Fanny Kemble, Part One

(© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.)

[OPENING THEME]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. Over the past few episodes we have primarily been detailing the story of Philadelphia theater in the early to mid 19th Century. You no doubt noticed that this was a very male-centered narrative. We talked about William Warren and William Wood, about George Frederick Cooke and Edmund Keane, about John Bill Ricketts, Thomas Wignell, and Edwin Forrest. And this hasn’t just been a failing of my admittedly male historian’s brain. In the time we’ve been discussing so far men dominated the theatrical professions, from circus performers and acrobats up through clowns, comedians, scenery painters and tragedians. The Philadelphia playwrights we’ve discussed were male, the contemporary historians and chroniclers we’ve been quoting from were men, and we’ve talked about how even the audience sitting in the seats at the Chestnut and Walnut Street Theatres was primarily male. This was true in American and European theater generally, at the time, but it was even more true in New York and Philadelphia than elsewhere. Theater, in fact, was not regarded as what we would now call a safe space for women at all, and female theater artists were morally and socially suspect, mostly quite unjustly.

Over the next few episodes I am going to explore how that began to change in American theater, as female stars and actresses and eventually female managers and playwrights began to take a larger role and changed the very nature of the art form. Today we begin studying this exciting change with the story of Fanny Kemble, and then we will move on to other significant figures such as Louisa Lane Drew and Charlotte Cushman. As usual we are going to concentrate on what was going on in Philadelphia in particular, but this was a larger trend in American culture and society. And I’m happy to announce that instead of only using my voice to undertake this important task, I have the honor of sharing with you the talents of one of the finest Philadelphia actors of today, Jessica Bedford, who will be doing the voice of Fanny Kemble when we quote her words directly. I couldn’t possibly be more pleased about Jess agreeing to help us out today - oh believe me, you’re all in for a treat.

Speaking of delightful experiences, if you go right now to the [Pennsylvania] Academy of the Fine Arts on Broad Street in Philadelphia, you can see three portraits of Fanny Kemble by the artist Thomas Sully.  [NB: As of 2023, these pictures may or may not be on display at PAFA] They are on the opposite wall from Sully’s portrait of George Frederick Cooke as Richard III that we mentioned back in Episode 10. I’ve put some photos of them on the website, they are labeled Fanny Kemble as Bianca, Fanny Kemble as Isabella, and Fanny Kemble as Beatrice. 

In these three paintings we see a vivacious young woman, with pale skin, dark eyes and a long neck. In all of them we can see that (although Sully tries to disguise it a little) Fanny Kemble had largish hands and strong arms and shoulders - quite athletic-looking, really, which is most unusual for depictions of women of her day. And in each portrait she seems to be on the verge of speech - like she wants to say something quite pointed and direct. Who was this remarkable-looking person?

Frances Anne Kemble lived from 1809 to 1893. Although she was English by birth, she spent significant amounts of her life in the city of Philadelphia. Indeed, Philadelphia was to prove both the scene of some of greatest professional and personal happinesses, but it was also to be the place where she suffered for years in despair, depression, and frustration. 

She was a member of the greatest English theatrical family of her day. The Kembles had ruled the London stage for decades. Her grandfather Roger Kemble was a provincial actor and theater manager. He married an Irish actress Sally Ward and the couple had thirteen children together, a great many of whom ended up on the stage, part of the burgeoning world of trans-Atlantic English language theater that we have been documenting over the course of this podcast. The Kembles were all known for their tall stature, their elegant good looks, the classically mannered elocution. The oldest daughter, Sarah, became the leading tragic actress of her day. Known by her married name as Mrs Siddons, she portrayed all the great female tragic roles of the stage over the course of her lifetime, and was said to inspire ‘Siddonmania’ - a type of frantic hysteria in her fans who would faint and scream in the audience at her most thrilling speeches. Her only rival in terms of fame was her brother John Philip Kemble who was the most successful leading tragedian in London, and rose to become the manager and part owner of the Covent Garden theater. Another brother, Stephen Kemble managed the Theater Royal in the city of Newcastle. Two other Kemble sisters, Anne and Elizabeth, spent time performing in America, indeed for many years Elizabeth Kemble, under the name Mrs. Whitlock, was a distinguished member of Thomas Wignell’s company at the New Theatre on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, in the 1790s and early 1800s.

Charles Kemble was the youngest son of the family, and the last one to go on the stage. Though also quite tall and handsome, with the famous aquiline Kemble nose, he had a rather weak voice. Charles, in fact, was known as a highly capable second lead - the Laertes to his brother John’s Hamlet, the MacDuff to his Macbeth, Cassio to his Othello. Not a leading man at all, at least during his twenties and thirties. The actor William Charles Macready once described Charles Kemble, rather snidely, as a ‘first-rate actor of second-rate parts”. But still, he was a Kemble, and he could always find work when he wanted it.

In 1806 Charles Kemble married the vivacious French-Austrian actress and dancer Marie Therese de Camp who was also very popular on the London stage in her day, and together they ran a happy household that was filled with visits from other famous actors, poets, and writers. They had four children together. Their daughter Frances Anne arrived in November of 1809. Her parents were often busy touring the provinces, so like many young children of the Regency Era , young Fanny, as everyone called her, was sent away to school - first at a girls’ school run by yet another Kemble aunt in England and then at one in Paris.  Fanny proved to be precocious and strong-willed from the very beginning. And she showed a strong inclination to physical activity and to mischief, too. On one occasion the little English girl climbed out onto the  Parisian school roof and skipped happily about on the tiles high above the city, until an alarmed person passing by alerted the faculty. “Ah it can only be that devil of a Kemble!” exclaimed her exasperated teacher. 

But there she learned flawless French, how to dance, how to sing and sew, and how to devour endless novels and romantic poetry like that of Lord Byron. She also showed an inclination to write herself, and by the time she had returned to England from France at the age of 19 in the late 1820s, she had already published a play about King Francis the First of France. 

Indeed she was a budding and passionate intellectual, much interested in English society and politics, and unlike almost all the rest of her family, she had never imagined a future for herself on the stage. A teenage bout with smallpox had left her complexion rather rough, and although she loved parties and dances as much as any young woman, she never saw herself as a great beauty. But her father Charles Kemble had recently taken over the management and shares of Covent Garden from his brothers, just at the moment when plays and theaters were falling on hard times. His new position was bankrupting him. Notices from creditors were pasted all over the theater’s door. Fanny considered becoming a governess to help support her parents in the midst of this crisis, but instead her mother suddenly asked her if she had ever thought she might have some talent for the stage? So she gave it a try. It turned out Fanny’s voice was strong enough to fill even the cavernous Covent Garden auditorium. So, after just a few weeks of rehearsal, suddenly Fanny Kemble found herself going on as Juliet in the most prestigious theater in London, supported, admittedly, by her father playing Mercutio and her mother as Lady Capulet.

It turned out she had an innate and instinctive talent for the stage. Her strong and low voice and her dramatic personality carried all the way to the back row of many theaters:

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name!Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is not hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

The production was an immediate success, and Fanny suddenly found herself repeating the role of Juliet thirty-one times that season, and was soon branching out and learning many other leading parts, as eager playwrights showered her with their works. She was soon earning 30 pounds a week, performing to adoring London audiences, and was dancing at society balls and indulging her passion for horseback riding around Hyde Park on a regular basis. For three years she was the toast of London every season and toured the provinces every summer, just as her Aunt Sarah Siddons and uncle John Philip Kemble had done before her. Her portrait was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. She did roles far beyond her years, such as Queen Katharine in Henry VIII and Lady Macbeth. She even got her own play Francis I staged and it was well received - she had ideas for more plays she wanted to write, and began turning out poetry as well. But Covent Garden audiences only showed up in droves on the nights Fanny herself was playing, it turned out. Her attraction could not subsidize the entire establishment, and the family fortunes were still maddeningly insecure. So it was decided that what they needed to do was what almost every other star of the English stage was doing at the time - make a tour of America, and milk the theater managers there for every dollar they could and then return home with the proceeds. Her father’s plan, in fact, was to extricate himself from Covent Garden entirely after the tour, and then to retire on whatever fortune he and Fanny could pile up in America.

Fanny agreed to this plan, perhaps as much to escape her difficult mother, who was staying behind, as to help out her father. Her mother’s unmarried sister Adelaide, known to the family as “Aunt Dal”, agreed to come along as chaperone. Furthermore Fanny planned to keep and write a careful journal of her travels - a young Englishwoman’s thoughts and observations about America! - that she could then publish and add the proceeds to her own bank account.

In the summer of 1832 Charles and Fanny and Aunt Dal landed in New York and the Kembles brought their repertoire to the Park Theatre in lower Manhattan. Unfortunately the actor named Mr. Keppel who was engaged to do Romeo and other young romantic parts opposite Fanny proved to be quite inadequate - he was clumsy, he kept forgetting his lines and in desperation he would simply drop to his knees and wait for Fanny to cue him. So the hapless Keppel was let go and instead Charles Kemble stepped in as Romeo to his daughter’s Juliet. Nowadays we might find it a bit odd to watch a father playing the lover to his young daughter on the stage, but actually, you know in the 19th Century they kind of liked to see that sort of thing - it allowed people to listen to the poetry and passion without any hint of there being actual sexual activity going on off the stage. A few years later the actress Charlotte Cushman would make a hit as Romeo acting with her own sister playing Juliet, which people would like even better. But the Kemble family managed to please the New York audiences quite satisfactorily, and no one was worried about the supporting cast. The poet Walt Whitman, then working as a newspaperman in Brooklyn came to see every show and pronounced himself utterly ravished by her charms and talents.

In her time offstage, Fanny scribbled furiously away at her journal whenever she could, making a lot of snarky remarks about American food, American manners and American fashions. She also noted that in the audiences she played to there might be only 20 women in the dress circle, and the men thronging the pit kept their hats on. Like many actresses, she felt the pressure of the thousands of appraising and lascivious male gazes most keenly. When she was invited to New York dinner parties, she tended to avoid the flocks of young men gawping at her, she never stopped to flirt with them in idle chatter and instead chose to talk directly to the older married men about politics and art. And though she knew full well that she and her father were being well paid for their performance, she also knew that the local New York stock company actors were not, and as far as quality they were mere ‘sticks’, she declared. The whole situation confirmed her low opinion of the entire profession of acting. It was an unseemly way of making money, it seemed to her, living out of hotels and trading on her youth and beauty. It was not like the literary life she longed for. Nonetheless, she had committed to at least two years playing the best theaters in America, for the sake of her dear Papa. The next stop on their tour was Philadelphia.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

After what she described as a most uncomfortable journey over land and water, the Kembles arrived in Philadelphia in mid-October 1832 and stayed at the Mansion House Hotel at Chestnut and Third. The Mansion House was the most elegant and fashionable hotel in town at the time but even it did not offer the amenity of indoor bathtubs. Fanny, wanting to clean up after her journey, was driven to a local public bathhouse near Washington Square, and was astonished to find two bathtubs standing side by side in the room she was given. Americans didn’t like to do anything alone, she tartly wrote in her journal. But she liked Philadelphia, she decided immediately, it compared most favorably to New York.

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] “After rehearsal, I walked about the town . . . I like this town extremely: there is a look of comfort and cleanliness, and withal of age about it, which pleases me. It is quieter, too, than New York, and though not so gay, for that very reason is more to my fancy; the shops, too, have a far better appearance. New York always gave me the idea of an irregular collection of temporary buildings, erected for some casual purpose, full of life, animation, and variety, but not meant to endure for any length of time . . This place has a much more substantial, sober, and city-like appearance.”

But she was still worried about the Philadelphians' behavior as an audience. Would they even come? The Kembles were contracted to play a dozen or so shows from their repertoire at the Chestnut Street Theatre, using the stock company there as their supporting players. They knew they were up against the competition of Philadelphia’s own Edwin Forrest himself, who was then playing his entire repertoire over at the new Arch Street Theater a few blocks away, with its proudly all-American company. Fanny had seen Forrest play in New York, and besides being impressed by the sheer size of him, was also impressed by the enthusiastic noise of his fans. Over at the Chestnut Street Theatre, the old genteel Philadelphia crowd had largely been deserting the theater entirely of late. But as it turned out, the magic of the Kemble name was enough to fill the older theater’s seats. The first night Charles Kemble performed without her, as Hamlet, and Fanny sat prominently watching him from a box where everyone could get a good look at her. This was enough to whet the fans’ appetites for her Philadelphia debut a few nights later in Fazio, an 1815 tragedy by Henry Hart Milman. Fanny played Bianca, a young lady bent on revenge for her husband’s supposed infidelity. The theater was crowded with fashion and beauty, reported historian Charles Durang, and they were astounded by what they saw. “A breathless silence pervaded the entire audience. Miss Kemble came in as a lady would enter into her own parlor, with quiet elegance and polish to receive her guests. The manner was novel, for conventionalities of the stage were entirely absent. . . When the progress of the scene brought out the passions of the soul in all their various moods, the fearful energy with which she depicted the emotions of jealousy and rage were intense to a degree that the audience did not anticipate. In her first quiet scenes all was hushed as death . . it was only at each approaching climax . . that the feelings of the excited audience burst forth as ecstasies. She had a flashing black eye; her voice was sweet and musical, well attuned by the elocutionary rules.”  But it was the evident quality of her intelligence that filled her every moment on the stage,' Durang declared: “It was these intellectual qualities   . . that gave birth to Miss Fanny Kemble’s school of acting; for she originated a school with her powerful genius. The tone and tendency of Miss Kemble’s mind are of the masculine, both in her acting and her very able literary productions, abounding in strength and originality of thought.”

So - a successful debut in the Quaker City! But not according to Fanny herself. In her journal that night she wrote that her voice had croaked horribly during the performance due to a cold, her costume was lacking some extra ornamentation she had asked for, and her leading man’s horrible false whiskers had dripped dye down the side of his face all evening.  Furthermore she had been mortified by the audience’s rapt and mostly silent attention. They were the most ‘unapplausive’ audience she had ever played to! They were attentive, certainly, but they did make her work!

Admittedly, Fanny was never complimentary of her own acting in her journals and letters. Perhaps channeling the judgemental voice of her difficult mother, even a show that sent her audiences into apparent raptures would receive a verdict of just ‘fair’ from Fanny herself. But she was very pleased when the next day she came down to tea at the hotel and found a handsome young man she had never met before sitting with her father, wanting to be introduced. He was quite genteel, allowed Fanny - a year younger than her, true, but well-spoken and evidently very very rich indeed. But best of all he asked her to ride with him the next day. Fanny adored riding. She had been much annoyed by the bad quality of the horses in New York. The young man said he knew where the best mounts in Philadelphia could be found. She accepted the offer.

The young man, as it turned out, was one Pierce Mease Butler, of the Philadelphia Butlers. He had been tipped off by a friend from New York that he really should go see the divine Miss Kemble. Like many other American young men that year when they first saw Fanny on stage, he was immediately smitten.

The wealthy Pierce Butler at least did not have to pawn his coat or his watch, like other desperate young admirers were said to be doing, in order to afford theater tickets to see Fanny perform again. He hurried to the Chestnut Street box office, just two blocks from his own family’s mansion, and bought tickets for the next night’s performance of Romeo and Juliet. Charles Kemble once again was Romeo, and our old friend William Wood, the former manager of the theater played Mercutio. Once again the crowds nearly burst the limits of the Chestnut’s seating area, despite the competition from Edwin Forrest at the Arch. Once again, nobody really seemed to mind the odd spectacle of a father in his 50s playing a young man falling in love with a young woman played by his daughter in her early 20s. The acting was too exquisite to bother about such things. The critic “Colley Cibber” of the journal the Dramatic Mirror allowed that “Miss Kemble, in the estimation of the audience . . . more than justified the encomiums showered upon her in London and New York. She proved herself to be a tragedienne of extraordinary powers and genius, most richly endowed with gifts of nature which no art can supply.” 

But to her own mind, Fanny felt that once again the audience was unresponsive and that her performance was decidedly sup-par. She upbraided herself in her journal:

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] “I acted like a wretch, of course; how could I do otherwise? Oh, Juliet! Vision of the south! Rose of the garden of the earth! Was this the glorious hymn that Shakespeare hallowed to your praise? Was this the mingled strain of Love’s sweet going forth, and Death’s dark victory, over which my heart and soul have been poured out in wonder and in ecstasy? -- How I do loathe the stage! Those wretched, tawdry, glittering rags, flung over the breathing forms of ideal loveliness . . . What a mass of wretched mumming mimicry acting is! Pasteboard and paint!”

She could at least take consolation in one pleasant thought: Every day throughout her stay, a lovely bouquet of flowers was delivered to Fanny’s room, with a card saying they were from “A Friend”. For several weeks she thought they were from a shy Quaker theatergoer, but eventually she learned that it was that nice Mr. Butler who was the source. He was also a reliable riding companion on the excursions up and down the Schuylkill River Valley, where they would canter up to the Laurel Hill Estate together, loyal Aunt Dal coming along as a discreet chaperone. Sometimes though, on evenings where she was not playing, she and her father would go on long nighttime walks together over the bridges crossing the Schuylkill into the rural sectors of West Philadelphia. Coming back together and strolling down Market Street where barrels of wine and whiskey were piled up overnight outside the city’s drinking establishments, they shared together the impish desire to poke a hole in every one, and let the spirits flood the entire town.

When they returned to work, the crowds kept coming to see them: Sheridan’s School for Scandal in which Fanny played Lady Teazle, Otway's Venice Preserved, in which she played the role of Belvidera, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, where she played Beatrice to Charles’ Benedick; The Stranger by Kotzebue, The Hunchback by Sheridan Knowles. Success after success. Philadelphia booksellers were peddling engraved prints of her in their stores, and Philadelphia’s artists crowded the front rows of the pit, furiously sketching away as she acted on the stage, then rushing back to their studios to turn out finished paintings of her image, which were snapped up by the adoring public. Even before they left town, after a final performance of Romeo and Juliet, the Kembles had already negotiated a return engagement. Her only worry, thought Fanny, was what would young Mr. Butler do with his time now that she was gone? He never seemed to work much at his supposed law practice, but was always available to be her faithful escort to local parties and receptions. An accomplished flute player, he had started sitting in with the theater’s orchestra every night, gazing up at her with quiet devotion. It was all too touching. She was sorry to leave Philadelphia, Fanny thought, even if the audiences were too reserved. There was an air of stability about the place, she thought. It reminded her of England.

During their tour down to play in Washington DC, however, there was a very upsetting scandal. A rumor was started by someone that Fanny had insulted America, in some way or another. Throughout the 1830s and 40s there were often miniature uproars over something some British writer or celebrity had said or written about the roughness or lack of culture in the young republic, and this alleged statement of Fanny’s was just more fuel for the fires of patriotic American outrage. Her performances in Washington were almost spoiled by it. In her mind, she detected a hostility in the crowd of politicians from the South, who had the additional grudge that young Fanny had expressed some reservations about the institution of slavery. She was relieved to leave America’s disputatious Capital city, and return again to the pleasant Mansion House in Philadelphia, where she once again treated herself to the local frozen delicacy known as “water ice”.

Best of all, it seemed the Philadelphia audience had taken her side in that entire distressing affair when they heard about what had happened in Washington! After the Christmas Day performance the Kembles gave at the Chestnut of Macbeth, she was startled by what she considered the odd custom of the audience standing and applauding after the show until she came out to take a bow! And then, on December 30th, every entrance of hers was met with a veritable storm of applause!

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] “The play was The Merchant of Venice . .  - my father’s benefit. The house was crammed from floor to ceiling as full as it could hold . . At the end, the people shouted and shrieked for us. [Father] went on, and made them a speech, and I went on and made them a courtesy; and certainly they do deserve the civilest of speeches, and lowest of courtesies from us, for the have behaved most kindly and courteously to us; and for mine own good part, I love the whole city of Philadelphia from this time forth, for ever more!”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

And it’s true that ardent theatergoers in Philadelphia had taken the Kembles to heart. So had the society of local Philadelphia actors. That itself had taken some doing, because of the natural reluctance among theater folk to welcome yet another set of visiting British stars who were swanning in to grab a big pile of money and then get out of town.  But it was Charles Kemble’s respectful treatment of such longtime and beloved Philadelphia actors as William Wood and his wife Julia Westray Wood that really won people over. At the beginning of the new year of 1833, the entire company was transferring its operations to the Walnut Street Theatre, which was then under the same management as the Chestnut, for the next few months. Wood, still struggling financially, asked the Kembles if they would appear in a performance of School For Scandal scheduled for his benefit, and offered them their usual fee to do so. Charles Kemble declined, and Wood’s face momentarily fell, but then rose again instantly with the English star’s counter-offer: “Miss Kemble and myself will feel gratified in aiding your object, only on one condition -- that no remuneration of any kind [to us] shall be mentioned or thought of.” The performance went on under those generous terms, and Mrs Wood in fact gave her farewell performance in Philadelphia ever in the play. William Wood, needless to say, had nothing but nice things to say about the Kembles in his autobiography. He noted that a better quality of people, real Philadelphia society, had made their appearance audiences of both the Chestnut and Walnut Street theaters once again, which they had not for many years previously.

Admittedly this warming trend of elite society accepting actors as being decent people to be seen with in public was nonetheless a reluctant one. It helped when such an eminent Philadelphia family as the Biddles asked the Kembles over for dinner, but only to a degree. Actors were still tradesmen, and the not too distant visits of such renowned rakes as George Frederick Cooke and Edmund Kean had done little to improve their moral reputations. And there was a sneaking suspicion about how much time young Pierce Butler was keeping in Fanny Kemble’s company. Could he not keep all that lovely money that he was about to inherit amongst their own kind, and marry some other local society girl?

Well evidently not. As the months went on, his attentions to Fanny never faltered. It was generally assumed they had an understanding about their future together now, although nothing was openly said. When the Kembles returned to New York for another engagement, he followed them there. When they went to Boston, a town full of young men generally much more amenable to Fanny’s liberal political and social opinions, everyone stood clear of Mr. Butler. He had family connections down South, they may have heard, and those were dueling people. So the Harvard boys all lined the streets to watch her pass going to and from the theater in the evening, and devotedly serenaded her at the stage door. But it was understood that she rode out on excursions with the flute player from Philadelphia only. When the Kembles made a trip across upstate New York to see Niagara Falls, Pierce Butler had tagged along, making himself useful by bringing along forks, which he knew were items of cutlery not generally available in the backcountry. And he was nearby when Fanny’s Aunt Dal passed away in Boston, having never recovered from an injury she suffered when the party’s stage coach had overturned on the return journey from Niagara.

It was in Boston, after Aunt Dal had been laid to rest in Mt Auburn Cemetery, that Fanny and Pierce Butler finally became engaged. Charles Kemble was amenable to it, though it has been the plan Fanny would perform at least one more year before leaving the acting profession entirely. The Kembles had cleared at least 35,000 dollars from all their efforts, quite a considerable amount, but he was only due to receive half of that, and it wasn’t enough to buy him out of Covent Garden and let him retire. They still had return engagements booked in both New York and Philadelphia, and then could not Fanny perform for at least one more year in London before the marriage actually took place?

This was when Pierce Butler began, at last, to show the elements of his nature that were perhaps a foreboding of what was to come. He had always been incredibly vague about exactly where his fortune came from. And he had a tendency to promise to do things, and then somehow forget to do them and then renegotiate the terms later on. After initially agreeing to let Fanny go back to England for one more year on the stage either before or after the wedding, he suddenly had a better idea: They should get married now and she should immediately retire from acting, instead. After all, Fanny had always said she wanted to leave the stage, and now she could! She could give Charles all of the $35,000, and he would take care of Fanny. He had ten times as much money, after all, and more coming his way soon. He would even arrange for his family to send substantial sums to her mother and aunts in England, for their old age! Wedded bliss awaited and a happy and secure life in lovely old Philadelphia, the city that would be her new home.

To this plan Fanny and Charles agreed. Perhaps they would have hesitated, if poor old Aunt Dal was still alive. She had often made it clear to Fanny how much the marriage laws of the day made a woman, both in England and America, the ward of their husbands, and that perhaps an unmarried life was to be preferred if one wanted financial, social, and intellectual independence. But Aunt Dal was gone, and Fanny’s friends in Boston could think of no real objection to the marriage, or any better life plan. Fanny needed to settle down so she could become the writer she always wanted to be, they decided. And after all, Pierce was right there, and he was so handsome and attractive and so kind and so very very rich . . and perhaps after years of courtship was  more than ready for the physical side of marriage, as well. and so - she consented to the arrangement.

In April of 1834, as the end of her single life approached, Fanny acted in some good-hearted farces that made gleeful light of her situation, with such titles as The Wedding Day and then The  Day After the Wedding. On June 7th, 1834, an actual wedding took place at Christ Church, an Episcopal congregation on Second Street, in Philadelphia. A beautiful old church even then, it still stands today - so you could easily visit where F​​rancis Anne Kemble became Frances Anne Butler. Interestingly the wedding was not a big theatrical production - in those pre-Queen Victoria days, that was not yet a common thing to do, even among the wealthy and prominent folk in England and America. Nor was there an immediate honeymoon planned, in fact the ceremony was sandwiched between Fanny’s two farewell performances to the stage, one in Philadelphia, and then one in New York. 

Interestingly, the role she was performing in these final shows was not Juliet or Beatrice or any light-hearted comedy, but a tragedy, The Hunchback by James Sheridan Knowles, one of her famous roles. I don’t think I’ve seen this noted anywhere in any of the many biographies that have been published about her life, but if you examine the text of The Hunchback, there is not much celebration of marriage in it. In fact the character of Julia, which Fanny played has an ominous-sounding soliloquy, after she agrees to marry a man she does not truly love:

[Jessica Bedford as Julia:] 
 . . . A wedded bride!

Is it a dream? Is it a phantasm? 'Tis

Too horrible for reality! for aught else

Too palpable! O would it were a dream!

How would I bless the sun that waked me from it!

I perish! Like some desperate mariner

Impatient of a strange and hostile land,

Who rashly hoists his sail and puts to sea,

And being fast on reefs and quicksands borne,

Essays in vain once more to make the land,

Whence wind and current drive him; I'm wrecked

By mine own act! What! no escape? no hope?

None! I must e'en abide these hated nuptials!

 . . . 

He comes! Thou'dst play the lady,--play it now!

In her new role in life, she was about to learn what it really cost to play the lady, and at what price her financial security had been sold for. After she had acted in her last play on the stage, and had seen her father off on the boat to England, the realities of her new life suddenly became clear to her. Just when exactly the truth came hit her is uncertain, but within a few months she was writing a frantic note to a trusted friend back in England: “The family into which I have married are large slaveholders. Our present and future fortune depend greatly on plantations in Georgia.” She would rather go back to the toilsome earning of her daily bread in theater, she declared, it was a disreputable business, but at least the labor was honest and not drawn from the blood and tears of the enslaved. But now literally everything around her, she realized, was soiled with the institution, she was literally being fed and clothed by human beings who owned nothing in this world at all, not even their own bodies. No longer Miss Fanny Kemble, the new Mrs. Fanny Butler was the wife of a slave owner - in fact, one of the largest slave owners in America.

That’s where we will leave it for today, but don’t worry folks - there’s more to come. Our next episode will follow the amazing story of Fanny Kemble, Philadelphia, and how she helped to change the world she found herself in, all the way to its conclusion. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast, if you’re just joining in, you won’t want to miss it.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. The voice of Fanny Kemble was performed by Jessica Bedford. 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.

[END THEME]

Hi folks, another post-show announcement. First of all I’d like to thank ROBERT, who recently signed up to be an ongoing supporter of the show on Patreon. Bless you Robert, not only for your contribution but for lending us your experience and erudition as well. 

If you too would like to help support the show and keep the podcast going, go to Patreon. Com Adventures in Theater History, and check out the extra blog posts and bonus episodes there. If you’d like to send along a quick one-time donation, we’re also on BuyMeACoffee.com. The links are in the show notes. You can also follow us on our Facebook page, and on our Twitter Feed. There will be announcements there about our upcoming Philadelphia Theater History Walking Tour in October, and about how you can join in the fun!

You may have noticed it’s been three weeks since our last episode, not our usual two week interval. Anyway, it gives us a good opportunity to let you know that in the future this will be scheduling two episodes per calendar month, rather than trying to crank them out every two weeks. In the future, we might even shift to once a month for these intensively researched episodes, and begin to blend in some more shows that feature interviews with other historians or significant people from the history of theater in Philadelphia. We’ll see. Just giving everyone a heads up now.  Okay, that’s all I wanted to add. Take care of yourselves everybody and thanks for listening. Bye bye.