19. The Duchess of Arch Street, Part One

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME]

Welcome once again to Adventures in Theatre History! Today we begin the story of one of the most iconic figures of 19th Century Philadelphia theater, and certainly the most important female theater artist of that era: Louisa Lane Drew. 

It’s actually a little difficult for me to write or to say the name that way: “Louisa Lane Drew”. It’s only a modern convention that we do so at all. Respectable ladies were seldom addressed in such a manner in the 19th Century. In her heyday her name was known to everyone in the city of Philadelphia as “Mrs. John Drew”. Nothing else would have been accepted by her, and she was by all accounts a person of extreme dignity and formality - a formidable presence both onstage and off. Her grandchildren, Lionel, Ethel and John Barrymore, whom she all raised in her home at 140 N. 12th St in Philadelphia, affectionately called her “Mummum'', but their father, the debonair and irreverent actor Maurice Barrymore, always solemnly called her “Ma’am”. She, for her part, never called her son-in-law by name, but instead only addressed him as “you”. Awed newspaper journalists who were ushered into her august presence to conduct interviews called her “Mrs. Drew”, if they dared to call her anything at all. The members of the stock company at the Arch Street Theater, which she managed from 1861 to 1892, also said “Mrs. Drew” during rehearsals, but amongst themselves in the Green Room they called her “The Duchess”. Only her very old friend, the actor Joseph Jefferson - who had known her even before she married Mr. John Drew - used her first name. Granddaughter Ethel Barrymore once recalled seeing her grandmother sitting with Joseph Jefferson when they were both in their seventies, reminiscing together by the fire. “Do you know, Joe, you are the only person alive who calls me Louisa?,” said The Duchess, softening for a moment. Then her gaze suddenly fell upon young Ethel, and she snapped back into control. “Come child, it is time for bed.”

Now that is one of the few times in this episode I will attempt to voice the words of Mrs. Drew, because once again I have recruited one of modern-day Philadelphia’s finest actresses, Susan Riley Stevens, to properly convey the full vocal presence of our subject. Susie is a good friend and a faithful supporter of the podcast, and I am honored by her sharing her talents with us for this episode.

Louisa Lane was born in Lambeth parish, South London, in January of 1820. Her parents were Thomas and Eliza Lane, an actor and a ballad singer respectively, two marginal and struggling English performers who were both themselves the offspring of strolling provincial players - that is to say, they had no permanent company they were attached to, but found work as they could from season to season.To English theater folk of that era, everyone in the family was expected to pitch in, if the situation called for it. And even before she could talk, little Louisa was in a play:

[Susie Stevens as Mrs. Drew] At twelve months old my mother took me on the stage as a crying baby; but cry I would not, but at the sight of the audience and the lights gave free vent to my delight and crowed aloud with joy. From that moment to this, the same sight has filled me with the most acute pleasure and I expect will do so to the last glimpse I get of them.

Or at least that’s the story Louisa was told by her mother, because of course she would not have remembered the incident herself. But the tale of her instant enjoyment and acceptance of an actor’s life was trotted out in almost every interview she ever gave and duly quoted by every biographer that has written about her since. The story’s moral is either interpreted as: that’s the last time she EVER got her cue wrong, or that she obviously was born to love the stage. A pat and fun anecdote to pass along, without really revealing any darker truths, like the possible pressing need of her fitfully employed parents to earn some extra money by bringing their infant daughter along on the job.

And this gets immediately to the point I would like to make about Louisa Lane Drew right from the start: For someone who was on stage, performing in the public eye, for 76 of her 77 years, we don’t actually know that much about her private life. Unlike our previous subject, Fanny Kemble, she did not keep a journal, or save bundles of her letters, or create scrapbooks. She did not write a carefully annotated two-volume autobiography, full of recollections of life in the theatah, like so many of her Victorian contemporaries. “I don’t have time for such things,” she once sniffed to an inquiring reporter. What historians mostly have is one single breezy memoir that she dictated to her son John Drew Jr. quite late in life - and let me tell you, even that book is REALLY stingy on personal details. As published, it looks rather like an undergraduate’s term paper, with many vaguely sketched in stories, really WIDE margins and with frequent use of illustrations and tangential footnotes to pad out the pages. Her recollections of names and dates don’t always gibe with facts elsewhere in the historical record, either. We have other memoirs by other Drew or Barrymore family members, but even they seem slightly overawed whenever they speak of Louisa, and are short on details. It was not until after she had passed away that they were brave enough to write down one family secret that she held onto until the day she died. We will get to that interesting story - quite a juicy tidbit really -  much later on.

From the details we can still gather elsewhere, we learn that Louisa’s early years were in fact turbulent and unpredictable and that for the first forty years of her life she was constantly moving from place to place - like a life for someone in the theater often is. She received no formal education and her private life was a bit messy - indeed it resembled rather exactly what ‘respectable’ people of her day often thought about a theatrical life: full of transient relationships and financial and moral peril. Louisa’s reaction to all this disorder was simply: to manage. She learned to read by being handed scripts, she learned to count and deal with money because it was necessary to survive on skimpy actor’s salaries and in constant dealings with managers, landlords and hotelkeepers. She was a highly successful child actor, and like many child actors got along better with adults than other children. While still in England, she performed in her first melodramas such as Frankenstein and Meg Murmock, or the Hag of the Glen, and in her first Hippodrama, scaling the heights of the scenery on horseback as Prince Aghib in Timour the Tartar. Her father died when she was about five years old, so her mother accepted the attentions of another theatrical gentleman, John Kinloch, whom she married - eventually. Together, they joined the general trend of 19th century British theater folk who were seeking their fortune in the El Dorado of the United States, across the Atlantic. Landing in New York, Louisa and her mother were hired and dispatched on a tour, first performing with another famous British expatriate, Junius Brutus Booth. Their initial engagement was in a city that we know well, by this point:

[Susie Stevens as Mrs. Drew] We were then sent to Philadelphia, to the old Walnut Street Theatre. . . I appeared as The Duke of York to the elder Booth’s Richard III. 

Indeed Philadelphia seems to have made a positive impact on little Louisa right from the start. It seemed cleaner and more orderly than most American cities of the day, and the standards of its theatrical world, as we know, were well established. But soon she and her mother were continuing on their way, where her next engagement was with another Philadelphia gentleman we have already met:

Then we were sent to Baltimore, to Mr. Joe Cowell’s theatre, where I had the honor of appearing as Albert to Mr. Edwin Forrest’s William Tell,  . . At that time he was, I suppose, about twenty-two or twenty-three and the handsomest man I ever saw. 

Forrest was evidently fond of little Louisa, too. He even gave her an engraved silver medal after the play was over, as a “testimonial of his admiration for her talents” - a memento she was to keep for the rest of her life. She was to act with Edwin Forrest many different times over the course of her career, and with Booth and Macready and Joseph Jefferson and James Murdoch and Tyrone Power and Charlotte Cushman and Thomas Hamblin and with almost every other major figure of the 19th Century American stage, in almost every American city that had any sort of theater in it. 

But as a child actor, little Louisa often didn’t even need any co-stars. Her stepfather John Kinloch decided she could be the family’s chief breadwinner if she became another precocious child star, like Clara Fisher, who was all the rage back then. Little Louisa Lane was soon performing not only many roles of both young girls and boys in plays: Like the impish tyke “Little Pickle” in The Spoiled Child, but also adult roles like Dr. Pangloss in adaptations of Candide!  There is a charming print of her doing a tour-de-force play called Twelve Precisely, in which she acted five different roles - male and female, young and old - at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, in November of 1828 - all five images are of Louisa’s various characters - her large eyes burning brightly and expressively. In January of 1829 she was performing in a comic afterpiece at the Chestnut, called The Four Mowbrays in which she portrayed Matilda Mowbray, Master Hector Mowbray, Master Gobbleton Mobray and Master Foppington Mowbray. A reviewer in a Philadelphia newspaper enthused: “This astonishing little creature  . . evinces a talent for and a knowledge of the stage beyond what we find in many experienced performers of merit . . . and the applause bestowed upon her bespoke the wonder and delight of the audience!”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

In 1839, Louisa had an engagement in Philadelphia once again, at the age of 19 she was now the leading lady of the Walnut Street Theatre, under the management of Francis Wemyss (WEEMS). She was earning $20 a week, a very respectable salary for a stock company player, and was once again appearing with Edwin Forrest - this time in the first elaborate production in America of the Bulwer-Lytton play entitled Richelieu.

 . . Mr. Forrest was never a good-tempered man, but he  .  had many noble qualities; he was the ‘fairest’ actor that ever played. If the character you sustained had anything good in it, he would give you the chance of showing it to the audience. He would get a little below you, so that your facial expression could be fully seen; he would partially turn his back, in order that the attention should be given entirely to you. This will be better understood by actors, who know how differently some players act.

That was her professional opinion, at any rate, and by this point her opinions had a wealth of experience to back them up. Much had happened to Louisa during the interim. She had twice gone with her family to play theaters in the Caribbean, and had twice been shipwrecked. Her stepfather and her youngest half-sister had perished from Yellow Fever in Jamaica, and she had almost lost her mother to the disease too - indeed the family came close to being swept up in a slave uprising there, as well. The shipwrecks nearly took her life, though in her memoir she just matter-of-factly describes being asked to walk along a submerged bowsprit, in a storm to the waiting rescue boat. Nothing to see here, just another day in the life of a strolling player . .  there was always another play to do, so as ever she simply got on with it. Soon enough she and Mama and her two remaining little sisters, Georgina and Adine, were back in New York and Louisa was doing a small role at the Bowery Theatre and singing a popular little song called “A Nice Young Maiden” for forty-eight nights. Then the family got hired to be in the company of a theater in Boston and they even went briefly to Nova Scotia, where, she writes mysteriously (and unhelpfully) “we saw a great deal of human nature.”  But the last time in her life she would ever risk a long ocean voyage was taking a ship from Boston to New Orleans, Indeed, like Edwin Forrest before her, in her teenage years she went West, and played both the ornate theaters of New Orleans and also the rough stages along the Mississippi and Ohio River basin, from Cincinnati to St. Louis to Vicksburg. In fact even before she was doing Richelieu with Forrest in Philadelphia, she had worked with him in Natchez, Mississippi, doing Lady Macbeth to his Mr. Macbeth and then being Ophelia to his Hamlet. Though she rarely did tragic roles during her career, as a professional, she was always ready to do any part she was hired to do. From long practice, she was able to memorize lines at lightning speed and was always word perfect. Forrest must have marveled that the little girl he worked with in Baltimore was now spouting Shakespeare along the Mississippi. Or maybe Forrest just knew that was life in the theater. You meet someone in a minor role and then the years rush by and the next time you see them they’ve got top billing. Little Louisa Lane had now reached her full height of just over five feet. She had a trim figure, an erect posture, long dark hair, and her large heavily-lidded eyes made an impression on audiences all the way to the back row. She was now officially a Leading Lady, and would never relinquish that all-important distinction for the rest of her life.

Oh and she had gotten married. At age sixteen. To a man more than two decades older than her. Did I mention that? Well, perhaps because she barely did so herself. In her autobiography her description of her first husband, another expatriate Englishman named Henry Blaine Hunt, states merely that he was “a very good singer, a nice actor, and a handsome man of forty.” All we know is that they were performing together in New Orleans in a play entitled Charles II, the Merry Monarch. Mr. Hunt played the King, Louisa played one of the ladies of his court, and two months later they were married. Now in the course of researching the marriages of 19th Century theater people one often notes that the age disparity was often startling: generally men in their forties, fifties and even sixties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties - that tells us something about the gender power disparities of the day. But we learn not much from Louisa about anything she felt for Mr. Hunt. At any rate did not seem to rule over her. We can note that professionally her career blossomed from this point on while his career faded. In fact he seems to have rather just joined her family, for Louisa and her mother and sisters were never separated. For about ten years, however, Louisa was “Mrs. Hunt” in all the records of her professional engagements. Finances must have been rough at times, for she did note that once when she and her husband were in “dire straits” in Louisville, Kentucky and she had to agree to play a one-night stand as King Richard III just to “get us out of town”. 

Another rarely noted fact of Louisa’s career, in fact, is how often she played breeches parts, or took on male roles. That her contemporary Charlotte Cushman played Romeo is often noted in theater history textbooks, but Louisa played Romeo too, when she was asked to. Since she had enacted men onstage in her childhood, it was perfectly natural she kept on doing so as she reached full maturity. There was a lot more gender-bending in 19th Century theater than is generally recognized. And I don’t just mean Shakespearean roles like Viola and Rosalind, which she also excelled at. In fact one of her most successful roles in her twenties was playing the title character in Fortunio and his Seven Gifted Servants at the Park Theatre in New York, a grand extravaganza with elaborate sets and costumes, about a “young lady who goes about in man’s clothes seeing adventure.” It was what in the 19th Century they called a ‘burlesque’, a comic play in which a cast of women take on all the roles.

It had all gone so well that next season she was back at the Park displaying her wide range and versatility, not only doing Cordelia to Forrest’s Lear but also doing a farce called The Married Rake in which she played several characters, of both sexes.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But I really am trying to get us back to Philadelphia, and to the Arch Street Theatre. It’s drawing nearer, I promise. During the 1840s Louisa was nearing the peak of her abilities, and though she did work in Philadelphia on occasion, she was not based anywhere in particular. Like most theater folk, she was frequently on the move, playing in cities from New York to St. Louis to New Orleans. She and her mother and sisters lived out of a never-ending succession of hotels and boarding houses. This is hard on romantic relationships, as you might imagine. By 1847 her marriage ended, and Mr. Hunt went off with another young actress. It’s quite fortunate for her, at least, that they had never had children together. Not that Louisa seems to have lacked other companionship. It’s not been noted by any other historian that I’ve read, but there’s a small entry in a book we’ve referred to often in this podcast, Charles Durang’s History of the Philadelphia Stage, a digital facsimile of which is viewable to everybody, online courtesy the Library of the University of Pennsylvania. In its sixth volume, it contains a very precise register of last names of 19th Century American actresses, helpfully listing both their maiden names along with their married names - because since women of that era were invariably formally referred to by the names of their husbands, it makes actresses’ careers a little hard to follow in the annals, as they switch monikers. Anyway, in this register, next to ‘Louisa Lane’ it quietly notes that at some point she was billed as having had FOUR married names: Not only “Mrs. Henry Hunt” but as “Mrs. George Jamieson”. I was a bit thunderstruck when I saw this, actually, since there was a George Jamieson working as an actor in Philadelphia in the mid to late 1840s. And as my friend Michael Lueger reminded me, Jamieson was later quite infamous for being mixed up in Edwin Forrest’s divorce case, and was accused of seducing his wife. But I’ve never seen Jamieson’s name connected to Louisa’s anywhere else. Were they ever actually married? All I can say is that there is precedent for actresses taking on the name of “Mrs.” for a man they were, shall we say, connected with, though not officially married to in a legal sense. It’s a bit of a mystery and perhaps is just an error on Durang’s part . . . But wait, there is yet another marriage in that register that we should mention, because this one, at least, is also noted in the family bible Louisa’s mother kept and even made her memoir, albeit briefly:

[Susie as Mrs. Drew] “In 1848 I married Mr. George Mossop. He died a few months after in Albany”. 

 . . and that’s all we get to learn about that. Mossop, like Hunt, was a pleasant and charming singing actor, plus like Jamieson and her later husband John Drew, he was of Irish descent, a nationality which she seems to have had a particular weakness for. She and Mossop met and were married in St. Louis, along the Mississippi, where they were both working at the time. She was now a true leading lady doing more light comedies, burlesques, and spectacles such as Fortunio. As a well-regarded, constantly-working leading actress on the American stage, already showing evident signs of her forceful personality, she evidently usually maintained the upper hand in her relationships with men, even if they were a bit older than her. Indeed, Louisa evidently found it somewhat endearing that George Mossop had a severe stutter in everyday life which completely vanished when he was speaking lines or singing on stage.  However, it turned out Mossop also tended to consume copious amounts of liquor and eat onions while performing, too. I don’t know if these helped him with his stutter, but perhaps they helped Louisa to not mourn him too much, when he drank himself to death in Albany along the Hudson, within a year.

Whether Mr. Jamieson entered her life before or after Mr. Mossop, or whether he did at all, is unclear. This section of her life is little hazy, though I must state at this point that I am very much in debt to the excellent scholarship of Dr. Noreen Clair Barnes, who in her 1986 PhD Thesis really did the legwork on tracking down the details of Louisa’s life and career before she settled in Philadelphia. I have, as always, put a bibliography of my own research in the blog on the podcast’s website www.AITHpodcast.com. Please take a look at the blog post for today’s episode, if you’re interested. As I do for every episode, I’ve posted some rarely seen images which I’ve come across in my research, along with additional details and thoughts about Louisa before she became Mrs. Drew.

And hey speaking of which . . . . at last, we really should bring in the person who brought that name into the story at this point. John Drew had been born in Dublin in 1828. He had been brought to America by his family, who settled in Buffalo, where his father was a theatrical manager and his brother Frank became an actor. John avoided the stage at first, running away to sea as a teenager, but three years on a New Bedford whaler evidently taught him just what endless manual labor was really like, and so he decided to take up the family trade instead, becoming what was termed at the time a ‘low comedian’. Now ‘low comedian’ was not a judgment on his moral character, that described a certain type of theatrical role in many plays, it was what actors called ‘a line of business’. Drew specialized in being the Stage Irishman, which was much in demand in that era of the Great Hibernian Diaspora. Recalled one of his fellow actors, “In broad comedy he had no superior in melodramatic and character parts”. Said another: “He was the popular actor, the polished gentleman, the Irish Yorick, the fast fast friend, the good fellow.” As the comic character Handy Andy he portrayed an Irish type that was “ . .  gay and irresponsible, witty, highly imaginative, and quarrelsome. Rarely was he bright and clever; more often than not, he was sentimental and nostalgic and not a bit above deep melancholy.’

By 1850, young John Drew had already had some success on the New York City stage, and had just taken a job at a theater in Albany, where he joined a troupe of other Irish comedians.

It was at the theater in Albany that the gallant John Drew evidently met an intriguing and shy young lady that caught his eye. Georgiana Kinloch was just 19 years old, and still living with her mother Eliza Kinloch, and her older half sister, the recently widowed Louisa Lane Hunt Mossop, now 30 years old. John Drew came to where the family was residing, and asked if he might pay court to sweet Georgiana. But whatever Georgiana may have thought about his romantic attentions we don’t know, but the handsome young Irishman certainly caught Louisa’s eye. I’m not sure exactly how she managed it, but somehow Louisa convinced John Drew that her sister was too young to marry him - quite an assertion from someone who had herself first wed at sixteen. Louisa sat him down and made the case, quite persuasively, that he should marry her, instead! Whatever exactly she did to carry the day, the fact that this established actress, eight years his senior, could help John’s career, evidently played some part in it. It was easier for married couples to get employment at theaters in those days. Everyone knew that. Managers were increasingly looking for respectability in their companies. Her own narration of her victory over her sister was typically unromantic, business-like and to the point: 

[Susie as Mrs. Drew] “ . . . and in 1850 I was married to Mr. John Drew, although the marriage was not made public for some months, as I had several engagements to fulfil before I could join him. Then we went to Chicago for the season, and Buffalo, then to Albany. We went in the summer to New York, to act in small comedies at Niblo’s.”

But there must have been some honest passion in their relationship, because in December of 1851, their first child, a daughter also named Louisa, was born. Indeed the happy couple were not only parents but were using their married status as part of their professional appeal performing together in aptly titled comedies as The Serious Family and Married Life. In the latter, the characters were in fact very similar to Mr and Mrs. Drew’s actual personalities - a married ex-footman, still unused to middle-class life, and his ambitious wife who was obsessed with maintaining social respectability, constantly reprimanding him over using language that was now below his station.

And in fact their station was improving. In the autumn of 1852, the couple joined the company of the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Since she had first arrived in America 25 years previously, the city had always been a favorite of hers, and at this point in her life it seemed to have many advantages over the rough Western burgs she had spent so much time in, or the frantic bustle of New York. Philadelphia was renowned as being a clean city, with a modern water supply, it had culture, sophistication, and good schools. A good place, in short, to raise a family. The Drews even rented a real house. For the first time in her life, Louisa set up housekeeping - along with her sisters and her mother, of course. And in fact the next season, all of the Drews and Kinlochs joined the company of another long-established Philadelphia playhouse - the Arch Street Theatre.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

We’ve had occasion to mention the Arch Street Theatre on this podcast before, though never in the depth that we have covered the other two major Philadelphia theaters that bore the names of their eponymous streets, the Chestnut and the Walnut. It had been designed by the architect William Strickland, with steps leading up to doors flanked by classical columns and a triangular pediment on its facade displaying a statue of Apollo and his lyre. It seated just over 1700 people at full capacity. The building itself had been commissioned in 1828, by a businessman who was under the mistaken impression that  the Walnut was about to be torn down, and that he could challenge the dominance of the longtime local leader, the Chestnut. The Arch utilized a chiefly American company, as opposed to the Chestnut’s distinct association with British actors. The neighborhood of the Arch Street Theatre, just to the west of 6th Street and a few blocks north of Market, was less fashionable than its competitors, with many working class and middle class families, including quite a few of Philadelphia’s remaining Quakers, who were highly unlikely to attend the theater at  all. The Arch Street Meeting House and the Friends Burial ground were quite nearby. Nevertheless the theater had held its own in Philadelphia’s long-running cutthroat theater wars, mostly. For a while it was managed by Edwin Forrest’s brother William, as we’ve noted, and Forrest, as well as his great rival Macready had appeared there many times. But like other playhouses in the city it was frequently under new management, as the shareholders who controlled it kept offering the lease to the next person who could perhaps bring them an increasing return. Most managers made what money they could off box office receipts by offering  plays to appeal to popular tastes, while also garnishing a steady stream of the money the theater’s lobby bars brought - in addition to a sly cut from the prostitutes who solicited customers in the top third tier balcony, just as they did in nearly every other theater building in America in those days.

To date, what the Arch Street shareholders had not done was offer the lease to a female theatrical manager. This was the tactic the Walnut had often taken recently. In the wake of New York City’s Astor Place Riots of 1849, there was a general move in America to make theater ‘respectable’, to eliminate the rowdy male culture of the pit, and to create instead a place where middle class women would feel welcome and a new moral tone would be established. It was a movement not unlike, in some ways, the current social examination of the culture of American theater of our own times. Who’s running the theater, what kind of plays are they programming, and what values are they bringing with them?, people wanted to know. Nice people no longer wished to be seen where there wasn't the proper moral tone being maintained. The success of Laura Keene’s company in New York had inspired the Walnut to recruit famous actresses, women of impeccable cultural standing, to take the reins. Charlotte Cushman had briefly done so earlier, rather unsuccessfully, but in 1857 Mrs. D.P. Bowers, a former member of the Walnut’s stock company, had taken over, and Laura Keene herself had been the guest manager in the summer of 1858. After 1859 Mrs. Augusta Garretson had managed The Walnut for several seasons, and though she had not been an actress herself, she had a keen eye for the sort of programming women would bring their families to. She programmed a lot of popular adaptations of Charles Dickens novels, for instance.

The Arch Street, for its part, was still drawing crowds, with the Drews and the Kinlochs recruiting as many fellow family members as they could. Though back in the fall of 1853 Louisa was doing very little acting herself - for her son John Drew Jr. was on the way, finally making his appearance in November of that year. The proud papa, John Drew Sr., for his part, had now taken the lease on the Arch and was running the company along with another actor, William Wheatley. Louisa was back on the stage soon enough and was playing Beatrice to Wheatley’s Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing. John also had great success, pairing with his brother Frank as the two Dromios in A Comedy of Errors. After which he scheduled his sister-in-law Georgiana to appear in the afterpiece, Satan in Paris. But the responsibilities of management were not really to John’s taste, when the Arch Street gig had failed financially, he gave it up and at Louisa’s urging briefly took over the National Theatre near the Walnut. But then John decided he wanted to tour, and gave up running companies entirely to go off and perform his popular stage Irishman parts at theaters in Chicago, New York, and even London and Dublin. Meanwhile the couple’s third and last child, their daughter Georgiana, was born in 1855. Louisa kept performing steadily despite having three small children at home, working at either the Arch or the Walnut and joining her restless young husband on the road when she could:

[Susie as Mrs. Drew] “John and I traveled in 1857, came back to Philadelphia in the spring, and joined Mrs. Bowers company at the Walnut Street Theatre. Mr. Drew, accompanied by my mother, paid a visit to England and Ireland. I took the leading position at the Walnut, and they returned in the winter, when Mr. Drew played a long engagement at the Walnut.” 

But in 1858, John announced he had booked a simply magnificent tour that would take him across the Pacific Ocean to Australia - a country which now loomed in the imagination of American actors in the same way America had once loomed for the Brits - the wild land of theatrical possibility, a literal gold mine where fortunes could be made in culture-hungry frontier cities. Furthermore, John proposed that he take sister Georgiana Kinloch (the original object of his romantic affections, remember) with him as his co-star. Seeing his wife’s raised eyebrows, he also offered to take their daughter Louisa along with him, as sort of a chaperone, I guess . . .. For whatever reason, Mrs. Drew agreed to this dangerous-sounding plan. The family's financial situation was still rocky, their little rented house in Philadelphia was not a grand one, the children were growing, and the receipts of this tour could possibly set them up quite nicely. John, Georgiana and little Louisa went off on a world tour, and she went back to working as the leading lady of the Arch Street stock company, and even plunged ahead with further ambitious projects of her own, playing Queen Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII at the Walnut, with Charlotte Cushman playing Cardinal Wolsey.

The Arch, for its part, was at that point under the management of William Wheatley and John Sleeper Clarke. But in 1861, as the country plunged into Civil War, the pair of men had decided to give up the Philadelphia theater as too risky a venture in such turbulent times.

So the Board of the Arch Street Theatre stockholders turned to Mrs. John Drew. After all, she was, at the age of forty-one, literally the most experienced actor in the country. Her passion for meticulous standards was evident to everyone, and she was by then a regular attendee in the congregation of highly respectable St. Stephens Episcopal Church on 10th Street. The board felt that “she would probably make the Arch more popular than ever, and the fashionable theater of the city.” Interestingly, according to law, Louisa could not sign the contract without her wandering husband’s approval, so they had to wait until John, by that point in Ireland, wrote back and gave his assent.

So Louisa Lane Hunt Mossop (Jamieson, possibly) Drew, forever after hereby known as Mrs. John Drew, 34 years after arriving in America, took on the position that was to define her life, and her historical reputation: manager and reigning star of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. “Mrs. John Drew’s Arch Street Theatre” was in fact its official name, and was emblazoned on every advertisement. And she went about her new responsibility with fierce determination to make it worthy of the name. First the theater itself was renovated top to bottom. New seats were installed, the stage was expanded, new scenery was built and new curtains hung. Every interior wall and every musty corner was scrubbed out and re-painted. Most importantly, she decided to abolish the infamous “third tier”, rebuilding the upper galleries, banning prostitutes from entering and forbidding the sale of liquor. She assembled a new company, drawing from local Philadelphia professionals and amateur societies. She hired her childhood friend Alexina Fisher and her brother-in-law Frank Drew. She was determined, as well, to pay her actors fair salaries and never miss a payday, even if she had to borrow money to meet payroll every week. She rehearsed the actors every day, insisted on rigor and discipline at rehearsals, and spent time carefully directing them and arranging the scene cues with the stage hands, with the assistance of the theater’s longtime stage manager William Fredericks and its treasurer William Murphy. Only Sunday was a day of rest, and she and Mrs. Kinloch and the rest of the clan all lined up, a respectable family at last, in their labeled pew at St. Stephen’s.

On Saturday, August 31, 1861, her first production opened at the Arch: Sheridan’s The School For Scandal. Mrs. Drew played Lady Teazle. She drove the company hard that year, but she drove herself even harder. That season, she would play 42 roles in all, including a new version of Camille in which she starred, always arriving at every rehearsal with each line perfectly set in her memory. The repertoire was rotated as public interest dedicated, and by Christmas she was playing Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour's Lost. The newspapers noted with approval the scenery, the designs for which they said had been shipped from London by Mr. John Drew, at great expense, based upon the paintings of Watteau, with shepherds and shepherdesses playing the pipes in the background beside a lake of real water. 

In January of 1862. Mr John Drew, her sister Georgiana, and their daughter Louisa finally returned from their prolonged long world tour. Their daughter was much grown since she had seen her last, of course. Her husband John was full of energy and jests, as ever. But it was Georgiana who no doubt had most of her attention, standing on the doorstep with a slightly sheepish look. Because in her sister’s arms, as Mrs. John Drew could hardly help noticing, was a baby girl - a child who looked very much like Mr. John Drew.

And in fine old melodramatic theatrical tradition, we’re going to leave the action suspended right there at the curtain. We haven’t even gotten to the even more juicy tidbit that I mentioned early in the episode. Folks, you’ll just have to get another ticket for the next show. Tune in to see how it all turns out, and for the thrilling continuation of our story of Louisa Lane Drew, the Duchess of Arch Street, Part Two.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. The voice of Louisa Lane Drew was performed by Susan Riley Stevens. 

I also want to thank Dr. Eric Colleary, Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, for inspiring the topic of the episode, and for providing me access to material in the Ransom Center collection. And I must also acknowledge all the help I received from the wonderful staff in the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, most especially Karin Suni, the Curator of the Theatre Collection there. Librarians are there to save the world, folks, always remember to support them and their important work. 

If you’d like to have a daily dose of Philadelphia theater history, please follow us on Facebook [or Instagram] - the links are in the show notes. As always there are additional images, blog posts, and bibliographies about this episode and all others on our website, www.AITHpodcast.com. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.