by Tana Wojczuk
Charlotte Cushman was a bright, energetic, and healthy child who loved to run fast and climb high. She grew up strong and tall, with a passion for books. Like many American children, she learned three texts by heart: the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, and Shakespeare.
Built around a bustling port, the Boston of her childhood still retained the rough magic of a little town surrounded by big woods. The Cushman family grew, and soon Charlotte was playing in the woods with her younger brother Charles, teaching him how to climb trees and make mischief. “Climbing trees was an absolute passion,” she later said. “Nothing pleased me so much as to take refuge in the top of the tallest tree when affairs below waxed troubled or insecure.”
Charlotte’s experience of America for the first ten years of her life was of an uneasy nation in constant upheaval. The War of 1812 had caused a deep recession, which led to a series of financial crises that businessmen like her father struggled to climb free of. The 1807 ban on international slave trading had a boomerang effect that meant the domestic slave trade exploded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise enshrined slavery as a permanent condition in the South, allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state, while keeping Maine free. Genocide against the Seminoles in Florida and the Cherokee in the West filtered through to Charlotte as adventure stories, and in Byron’s odes to Daniel Boone.
Socially, the country was also changing. Charlotte could read the advertisements for British actors’ first American tours. The star power of Edmund Kean, William Macready, Fanny Kemble, and Sarah Siddons attracted audiences to theatres in New York and Boston. Unlike her parents, who grew up thinking novels were trashy and lowbrow, Charlotte grew up reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jane Austen’s Emma, which was published the year she was born.
Raised on a diet of adventure stories, Charlotte began to chafe against the social conventions for how women should look and act. Nice girls did not climb trees, or beat boys at races, or laugh at their own jokes. Charlotte, however, declared herself a “tomboy,” and as the oldest of the family she was a tough act to follow. When Charlie was born, he was in effect the second son. She agreed to play dolls with her little sister, but while Susan industriously sewed her dolls new clothes, Charlotte “ruthlessly” cut their heads open “to see what they were thinking.” She was no good at sewing, she said, but “could do anything with tools.”
It may have come as a surprise to her parents when ten-year-old Charlotte fell in love with her youngest sibling, baby Augustus. She declared him her baby, her “child-brother.” She was possessive, bragging that Augustus was “by far the cleverest” of the Cushman children, “keener, more artistic, more impulsive, more generous, more full of genius.” He was “my child,” she insisted, and he loved her “best in all the world.”
Still, as the eldest, Charlotte was “tyrannical” to her siblings, though “very social and a great favorite with the other children,” as she later wrote. She made her friends roar with laughter with her “vivid representation of a hen pursued and finally caught, or of the strange, weird, mistrustful behavior of a parrot.” She was always curious about what people were thinking, and observed how their mannerisms betrayed psychological secrets. One afternoon Mary Eliza caught her staring at their pastor across the table, mimicking him as he drank his tea. “Charlotte, take your elbows off the table and your chin out of your hands,” her mother scolded. “It is not a pretty position for a young lady!” Charlotte obeyed, but felt stifled by the corseted world, and continued to look for outlets for her energy and ambition.
At school, she was not only popular, but a strong and competitive student. She won a medal for arithmetic and kept the title year after year. She also excelled at dramatic reading. Her uncle Augustus saw her talent and encouraged her with prizes. He was often away at sea, but when he came to port he urged Charlotte to cultivate her talent for singing and performance.
Encouraged by her uncle and bursting with creative energy, Charlotte often rallied her siblings and friends to put on plays for the adults. Charlotte wasn’t shy about bossing the other kids around, and when she passed out roles she always cast herself as the hero. After reading a play only once she had much of it memorized, and her vision of a character usually came quickly and fully formed. In the evening, the troupe of kids would transform one of the rooms of the house into a theatre, with Charlotte striding across their makeshift stage in pantaloons, a wooden sword strapped around her waist.
* * *
Elkanah worked long hours, so Charlotte and her brother Charles often walked from their house in downtown Boston to Long Wharf to visit their father’s office and rummage around his warehouse filled with exotic treasures. Long Wharf lay at the heart of the city, the chaotic intersection of India, Commerce, Market, Commercial, and Mercantile streets. As they made their way Charlotte and Charles could hear gulls crying over fish guts and the shouts of the longshoremen, and watch the hunchbacked stevedores loading and unloading cargo from tall-masted ships packed so tightly you could almost walk across.
It’s unclear who had the idea first. That day Charlotte and Charles made a new game of jumping from one of the ships to the next. Boston’s Long Wharf stretched 1,586 feet into the deep water of the Atlantic with room for nearly fifty ships to dock at one time. Could they get to the end without touching land? They walked up the gangplank to the deck of the first ship. If any of the sailors noticed, they were too busy, or knew them too well, to care. It was exhilarating at first, leaping over the canyon of dark water to land soundly on the next ship, the sharp report of their feet hitting the deck. Then Charlotte leapt but misjudged the distance and fell into the dark water of Boston Harbor.
Filthy water rushed in through her nose and into her mouth. Her heavy petticoats turned to wet rags, then to ballast, and she began to sink. I’m dying, she thought, as the waters went over her head.
Then hands plunged into the water and she felt herself being hauled up, waking out of a terrible dream. The sailors dried her as best they could and gave her a spare pair of overalls and a jacket to wear instead of her wet clothes. They led her back to her father’s office still shaken, wearing a sailor’s rough trousers: a tall, raw-boned girl new-baptized as a man.
Soon after Charlotte’s near-death experience, her father disappeared, leaving the family with no visible means of support. Charlotte later called it the “first disaster” of her life. It felt like drowning.
Debt collectors descended on the Cushmans like ants at a picnic. Mary Eliza moved them from one boardinghouse to another, but it was no use. On the day the debt collectors finally caught up with them, Charlotte and Mary Eliza watched the men carry the past away on their backs, hunched over with the weight of family heirlooms.
Mary Eliza finally settled them at 41 Brattle Street, where with few other options for bringing in her own income, she used the little money she had left to open a boardinghouse. At thirteen, Charlotte dropped out of school to work for her mother full-time. (Charles and Susan were too young to help and Augustus was still a toddler.) Mary Eliza could have sent her children to relatives—well-meaning friends in New York even offered to adopt Charlotte—but she refused to break up her family.
Their new neighborhood was a mix of high and low classes. It was a short walk to the genteel meadow of Boston Common and also around the corner from the Tremont Theatre and the actors, politicians, wealthy men, and prostitutes who frequented it. The actors would become Charlotte’s mother’s best clients.The Cushmans had gone from being the pedigreed family of a prosperous merchant to genteel poverty. It pained Charlotte to see her brother Augustus growing up without the ease and luxury she’d taken for granted as a little girl. She worked every day for her mother, but although the boarders helped feed and clothe them, Charlotte was determined to lift her family back out of poverty, somehow.
It was no easy task. Window-shopping in the boutiques around Long Wharf and Boston Common, one saw very few women working. The shop clerks, the carriage drivers, the lamplight
ers, street sweepers, and newspaper sellers were men. Sometimes Charlotte might see lady’s maids in sere cotton dresses like her own, appearing briefly in the doorway of some stately home to dump out their masters’ chamber pots, or occasionally through the back curtain of a haberdashery, a woman surrounded by heaps of fabric, bent double as she made tiny stitches along a man’s pant cuff. Education made little difference; even women who had finished high school had no universities that would admit them. Charlotte lived in a half world, denied even the physical freedom of riding out on her horse alone. She could have looked for a wealthy husband, but was scornful of women who believed marriage would bring them independence; it was, she would later write, a form of sexual slavery. She wanted more than that.
Charlotte’s work was grueling. She emptied chamber pots and stripped beds, washed endless piles of linens, their sodden coils heavy as a body. She dusted the dressers and lamps and tables with a goose wing. Several times a day she filled the ash bucket and dumped hot ash down the toilet to muffle the smell. If the weather was nice, she opened the windows and lifted the sash to bring sweet air in and let the bad air out. Every few months, they washed down the bedposts with lye to kill the lice. But it was here the first glimmer of an idea came to her. Her eyes burning from lye as she scrubbed the kitchen floor or with her hands plunged into a basin of soapy dishwater, she listened to the actors and actresses. They might complain about late payments, drunken costars, costumes rubbed raw, and nervous exhaustion from train travel, but they also recited lines from great poets and playwrights, told good jokes, read widely, traveled constantly, and told stories about stars who were invited to dine with royalty and made great fortunes.
The next time Uncle Augustus came to visit them in Boston, Charlotte pleaded with him to take her to a play at the Tremont Theatre. She knew she was her uncle’s favorite and that he felt sorry for her. Though Augustus and Mary Eliza’s family may have once had money, there was none left to help Charlotte or her siblings. Augustus had always believed in Charlotte’s intellect, and now here she was changing guests’ stained sheets instead of coming home breathless and excited after school. When the newspapers announced that the famous British actor William Charles Macready was coming to Boston, part of his first American tour, it was too good a chance to miss. He agreed to take Charlotte to see Macready at the Tremont in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
chapter two Quest
If her father had not left, Charlotte would have been forbidden to enter a theatre. In the 1800s audiences were primarily men, and theatres catered to male audiences by offering liquor and bawdy afterpieces that ran late into the night. In “that dark, horrible, guilty ‘third tier’ ” of all the large theatres men could purchase sex with prostitutes. Actresses were often former prostitutes and were considered only a step above your common whore. To become a star, an actress had to retain some veneer of respectability, and making it was a matter of survival as much as talent. Some older actors bragged about preying on the superlatives, or “supes,” who played minor roles like chambermaids and dancing girls. Girls who rose to fame on their good looks quickly found themselves wrung out and replaced, and yet the rare actress like the great British tragedian Sarah Siddons, who rose to fame, was treated like a queen. America had produced no actresses to rival Siddons, in part because no respectable family would allow their daughter to go onstage. It was seductive, however. Stepping into the theatre, you entered a raucous, debauched space, but it also promised connection with European high-culture through opera, Greek tragedy, and most of all Shakespeare.
The theatre wars in America went as far back as the Puritans who tore down Shakespeare’s Globe. Puritan polemicist William Prynne, born around the time the Bard was writing Hamlet, warned that “theater breeds spiritual anarchy by encouraging such inversions of nature as transvestism, irreverence and hypocrisy.” He argued that watching plays with “whores and strumpets” onstage would lead to “if not actuall, yet contemplative adultery.” Early American settlers feared the theatre in part because it was in competition with the church.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, growing up in puritanical Salem, Massachusetts, understood the Salem witch trials as a form of high drama themselves: mass hysteria and public murder of so-called witches by Puritans, the spectacle of young girls forced to confess to bizarre sex acts. As the future mayor of Salem Charles W. Upham wrote in 1831, “Pastors, deacons, church members, doctors of divinity, college professors, officers of state, crowded, day after day, to behold feats which have never been surpassed on the boards of any theatre.” Like Upham, Hawthorne did not “doubt the power of imagination so much as he fear[ed] it.”
Even before the American Constitution had been ratified, Americans were debating what to do about the theatre. Most plays were written by British writers, “that heathen riter Shakespur” the most popular among them. During Charlotte’s childhood, Shakespeare was performed in American theatres at least as frequently as in England, but a uniquely American theatre had not yet been born. Americans might have gained the right to call themselves a country, but culturally, they were still a colony. One problem, according to Herman Melville and others in the Young America movement, was that Shakespeare continued to overshadow American genius. Possibly more problematic was the enduring puritan squeamishness about theatre in general.
In the years following the Revolutionary War, Americans had turned their attention to the culture and entertainment their new freedom could afford them. Puritans saw clearly that theatre was in competition with the church for butts in seats. Other anti-theatre factions argued that since most plays were British, theatre was a form of cultural imperialism. (Ironically, theatre bans throughout the revolutionary period only solidified the British monopoly on theatrical culture.)
It seemed that every American had an opinion on the theatre paradox. On one hand, Americans were free people who believed that the government should not be allowed to dictate their entertainment choices. In Boston, one senator even argued that theatre was “the natural right of every man.” Yet the majority of the wealthy, influential Americans who made the laws mistrusted “every man,” and doubted that the average American had the intellectual capacity to know what entertainments were good for them. These same would-be aristocrats hired actors for private performances to entertain family and friends.
Foremen argued that the theatre would entice the poor to waste money and the working man to shirk his duties. But workers protested when their theatres were closed down. The Clergy recognized that the theatre was a powerful force that shaped public morals, but they failed to imagine working-class audiences could have any other response to a play than to emulate it. Clergymen “assumed the actors must be depraved because those who represented a passion had internalized it” and predicted that “women would expect to be treated like goddesses after viewing a play, causing the family to fall apart.”
But, by the early nineteenth century it had become clear that, like prostitution (which it was often likened to) theatre was nearly impossible to regulate. Laws banning it were unenforceable and only undermined the authority of the fledgling legal system. American writers pleaded for more theatres to be opened, so they could have an outlet for their plays. By the time Charlotte was born, the debate was no longer about whether theatre should exist in America, but about how Americans could use the theatre to develop their own culture. Still, the America of Charlotte’s youth was a country whose vision of itself had yet to come into focus.
* * *
When Charlotte and her uncle Augustus arrived at the Tremont Theatre the sun was dipping low in the late afternoon, casting long shadows across the cobblestone street. The theatre’s marble facade shone creamy white. Men leaned against a low stone wall, hands in pockets, hats tipped low to block the sun. Young boys dirtied their fine clothes playing tug-of-war with stray dogs, and women with parasols wore bonnets and long pastel dresses held away from their bodies with stiff crinolines and bustles, looking like bells about to be rung.
/> They were all here to see the great British actor William Charles Macready. As a boy, Macready grew up in his father’s London theatre. He was a pretty child and his father cast him in the girls’ parts. Young Macready did well in school, and dreamed of leaving the theatre to become a lawyer. He had finally started law studies at Oxford, when his father’s theatre went bankrupt and his father was locked up in debtors prison. Rather than let the theatre fail, Macready dropped out of Oxford and returned home, where he took over as manager and stepped into his father’s leading roles. He excelled at tragedy and soon became a star. Now, he was the most famous actor in England. With no telephones or telegraph, indeed with no electricity at all, news traveled very slowly. It spoke to Macready’s fame that even before he boarded the steamer in London, every city in America knew he was coming.
Though he belonged to a suspect social class, Macready’s celebrity won him invitations to dine alongside the wealthiest and most respectable families in England—and their patronage had helped make him rich. In London, he was close friends with Charles Dickens, with whom he shared the experience of rising from penniless youth to fame and fortune. He was also prone to the kind of attention-grabbing tantrums that made news. Once, when a costar’s death throes threatened to upstage him, Macready broke off mid-sentence to hiss that the upstart should “die further off.”
