, even as the actress, historically, became
more respectable, she was used as a figure for class disruption. The
works examined in this chapter range from melodrama and the sen-
sation novel to a play that, although it is widely recognised as a
breakthrough in theatrical realism, paradoxically depends on melo-
dramatic conventions in order to claim its own realistic status.
The famous melodramatist Boucicault’s The Life of an Actress,
which was first performed in London in 1862, thematises authen-
ticity as the much maligned bit-part actor Grimaldi criticises the
star Julia for being mechanical, rather than achieving the ‘double
consciousness’ that Lewes theorised. Grimaldi vocalises the position
of the play: that authenticity is located in emotions, and the great
actress must be sentient. In contrast, lacking any standing in the social
world, the orphaned street beggar Violet performs with real feeling
that stems from her own griefs, and she is consequently adopted by
Grimaldi. The vulnerable social status of the actress is instantiated
by the melodramatic plot, in which Violet is abducted by a villainous
seducer. Further, the problem of her class status is embodied in her
secret marriage to Lord Arthur. In the end, it is through the creation
of family ties and her authentic acting that Violet’s status is elevated,
and the play both valorises the nobility of acting as an artistic profes-
sion and celebrates the power of popular audiences.
Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel No Name (1862–3) explicitly
criticises traditional landed wealth and emphasises the acted nature

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 18 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

of class, stressing family relationships and domestic life as the basis

for individual identity. The novel’s heroine, Magdalen, prostitutes
herself both as an actress and by marrying, under a false identity, for
mercenary reasons. Her fall is precipitated by a loss of family and
inheritance; her redemption is effected by a symbolic return to her
family. Contrary to criticism of the novel that holds that it focuses
on plot rather than character, I argue that the central mission of No
Name is to establish the basis of Magdalen’s internalised subjectiv-
ity. No Name traces an elaborate plot of its heroine’s identity loss –
Magdalen loses herself as she constantly mimics identities that are
not her own – only to restore her to her true character through
her re-domestication. Just as Charles Reade and Tom Taylor found
it difficult to assert Peg Woffington’s authenticity on stage, Collins
struggled to adapt Magdalen’s story to the stage. In addition to
examining Collins’s novel, this chapter traces its stage adaptations,
including one by Collins himself. The conditions of the theatre
caused Collins, in adapting his novel for the stage, to make drastic
changes to his narrative – changes that represent Magdalen as more
genuine on stage than she is in the novel.
Finally, this chapter turns to a pivotal moment in the theatre – a
moment whose influence on the novel’s development has gone unre-
marked. T. W. Robertson’s play Caste (1867) occupies a prominent
position in the development of formal realism on stage, and the figure of
the actress and her relationship to the domestic is crucial for this devel-
opment, as the plot grappled with whether the actress truly belonged in
the home, which was realised on stage in the ‘box set’ that Robertson
helped to popularise. Like Boucicault’s Violet, Robertson’s Esther mar-
ries a member of the nobility and faces the censure of his mother, and
her respectability is founded in her authentic feelings which, in this
play, are inextricably linked to her identity as a mother. Retrospectively,
the thematic and representational similarities between The Life of an
Actress and Caste reveal the importance of melodrama in the develop-
ment of realism, as a play that has been considered a landmark in the
development of stage realism remained indebted to and grounded in
melodramatic strategies.
Turning from the domesticated actress to women who choose careers
as performers instead of marriage or motherhood, Chapter 3 takes as
its subject performing women created by the landmark novelist George
Eliot in the 1870s: the title character of Eliot’s poetic closet drama
Armgart (1871) and the diva Alcharisi in her novel Daniel Deronda
(1876). These works emphasise the importance of performance not for
self-expression but for the influence and independence that performing

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 19

for a public audience provides. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora

Leigh (1856), which Eliot reviewed and which invoked antitheatrical-
ity as it portrays a female poet’s scorn for theatrical performance and
being controlled by any audience, throws Eliot’s interest in women’s
public performance into greater relief. In Armgart, Eliot demonstrates
how the female artist can gain control over her audience – albeit control
that is negotiated and tenuous – in order to attain a greatness unavail-
able to women confined to the domestic sphere. In Daniel Deronda, she
explores how Gwendolen Harleth, in contrast to the Alcharisi, lacks the
talent to perform in public and is relegated to performing in a domestic
world in which she lacks self-determination and is controlled by her
husband. Ultimately, Eliot presages the women’s suffragette movement
not only in her exploration of how an exceptionally talented woman
can wield power in the public sphere but also in her insistence on a
bond of sympathy between the public, performing woman and women
who lack such power. Eliot emphasises that this bond requires a sympa-
thetic connection greater than can be achieved through melodramatic
spectacularity.
Chapter 4 examines an unremarked way in which the development
of stage realism influenced the development of the novel. It argues that
the figure of the actress is crucial for the novelistic naturalism that
George Moore propounded in his novel A Mummer’s Wife (1885), and
that she reveals how the theatre’s movement away from melodrama
and towards domestic realism, exemplified by Robertson’s Caste in
Chapter 2, contributed to a historical shift in the novel. Moore’s own
theatre criticism helps to reveal how the naturalism of A Mummer’s
Wife, its form as a one-volume novel intended to dodge the bourgeois
taste of the censorial circulating libraries, and its plot that focuses on
the theatre’s incompatibility with respectable domestic life all respond
to the theatre’s increased claims to respectability and realism in the
1860s. Rather than competing with the theatre for market share,
Moore rejected the theatre’s appeal to popular middle-class audiences
in favour of attracting a more avant-garde readership. In both Robert-
son’s play and Moore’s novel, the actress’s artifice is juxtaposed with a
domesticity that each author uses to signify reality. While Robertson’s
play shows how the actress can be at home in the domestic sphere,
and Eliot’s performers avoided motherhood, Moore’s novel uses the
extreme case of maternal infanticide to demonstrate the actress’s
incompatibility with domestic life. Moore, reacting not only against
Robertson but also against Eliot, whom he satirises in the figure of a
female writer, mobilises the home to repudiate the public woman and
claim realistic representation, and a new audience, for himself. While

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 20 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

the next chapter will examine drama by the actress-turned-writer

Elizabeth Robins, this chapter concludes by analysing Robins’s satiri-
cal novel George Mandeville’s Husband (1894) as a pointed response
to Moore’s attack on the theatre. Robins knew Moore, and she
vehemently opposed his views on the theatre. George Mandeville’s
Husband defends both the theatre and the public woman by exposing
the commercialism of the market for novels and by satirising criticism
of women who participate in the public sphere. It also engages explic-
itly with the legacy of George Eliot’s exceptionalism for feminism.
This book concludes, in Chapter 5, with Henry James and Eliza-
beth Robins, two American expatriates whose lives and, I argue, writ-
ing became intertwined through Robins’s career as an actress and as
a pioneering figure in the production of Ibsen on the London stage.
Henry James’s short story ‘Nona Vincent’ (1892), about the pressure
on an actress to play her role, frames the chapter, which then proceeds
to examine Miriam Rooth, the main character in James’s The Tragic
Muse (1890), in the context of James’s theatre criticism from 1871 to
1901 that was collected in The Scenic Art (1948). The chapter argues
that in these two works James recapitulates many of the themes about
the actress and the state of the theatre in Victorian England that this
book explores in its earlier chapters; and that Miriam embodies that
cultural history of the figure of the actress. It is notable, therefore, that
James places Miriam’s importance to an English national theatre in jux-
taposition and as a threat to Julia Dallow’s importance on the national
political stage. This distinction between the actress and the political
woman is challenged by actresses who themselves became involved in
politics as they became key participants in the women’s suffrage move-
ment. The long-term friendship between James and Robins that is
documented in Robins’s Theatre and Friendship (1932) traces a transi-
tion from Robins as an actress struggling to play roles – both literally as
an actress playing a part on stage and figuratively as an actress with a
rich cultural legacy scripting her place in society – to Robins as a play-
wright who reworks both theatrical conventions and the ways in which
actresses and women participated in the public sphere. The remainder
of this chapter traces that transition from James and Robins’s shared
enthusiasm for Ibsen as a cornerstone of a new English drama, to
Robins’s first play Alan’s Wife (1893), to her novel The Convert (1907)
and her play Votes for Women (1907). The works in this chapter, from
James’s fiction to Robins’s suffrage drama, also chart a course from
the scepticism about popular audiences that we saw in George Eliot
and George Moore, towards the use of theatre to function as propa-
ganda for a broad audience. The chapter examines Votes for Women

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 21

within the context of archival materials about the Actresses’ Franchise

League, for which the play was written, and its relationship to other
suffrage organisations in order to demonstrate that the theatricality of
the suffragettes, both on stage and in their spectacular political tactics,
resulted from and challenged the Victorian cultural tradition surround-
ing the theatre and the actress. It demonstrates that the issues that had
accrued around the actress – the blurring of class distinctions, the social
and aesthetic significance of domesticity, the challenges to gender poli-
tics, the power of public opinion and the use of both melodramatic
and realistic methods for developing connections through either feeling
or sympathy – were issues of central concern to the women’s suffrage
movement. These issues provide additional explanations, beyond that
of the actress’s significance as a public woman, for why the theatre
and theatricality were important to the suffragettes. A brief epilogue
describes the activities of the Actresses’ Franchise League in the years
between the beginning of World War I and the enfranchisement of
women in 1918.

Prologue: Thackeray’s Uneasy Dependence

on the Actress

Although this history will end with actresses who became play-
wrights, it begins with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
(1847–8), which defined the role of the novelist, the realism of the
novel, and the novel’s relationship to its audience by using the figure
of theatre and, more specifically, the actress, and The History of
Pendennis (1848–50), in which the actress is both essential to and
abjected by the novel. Extraordinarily vexed in their relationships to
the theatre, Vanity Fair and Pendennis provide outstanding exam-
ples of how the novel both asserted and contributed to the decline of
the theatre. They provide a starting point from which we can better
understand the struggle that the theatre would mount in order to
re-establish its and the actress’s respectability among middle-class
audiences, and the competition in which the theatre and the novel
would be embroiled for the second half of the nineteenth century.
Becky Sharp is an actress. More than an actress, she is a star. She
is a star in the sense that Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is one of a series
of English novels – the following chapters will explore others – that
are driven by the energies of a theatrical heroine. In many of these
cases, the actress is problematic enough that, as in Thackeray’s ‘novel
without a hero’, she does not fit neatly into the category of ‘heroine’,

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 22 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

although she is the very centre of the novel. Becky reveals that, as
Victorian novelists were troubled by their relationship to the literary
marketplace, they often defined their work in relation to the theatre
for commercial, as well as ideological, reasons. Becky, the daughter
of a French ‘opera-girl’, is consistently associated with theatrical-
ity, performs throughout the novel and, reputedly, tries her hand on
the professional stage.48 The narrator’s uneasy relationship to her is
symptomatic of the author’s uneasy relationship to the theatre more
generally – an ambivalence that is evident in Thackeray’s narrative
techniques. Thackeray seeks to emulate the theatre’s close relationship
with its audience.49 At the same time, however, he emphasises that the
theatre has lost its cultural prominence and that the novel has not only
supplanted it but has improved upon it. Accordingly, he draws distinc-
tions between his own mode of representation and that of the theatre.
Vanity Fair’s ‘Before the Curtain’ preface evinces what Janice
Carlisle calls Thackeray’s ‘preoccupation with his audience that might
be termed obsessive’.50 When the narrator enacts the ‘conscription’
of a reading audience, he begins with a theatrical model, creating
the illusion of a physically present audience.51 Casting himself as
‘Manager of the Performance’, the narrator concludes his preface
with: ‘And with this, and a profound bow to his patrons, the Man-
ager retires, and the curtain rises.’52 Later the narrator continues to
elide the novel and theatre when he states, ‘Every reader of a senti-
mental turn (and we desire no other) must have been pleased with
the tableau with which the last act of our little drama concluded.’53
The preface, however, is not without ambivalence towards the audi-
ence, for it begins: ‘As the Manager of the Performance sits before the
curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound
melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place’, a
place which is ‘not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though
very noisy’. The narrator proceeds to suggest,

A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of

this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people’s
hilarity. . . . An episode of humour or kindness touches and amuses him
here and there; . . . but the general impression is one more melancholy
than mirthful. When you come home, you sit down, in a sober, con-
templative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your
books or your business.54

This audience that provokes such mixed feelings is not only the
reader of Thackeray’s novel but its subject as well.

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 23

Reminding readers of the theatre’s lost heyday as a middle-class

attraction, Vanity Fair uses its historical retrospective to signal that in
emulating the theatre it has supplanted it. Joseph Sedley, as well as Mrs
Sedley, Amelia and Becky, ‘frequented the theatres, as the mode was
in those days’, meaning in 1813.55 Several references to dramatic stars
of that time, including Mrs Siddons and John Philip Kemble, invited
readers of 1847 to reflect nostalgically on the theatre’s past greatness.56
References to the scandalous affairs of the actress Mrs Rougement and
the association of the married actress Mary Robinson and the Prince of
Wales suggest, however, that the theatre enjoyed only tenuous respect-
ability.57 Meanwhile, Mrs Sedley’s ‘curtain lecture’ to Mr Sedley reflects
a historical movement away from the stage.58 Douglas Jerrold’s ‘Mrs
Caudle’s Curtain Lectures’, a series that appeared in Punch in 1845,
were a turn towards fiction by Jerrold, the son of an actor and a play-
wright in his own right.59
Yet even as Thackeray tries to emulate and supplant the drama, he
also differentiates his novel from it. Sutherland argues that

Gordon Ray is surely right in his insistence that Thackeray labours in

Vanity Fair to raise the tone of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and with
it the status of the novelist. . . . Thackeray, one might paraphrase, found
the English novel sloppy romance, he left it solid realism.60

Thackeray emphasises his novel’s realism by contrasting it to other,

purportedly less realistic forms, as Levine argues is a characteristic of
realism.61 Thackeray simultaneously contrasts Vanity Fair to other
novels and the theatre as he elides the two. The narrator states, ‘As
his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist gener-
ally drops the curtain’, and proceeds to explain how he will treat the
story of Amelia differently.62 Similarly, immediately after addressing
the audience at the beginning of Chapter 6, referring to his own novel
as the performance of ‘piping’, the narrator proceeds to discuss how
he might have ‘treated this subject’, and famously outlines various
novelistic sub-genres less realistic than his own.63
Thackeray highlights his own narrative technique as one that is at
odds with theatrical representation. In the same chapter in which the
narrator states that Joseph Sedley ‘frequented the theatres, as the mode
was in those days’, playing up the theatre’s lost, respectable past, the
narrator provides a view of Joseph’s internal thoughts, noting par-
enthetically, ‘for novelists have the privilege of knowing everything’,
before Joseph departs for the theatre in order to flee Becky Sharp, who
is singing in the drawing room.64 Sutherland points out that Joseph’s

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 24 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

determination ‘to go and see the Forty Thieves . . . and Miss Decamp’s
dance’ signals ‘that Joe can admire fast, fashionable women on stage
(the demi-mondaine De Camp background was, incidentally, not
unlike Becky’s) but is terrified of them in the flesh’.65 The significant dif-
ference here is that the performances of actresses on stage do not have
the interiority of Becky Sharp, who is an actress off stage, both in the
sense that she is a social performer and in the sense that she is a char-
acter in a novel with a fully developed interiority. Thackeray’s reference
to the theatre, therefore, highlights the contrast between the surface
appearances of theatrical performance, and the novelist’s privilege of
knowing everything. At the same time, the reference to Sheridan’s The
Forty Thieves carefully uses theatre history to emphasise the theatre’s
fallen state. Joseph would have seen it in 1813 at the transpontine Sur-
rey theatre, where it opened in 1812. Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow
point out that by 1842 ‘the Surrey was reputedly the leading minor the-
ater in London’, and that it drew ‘a broad range of spectators’ despite
its reputation for nautical melodrama.66 Nevertheless, to Thackeray’s
readership as well as to Joseph, it was a significantly less highbrow
venue than the Drury Lane patent house where The Forty Thieves first
opened in 1806 under Sheridan’s own management. Drury Lane itself
had suffered financial problems before it burned to the ground in 1809,
and the Prince Regent stopped supporting Sheridan’s political career in
1811. The play itself, a musical, spectacular, violent melodrama, rep-
resents a generic fall from Sheridan’s earlier works such as The School
for Scandal (1777). Thackeray’s readers of 1848 would also have been
familiar with the fact that Marie-Thérèse Kemble, formerly DeCamp,
had returned to the stage in 1829 as Lady Capulet in a production in
which her daughter Fanny Kemble played Juliet in order to save the
family business, Covent Garden, from bankruptcy. Thus, the reference
to ‘Decamp’ brought to reader’s minds the fact that even the patent
houses, the most respectable and venerable theatres, were no longer
commercially competitive.67
But in its attempt to supplant the theatre’s cultural and commercial
position, Vanity Fair is not a simple matter of a narrator claiming both
theatrical intimacy with a reading audience and, at the same time, an
omniscience about characters that the theatre does not achieve. As the
narrative progresses, the narrator does not consistently know every-
thing and instead presents the external performances of characters
without penetrating their façades. As Becky performs increasingly
effectively, she becomes increasingly opaque. Vanity Fair initially sup-
ports Mary Ann O’Farrell’s argument that the nineteenth-century
English novel ‘finds in the blush an implicit promise to render body

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 25

and character legible. The blush’s efficacy in fulfilling its pledge for
the novel depends upon its seeming, by means of its involuntarity,
to evade the constructive capacities of gesture, disguise, and will.’68
Early in the novel, we learn that, upon a mention of her beau George
Osborne, Amelia ‘blushed as only young ladies of seventeen know
how to blush, and as Miss Rebecca Sharp never blushed in her life – at
least not since she was eight years old, and when she was caught steal-
ing jam . . . by her godmother.’69 The ironic statement that one can
‘know how’ to blush, however, suggests the potentially performative
nature of a supposedly natural act. Shortly thereafter, when Becky
blushes during her pursuit of Joseph, her blush remains an impen-
etrable part of her performance.70 On the basis of earlier informa-
tion regarding her motives we can infer that Becky is quickly learning
to feign the signs that are taken as genuine. As the narrator says of
Becky’s departure from the Sedley household:

Finally came the parting with Miss Amelia, over which picture I intend
to throw a veil. But after a scene in which one person was in earnest
and the other a perfect performer – after the tenderest caresses, the most
pathetic tears, the smelling-bottle, and some of the very best feelings of
the heart, had been called into requisition – Rebecca and Amelia parted,
the former vowing to love her friend for ever and ever and ever.71

Andrew H. Miller points out that, when ‘Thackeray gestures toward

the spheres of existence – moral conscience, prayer, private desires –
to which he has no access’, he ‘shift[s] the ground of his claims: the
reader and author, he now implies, share a set of circumstances and
a set of attitudes toward those circumstances. . . . [T]he significant
identification is with readers in the drawing room’.72 Theatrical rep-
resentation, in other words, allows Thackeray the close relationship
to audience that he has used the theatre to signify.
Thackeray’s dual-mode narrative trains the reader to read his rep-
resentation of Becky, in particular, suspiciously and ironically: ‘So, in
a word, Briggs told all her history, and Becky gave a narrative of her
own life, with her usual artlessness and candour.’73 The narrator’s
dual point of view is clearest when he describes ‘the manners of the
very polite world’:

To us, from outside gazing over the policemen’s shoulders at the bewil-
dering beauties as they pass into Court or ball, they may seem beings of
unearthly splendour, and in the enjoyment of an exquisite happiness by us
unattainable. It is to console some of these dissatisfied beings, that we are
narrating our dear Becky’s struggles, and triumphs, and disappointments.74

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 26 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

The narrator assumes the point of view of an outsider, viewing, as it

were, the superficial pomp and ceremony of a theatrical performance,
but also evinces a determination to penetrate superficial appearances.
This appears to be the ‘blurring of the boundary between narration’s
extradiegetic distance, on the one hand, and on the other a level of
affective engagement (and historical embeddedness) ordinarily the
province of characters only’, that Greiner, citing Harry E. Shaw, sees
as a sympathetic impulse for the novel.75 Consistent with Greiner’s
argument that sympathy is a thought process that emerges from the
failure to fully access a character’s experience, the narrator ultimately
declares Becky opaque to him, because it is impossible to ascertain
truth amidst all of her dissembling:

What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not; but who could
tell what was truth which came from those lips; or if that corrupt heart
was in this case pure? All her lies and her schemes, all her selfishness and
her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy.76

In a radical denial of the ways in which the novel shapes and creates
the figure of the actress, Thackeray writes as if the actress possesses
a power that baffles the novelist. Indeed, in this sense Thackeray the
novelist and Becky the character parallel each other, to the extent
that the actress-character serves as a figure for the author.
Thackeray’s oscillation between the theatrical representation in
which the narrative point of view shares his audience’s limitations and,
in that way, establishes a close relationship with his audience, and an
omniscient narrator who nevertheless attempts to maintain the illu-
sion of a physically present, theatrical audience by ‘conscripting’ it
even as he claims a novelist’s privileged ability to penetrate superficial
appearances, reveals the novel’s determination to compete with, sup-
plant and exceed the theatre as a form of popular entertainment. In
this sense, however, Becky is not merely an actress whose performance
can be treated either omnisciently or non-omnisciently. Rather, as a
performer who drives the narrative forward, Becky is another figure,
along with the ‘Manager of the Performance’, for the novelist’s work.
As Jonas Barish has noted: ‘If Thackeray is the puppet master of the
show, Becky is the puppet master’s puppet mistress, for whom oth-
ers serve mainly as under-puppets.’77 Further, that Becky represents
the novel itself is evident in the narrator’s comment immediately after
Rebecca’s letter to Amelia describing Queen’s Crawley:

Everything considered, I think it is quite as well for our dear Amelia

Sedley, in Russell Square, that Miss Sharp and she are parted. Rebecca

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 Introduction: Setting the Stage 27

is a droll funny creature, to be sure; and those descriptions of the poor

lady weeping for the loss of her beauty, and the gentleman ‘with hay-
coloured whiskers and straw-coloured hair’, are very smart, doubtless,
and show a great knowledge of the world. That she might, when on her
knees, have been thinking of something better than Miss Horrocks’s rib-
bons, has possibly struck both of us. But my kind reader will please to
remember that this history has ‘Vanity Fair’ for a title, and that Vanity
Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and
falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist, who is holding forth
on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to
wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery
in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to
speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and
bells or a shovel-hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in
the course of such an undertaking.78

Combining direct address to the reader with the metaphor of a speaker

who has an immediately present audience and with a reminder of the
novel’s verisimilitude, this paragraph also draws a direct link between
the narrator and Becky, as the narrator begins by acknowledging the
unease that readers have with Becky but ends by making a plea on
her behalf. Both narrator and Becky view the world from a satirical
point of view, and, as Becky’s letter takes the place of the narrator in
opening the chapter, both serve as narrative points of view. Moreover,
just as Becky is a performer, the narrator explicitly reemphasises his
role as performer. He proceeds to describe ‘a brother of the story-
telling trade’ whose representation of villainy prompted the audience’s
fervent donations, and ‘the little Paris theatres’ where French actors
refused higher salaries because they would not appear as the villains
who aroused the audience’s passion, explaining, ‘I set the two stories
one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mer-
cenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and
trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which
he cannot keep down.’79 He asks to be able to have even more intimate
contact with the audience than a performer can, ‘And, as we bring our
characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and brother, not only to
introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and
talk about them’, specifically because

[o]therwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of
devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed
good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet – whereas the
laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity,
and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and

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 28 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

flourishing in the world – Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have

at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very
successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose
such as those, no doubt, that Laughter was made.80

Indeed, this conclusion of the chapter, like other passages that handle
Becky, must be read ironically, for the narrator has already demonstrated
his affinity with Becky. Thackeray is signalling not that his performer-
narrator is different from Becky but that he shares Becky’s mercenary
motives, and that the character of Becky, the narrator’s treatment of
her, and the figure of theatre all serve the commercial purpose of the
success of the novel.81 Just as Becky casts a satiric eye on everything,
the satire that Thackeray employs ultimately takes its own narrative
as its subject as he associates himself with a character within the nar-
rative. While Kurnick also traces ‘the convergence between Becky and
her narrator’ and points out that in Vanity Fair ‘the theater becomes
an emblem for what stubbornly resists accommodation in the domestic
sphere’, part of this resistance stems from the actress as public woman,
for it is as a result of her violation of the gendered separation of spheres
that the actress comes to stand for the theatre and its commercialism.82
Ultimately, Thackeray ascribes his narrative technique, which teaches
the audience not to trust appearances even though the novel ceases
to expose what lies behind deceptive performances, to the audience’s
demands that his novel has met, ostensibly for commercial success:

We must pass over a part of Mrs Rebecca Crawley’s biography with that
lightness and delicacy which the world demands – the moral world, that
has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repug-
nance to hearing vice called by its proper name. . . . [I]t has been the
wish of the present writer, all through this story, deferentially to submit
to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of
wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody’s fine
feelings may be offended. I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has
certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly
genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this siren, singing and smil-
ing, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers
all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the
monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down
under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling,
diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round
corpses; but above the water line, I ask, has not everything been proper,
agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in
Vanity Fair a right to cry fie?83

5872_Miller.indd 28 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 29

In the sense that Victorian writers often criticised the theatre for pan-
dering to its audience, the narrator describes a theatrical relationship
to his readership. Just as Becky shrewdly performs for financial gain,
so, too, does the novel itself. In fact, the narrator connects duplicity
and commerce when he describes how Becky must lie to Amelia when
they are reunited: ‘When one fib becomes due as it were, you must
forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your
lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection
increases every day.’84 It is at this very point that the novel shifts away
from its omniscience towards a re-told tale, the mode in which the
narrator avoids telling us the sordid details of Becky’s life. Given the
commercial awareness of the novel, this statement, by implication,
likens fiction to lying and, thus, through association with Becky, to
theatrical performance. Like Becky, Vanity Fair is also ‘eminent and
successful as a practitioner in the art of giving pleasure’.85
The centrality of the actress to the novel, and the degree to which
she both attracted and repulsed Thackeray, is evident in the novel
that immediately followed Vanity Fair: The History of Pendennis
(1848–50). Pearson argues that Thackeray ‘brings into the domestic
sphere of his readers that very threat to family morality represented
by the public theatre, but demonstrates that the divide is only a
social construction’.86 While in Vanity Fair the actress Becky con-
stantly crosses the line between the theatre and the home, the plot of
Pendennis is driven by society’s desire to enforce that line. The defin-
ing moment in the life of this Bildungsroman’s protagonist, Arthur
Pendennis, is his ‘infatuation’ and entanglement with his first love:
a provincial actress known as The Fotheringay.87 This is posed as a
problem at the opening of the novel, and it is not until Pen is hap-
pily married to his adopted sister at the end of the novel, a match
for which his mother had hoped from the start, that the theatrical
energies of the novel are controlled. The History of Pendennis is,
thus, essentially a history of attempting to move beyond the theatre.
Nicholas Dames has written about how in Thackeray ‘celebrity is
at once exalted and punctured’, and the narrator’s treatment of the
Fotheringay both reveals how star-struck Arthur is and how base-
less his admiration is.88 No matter what the Fotheringay performs
on stage – and she is described as performing with consistency of
expression – her own existence remains prosaic:

And after she had come out trembling with emotion before the audience,
and looking so exhausted and tearful that you fancied she would faint
with sensibility, she would gather her hair the instant she was behind the

5872_Miller.indd 29 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 30 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

curtain, and go home to a mutton chop and glass of brown stout; and
the harrowing labours of the day over, she went to bed and snored as
resolutely and as regularly as a porter.89

Nevertheless, in Arthur’s eyes she becomes more than she is:

Now the reader, who has had the benefit of overhearing the entire con-
versation which Pen had with Miss Fotheringay, can judge for himself
about the powers of her mind, and may perhaps be disposed to think
that she has not said anything astonishingly humorous or intellectual in
the course of the above interview.
But what did our Pen care? He saw a pair of bright eyes, and he
believed in them – a beautiful image, and he fell down and worshipped
it. He supplied the meaning which her words wanted; and created the
divinity which he loved.90

The novel traces Arthur’s heartache and gradual disillusionment with

his first love, as he continues to cross paths with her. While the actress is
not a suitable match for someone of Arthur’s social station, even though
his own origins have their roots in his father’s success as an apothecary,
she marries into the aristocracy and becomes Lady Mirabel. She thus
emblematises a variety of challenges to class pretensions that the novel
explores, most particularly in the Clavering family and in Major Pen-
dennis being outclassed by his own valet.
Notably, Arthur’s journey away from the theatre occurs in parallel
with his establishing himself professionally and financially through
becoming a writer. The theatre, in addition to related worldly corrupt
influences that threaten Arthur’s relationships with his family, remains
a constant presence throughout the novel, which is full of theatrical
metaphors, visits to the theatre, and references to dramas. In fact, a
challenge to Arthur’s progress from a theatrical infatuation to familial
stability erupts roughly halfway through the novel. After revising the
‘wet proof-sheet’ of an article he had completed, he crosses the river
for an evening of amusement at Vauxhall Gardens, where he meets
the theatrical aspirant Fanny Bolton on the arm of the Fotheringay’s
father.91 That this is a relapse for Arthur is realised metaphorically by
the fact that his mother discovers his involvement with Fanny when
she discovers Fanny nursing him during a critical illness.
In contrast, as Pen later attempts to settle into a relationship
without illusions with Blanche Amory, he mockingly describes her as
Morgiana from The Forty Thieves, but he proceeds to suggest that
their relationship should be untheatrical:

5872_Miller.indd 30 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 31

To the necessary deceits and hypocrisies of our life, why add any that
are useless and unnecessary? If I offer myself to you because I think we
have a fair chance of being happy together, and because by your help I
may get for both of us a good place and a not undistinguished name,
why ask me to feign raptures and counterfeit romance, in which neither
of us believe? Do you want me to come wooing in a Prince Prettyman’s
dress from the masquerade warehouse, and to pay you compliments like
Sir Charles Grandison?’92

Among the characters that Arthur demurs to play, Prince Pretty-

man was a character from the Duke of Buckingham’s comedy The
Rehearsal (1672).93 Blanche, however, also displays theatrical ten-
dencies, and the novel and Arthur accordingly reject her en route to
their final conclusion.
That the theatre remained in the background for Pen while he
worked as a writer speaks to the position that the actress occupied in
the lives, as well as imaginations, of many Victorian writers. In addi-
tion to playwrights such as Boucicault and Robertson, whose own
work in the theatre either as actors or playwrights put them in the
company of actresses who would become their wives, novelists such
as Dickens and Reade had irresistible and troubling relationships
with actresses. Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan was not only
a secret extramarital affair that threatened the Dickens brand in the
Victorian marketplace but was also deliberately long-suppressed
in the scholarly world that perpetuated the Dickens legacy before
becoming the subject of Claire Tomalin’s aptly named dual biogra-
phy, The Invisible Woman, which in turn became the basis for a
2013 feature film.94 Reade, while obligated to remain celibate as a
condition of his fellowship at Oxford, fell in love with the married
actress Mrs Stirling, who would originate the role of Peg Woffington
in his play of that name, and enjoyed a long-term and supportive
relationship with the actress Laura Seymour, but he discontinued his
relationship with his adopted daughter Katie, an actress, when she
married an actor against his wishes.95
Vanity Fair and The History of Pendennis weave various threads
regarding theatre and the actress that later plays and novels would
rework, most notably: the relative abilities of plays and novels to
establish authenticity, the actress’s respectability and relationship
to the domestic sphere and to social classes, and the ways in which
women can command power. These are the subjects of the following
chapters. Thackeray also depicted the actress as a challenge to the
writer even as his novels played the powerful cultural role of helping

5872_Miller.indd 31 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 32 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

to shape the actress. The following chapters trace how novelists and
playwrights, responding to each other, continued to shape the actress
and how the actress, both as a figure in plays and novels and as a
playwright and novelist herself who spoke back to that cultural tradi-
tion, shaped these cultural forms.

Notes

1. Weltman, ‘Theater, Exhibition, and Spectacle in the Nineteenth Century’,

p. 69; Kurnick, Empty Houses, p. 6; Pearson, Victorian Writers and the
Stage, p. 20.
2. Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, p. 44.
3. Ibid. p. 360.
4. Ibid. p. 360.
5. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 254.
6. Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, p. 385.
7. Ibid. p. 390.
8. For both an illustration of the Coburg’s curtain and an account of melo-
drama’s popularity, see Weltman, ‘Theater, Exhibition, and Spectacle in
the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 75–8. The illustration of the curtain also
appears on the cover of Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the
Audience.
9. [Collins], ‘Dramatic Grub Street: Explained in Two Letters’, p. 266.
10. Ibid. p. 269. See, for example, George Rowell’s classic chronicle, The
Victorian Theater 1792–1914 (1978).
11. [Collins], ‘Dramatic Grub Street: Explained in Two Letters’, p. 269.
12. Archer, ‘The Free Stage and the New Drama’, p. 666.
13. Archer, ‘The Stage and Literature’, p. 219; ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’,
Pall Mall Gazette, 31 August 1892, p. 1.
14. Kurnick, Empty Houses, p. 8.
15. Victorian writers’ disdain for the physicality of the theatre is consistent
with Leah Price’s claim that ‘the Victorians cathected the text in pro-
portion as they disowned the book’ (How to Do Things with Books in
Victorian Britain, p. 4).
16. Hardy, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 August 1892,
p. 1.
17. Ouida, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 20 September
1892, p. 1; ‘Lucas Malet’ [Mary St Leger Kingsley], ‘Why I Don’t Write
Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 September 1892, p. 2.
18. Woods, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 2 September
1892, p. 2.
19. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 5.
20. Altick, The English Common Reader, pp. 383–4.

5872_Miller.indd 32 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 33

21. William Archer and H. Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Scheme

and Estimates (1904) (rev. edn, New York: Duffield, 1908), quoted in
Tracy C. Davis, ‘The Show Business Economy, and Its Discontents’,
pp. 39–40.
22. Gissing, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 10 September
1892, p. 3.
23. Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson.
24. Frederic, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 September
1892, p. 3.
25. Ibid. p. 3.
26. Ibid. p. 3.
27. Braddon, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 5 September
1892, p. 3.
28. Shorthouse, ‘Why I Don’t Write Plays’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 September
1892, p. 2.
29. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice.
30. Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, p. 64.
31. Ibid. p. 68.
32. Important book-length works about the novel and theatricality include
David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam
Smith, and George Eliot (1986); Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act:
Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (1992); J. Jeffrey
Franklin, Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century
Realist Novel (1999); and Emily Allen, Theater Figures: The Production
of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2003). For an exploration of
how the stage played an important role in novelists’ self-definitions of
their missions as writers see Renata Kobetts Miller, ‘Imagined Audiences:
The Victorian Novelist and the Stage’.
33. Franklin, Serious Play, pp. 81, 92.
34. Ibid. p. 108.
35. Ibid. p. 127.
36. Allen, Theater Figures, p. 12.
37. Ibid. p. 3.
38. Ibid. p. 19.
39. Ibid. p. 16.
40. Ibid. p. 17.
41. Newey, for example, argues that nineteenth-century women’s theatre
writing ‘has the potential to disrupt the historiographical model of a
smooth evolutionary development towards psychological realism and
representational naturalism at the end of the nineteenth-century – that
male-centred account of the British theater’ (Women’s Theatre Writing
in Victorian Britain, p. 9).
42. Greiner, Sympathetic Realism, p. 21.
43. Ibid. p. 5.
44. Ibid. p. 16.

5872_Miller.indd 33 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 34 The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

45. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination; Greiner, Sympathetic Realism,

p. 8.
46. Levine, The Realistic Imagination, p. 22.
47. Ibid. pp. 6, 12.
48. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 16.
49. According to Kurnick, ‘Thackeray’s work is shot through with an
attachment to the publicity and social promiscuity for which the theater
stands’ (Empty Houses, p. 30).
50. Carlisle, The Sense of an Audience, p. 4.
51. Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century
British Fiction.
52. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 2.
53. Ibid. p. 179.
54. Ibid. p. 1.
55. Ibid. p. 27.
56. Ibid. pp. 516, 49.
57. Ibid. p. 128. See Sutherland’s notes to Vanity Fair, p. 934.
58. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 36.
59. See Sutherland’s notes to Vanity Fair, p. 888.
60. Sutherland, Introduction to Vanity Fair, p. ix.
61. Levine describes ‘the struggle inherent in any “realist” effort – the strug-
gle to avoid the inevitable conventionality of language in pursuit of the
unattainable unmediated reality. Realism, as a literary method, can in
these terms be defined as a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of
some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending the limits of human
sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing not some other
language but reality itself (whatever that may be taken to be); in this
effort, the writer must self-contradictorily dismiss previous conventions
of representation while, in effect, establishing new ones’ (p. 8). The his-
tory of troubled stage adaptations of Vanity Fair that Robert A. Colby
(‘ “Scenes of all Sorts”: Vanity Fair on Stage and Screen’) traces suggests
that the novel’s realism was distinctly different than stage representa-
tion, despite the novel’s association of itself with drama.
62. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 319.
63. Ibid. p. 16.
64. Ibid. pp. 27, 31.
65. Ibid. p. 31. See Sutherland’s notes to Vanity Fair, p. 888.
66. Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, pp. 5–6.
67. Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, pp. 20–4. While
Kurnick’s analysis of how ‘two key features of [Thackeray’s] narrative
technique’ – ‘the markedly melancholy attitude of the Thackerayan nar-
rator, [and] his interest in the representation of interior experience’ –
‘emerge as records of a traumatized reaction to the felt contraction of
the public sphere’, I believe that reading Vanity Fair within the context
of cultural arguments about the stage’s commercialism calls attention to

5872_Miller.indd 34 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Introduction: Setting the Stage 35

Thackeray’s own preoccupation with the commercial popularity of the

stage as both appealing and problematic (Empty Houses, p. 31).
68. O’Farrell, Telling Complexions, p. 4.
69. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 35.
70. Ibid. p. 43.
71. Ibid. p. 76.
72. Andrew H. Miller, ‘Vanity Fair through Plate Glass’, p. 1050.
73. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 521.
74. Ibid. p. 643.
75. Greiner, Sympathetic Realism, p. 27.
76. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 677.
77. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 310.
78. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, pp. 94–5.
79. Ibid. p. 95.
80. Ibid. p. 96.
81. See Andrew H. Miller, ‘Vanity Fair through Plate Glass’, for Thackeray
and Becky’s shared mercenary interests.
82. Kurnick, Empty Houses, pp. 51, 42.
83. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, pp. 812–13.
84. Ibid. pp. 839–40.
85. Ibid. p. 856.
86. Pearson, Victorian Writers and the Stage, p. 106.
87. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, p. 39.
88. Dames, ‘Brushes with Fame’, p. 42.
89. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, p. 93.
90. Ibid. pp. 87–8.
91. Ibid. p. 489.
92. Ibid. p. 678.
93. Donald Hawes’s notes to The History of Pendennis, p. 805.
94. Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, and Tomalin, The Invisible Woman.
95. Burns, Charles Reade, p. 41; ‘Reade’s Niece a Pauper’, The New York
Times, 18 January 1914, p. 2.

5872_Miller.indd 35 17/09/18 4:25 PM

 Chapter 1

An Actress’s Tears: Authenticity and

the Reassertion of Social Class

[The actor’s] talent depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon
rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the
trap. He has rehearsed to himself every note of his passion. He has learnt
before a mirror every particle of his despair. He knows exactly when
he must produce his handkerchief and shed tears; and you will see him
weep at the word, at the syllable, he has chosen, not a second sooner
or later. The broken voice, the half-uttered words, the stifled or pro-
longed notes of agony, the trembling limbs, the faintings, the bursts of
fury – all this is pure mimicry, lessons carefully learned, the grimacing of
sorrow, the magnificent aping which the actor remembers long after his
first study of it, of which he was perfectly conscious when he first put it
before the public, and which leaves him, luckily for the poet, the specta-
tor, and himself, a full freedom of mind. Like other gymnastics, it taxes
only his bodily strength. He puts off the sock or the buskin; his voice
is gone; he is tired; he changes his dress, or he goes to bed; and he feels
neither trouble, nor sorrow, nor depression, nor weariness of soul. All
these emotions he has given to you. The actor is tired, you are unhappy;
he has had exertion without feeling, you feeling without exertion. Were
it otherwise the player’s lot would be the most wretched on earth: but he
is not the person he represents; he plays it, and plays it so well that you
think he is the person; the deception is all on your side; he knows well
enough that he is not the person.1

Diderot’s characterisation, in The Paradox of Acting, of the actor’s

emotional detachment from his representations is notably different
from modern method acting but is essential to Victorian concepts of
acting and, more specifically, what the Victorians called ‘mimicry’.
Like Diderot’s dialogue, which represents the anti-emotionalist stance
about acting in conversation with an interlocutor who challenges
that position, nineteenth-century writers were concerned about the
simulation or dissimulation involved in acting, and theatre critics

5872_Miller.indd 36 17/09/18 4:25 PM

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