by Tana Wojczuk
Simpson and Price had made the Park successful, and they could be ruthless to the competition. For example, when the African Grove—the city’s only theatre owned and operated by African-American actors—began to compete with the Park’s own minstrel shows (which featured white actors in blackface), Price leveraged his family’s political connections to get the Grove shut down.
Charlotte began acting at the Park in the sweltering heat of late summer 1837. She took up the grueling schedule of an ensemble actor, playing several different minor roles every week. At home, Mary Eliza helped her sew new costumes, learn lines, made sure she ate, and helped her recover from frequent illnesses brought on by stress. But she could not rest. A new disaster had quickly taken the last one’s place. Susan arrived in New York, pregnant and in despair. Merriman had abandoned her as soon as she became pregnant, and after he left she discovered he was not the wealthy man he’d claimed to be. On March 4, 1838, Susan gave birth to a son, Charles Edwin, whom they nicknamed “Ned.” Two weeks later, Susan celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
* * *
Married at fourteen, a single mother at sixteen, Susan would likely have been forced into prostitution if Charlotte hadn’t been able to support the family with her acting. But with a new baby in the family, money was tight. Susan was young and beautiful and Charlotte had the idea that she could go onstage to play opposite her in the more feminine parts. When Ned was old enough to be left with Mary Eliza, Charlotte suggested Susan try a career on the stage. And if hard work had helped Charlotte recover from the blow of Augustus’s death, why shouldn’t it help Susan recover from her “disastrous” marriage? Their brother Charles was now supporting himself as a salesclerk and this was a rare opportunity for Susan to work, too, so she agreed to try.
Unknown to Charlotte, encouraging her sister to join her at the Park Theatre made her an enemy. Park Benjamin was an influential theatre critic whose mistress was a pretty young actress at the Park named Miss Clarendon. Benjamin was extremely handsome, described as looking exactly like Lord Byron, whom he copied in manner and dress. He was also lame in both legs, and walked “with difficulty on two canes.” Susan was now in direct competition with Benjamin’s girlfriend, and Miss Clarendon already disliked Charlotte for trying to give her unsolicited acting advice. Charlotte claimed she was being helpful, but Miss Clarendon “ridiculed [me] for my pains.”
Benjamin began by mocking Charlotte’s performances in the press. Then he wrote to her personally and promised to have her hissed out of the theatre if Susan didn’t leave the Park. Far from feeling intimidated, however, Charlotte wrote back immediately. The letter’s rhetoric was flawless. She instantly grasped that Benjamin saw himself as a cavalier defending his lady-love, and managed to flatter his ego by taking his chivalry seriously while challenging the assumption that she was any less vulnerable to attack than Miss Clarendon: “I have felt what it is to be defenseless,” she wrote to Benjamin, “and would not attack so unfortunate a young lady—but with due deference to you I do not consider her defenseless while she has a person willing to draw a band around him intending to crush one lady upon the ruin of whose reputation that of the young person might be built.” Regarding being hissed from the stage, Charlotte completely changed tack, treating this as a strictly business matter rather than a personal threat. Getting a large group together to intimidate her was “a matter requiring some time and trouble” and it would likely only hurt his own reputation. “I think,” she concluded, “you have business of more importance.” Perhaps calculating the cost versus the benefit of his attack, or feeling he had made enough of a show to please Miss Clarendon, Benjamin backed down, allowing Charlotte to get on with her work. But as she would soon discover, she still had enemies at the Park.
chapter seven Descent into Five Points
When Susan opened the paper, she gasped. She called Mary Eliza over and pointed out the announcement. “Charlotte will be furious,” she said. It was February 1839. Frost made paisley patterns on the windowpanes, and outside horses struggled to pull cabs down the street in deep snow. Charlotte had not gone to the theatre that day, staying home in front of the fire with Susan, Mary Eliza, and little Ned, now almost two years old. But the news Susan brought her was chilling: it was a cast list for the Park’s next production, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, with Charlotte in the role of the prostitute Nancy. It was not a starring role. Charlotte’s friend Annie Brewster recalled it was “always given to actresses of little or no position in the company.” It was also dangerous, since actresses already had to fight against the stereotype that they were essentially prostitutes themselves.
Charlotte was furious, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her contract explicitly said that she had to take any part they gave her. Charlotte suspected that Stephen Price, one of her managers, disliked her. “I was at the mercy of the man,” she later recalled. “It was mid-winter; my bread had to be earned. I dared not refuse, nor even remonstrate, for I knew he wished to provoke me to break my engagement.”
By casting her as a prostitute, Price was being reckless with her reputation. Playing a prostitute put her in the line of fire for moralizing journalists like Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Greenley wrote in one review that “a large proportion of those connected with the Stage are libertines and courtezans.”
In their New York apartment Susan tried to hush Ned’s crying, Mary Eliza mended costumes, and Charlotte sat in a chair reading and rereading Dickens’s play. It was clear she could not simply button herself into the role of Nancy as it was already made; she would have to take a seam-ripper to the thing and piece it out herself. She was determined to get the better of her enemy. “What he designed for my mortification should be my triumph,” she wrote to Annie Brewster.
Up to the night appointed for Oliver Twist she was not seen by anyone except at business hours. She took her meals in her room and spent her time there or out of the house on clandestine rambles. Charlotte was rehearsing in secret, “studying that bare skeleton of a part; clothing it with flesh, giving it life and interest.” To really get a sense of Nancy as a human being, and the conditions she had to endure, Charlotte even ventured into Five Points.
* * *
Five Points was a place both mythical and material. It was a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan that ran from Bowery to Centre Street, south of Canal Street, where gangs with names like the Forty Thieves and the Bowery Boys battled nightly. Five Points was an inner-city slum; the people there were largely new immigrants from Italy, Germany, and Ireland. Thousands of women who arrived in New York unaccompanied or who had families to support spent short, brutal lives there as prostitutes. Sewage from the nearby canal poisoned the water and the ground, and airless tenements housed sometimes dozens of men, women, and children in one room. Along the canal stood a prison known as the Tombs.
In the eighteenth century, however, Five Points had been the site of a beautiful clear lake called “the collect pond.” Nearby Bunker Hill emerged out of miles of forest there, and from its crest you could see birds rippling the waters of the lake: egrets, woodpeckers, black-eyed blue jays, and cardinals in their showy red cloaks. A winding horse path led to small homes, and beyond that the white walls of mercantile buildings, all dwarfed by the spire of St. Paul’s Chapel.
Then, around the lake grew a row of slaughterhouses and tanneries, which began to fill the Collect Pond with their offal. By the time Charlotte walked into Five Points in 1839 it was America’s first slum. When Charles Dickens visited the neighborhood on his American tour, he found it at least as bad as the London slums he fictionalized in Oliver Twist: “narrow ways diverging to the left and right, and reeking every where with dirt and filth.” Seeing pigs in the streets, Dickens asked, “Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all fours?” The aristocrats of Five Points, it was said, were the butchers, because their children never went hungry.
Collect Pond, New York (1798)
Middle-class tourists might pay to go “slumming” in Five Points with a police escort, holding camphor-soaked handkerchiefs to their noses to see how the poor really lived, but women rarely went there unless they were dedicated social reformers. A woman did not wander off there alone, without telling anyone where she was going.
Walking alone among the smell of roasted corn and the cries of the “hot corn girls,” Charlotte heard music spilling out onto the street from nearly every bar and public house, and a new kind of percussive dancing born in Five Points called “tap.” When she got thirsty, she could buy a lemonade or shandy from a German street vendor. Passing a dilapidated building called “the old Brewery” that housed more than a thousand people (once a cheerful yellow, it now squatted in the neighborhood like a toad), Charlotte walked the same streets Whitman frequented. While even well-meaning social reformers tended to think of violence and crime as the special talent of the poor, Whitman saw Five Points as a wellspring of “the Republic’s most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men who will work.” Immigrants did their best to make tenement apartments into homes, decorating their mantels with pictures and keepsakes of the life they’d left behind. Although Charlotte’s family had come to America on the Mayflower, she was driven by the same dream as these new immigrants.
She was empathetic toward the prostitutes she met, and she watched them carefully to find the spark of recognition that would help her bring Nancy to life. She had no trouble finding prostitutes, since, as one observer wrote, “every house was a brothel” and “every brothel a hell.” Charlotte also saw generational poverty, and how the lack of opportunities for work was especially crushing for women and girls. It was not unusual, wrote one journalist, for a mother and two or three daughters “to receive their ‘men’ at the same time in the same room.”
As with the character of Meg, the authenticity of Nancy’s costume could help her feel real to the audience. During one of her walks, Charlotte offered to trade clothes with a dying prostitute. She gave up a simple but well-made silk dress and put on the woman’s rags. These would be Nancy’s clothes.
* * *
The grass around the Park Theatre was crisscrossed with shortcuts. Street vendors sold hunks of gingerbread, oysters, fried beefsteak, and pungent pickled red herring scooped from a barrel. Behind the theatre, Charlotte carefully navigated an alley knee-deep with filth. In the bag slung over her arm were a dead woman’s clothes. Like the heroine of the Brothers Grimm’s “Allerleirauh,” she’d traded her fine dress for rags, and it had been a fair trade.
In the green room, Charlotte’s fellow actors made strange sounds and movements as they warmed up their voices and did calisthenics. She warmed up and dressed in secret. Waiting in the wings for her cue, she could hear the audience laughing and gasping as Dickens’s drama unfolded. The warmth of the gaslight dried their wet woolen winter clothes. The theatre was full, from the plush, velvet-lined box seats to the benches where women spread out their wide, rigid skirts. The galleries were draped in a swath of baize, the bright kelly green of a billiard table. Behind the galleries the walls were brilliantly whitewashed and the iron columns that supported them were made to look as though “covered with burnished gold.”
Of the three main theatres in New York the Park was the only one considered fashionable, though some secretly thought the Bowery was more beautiful. The third competitor, the Chatham Theatre, was out of favor, “so utterly condemned by bon ton, that it require[d] some courage to decide upon going there.” But even in the audience at the Park men stripped off their coats and hung them over the gallery railing, showed up with unshaven upper lips stained by tobacco. The European travel writer Frances Trollope found the audience at the Park “more than usually revolting.” The Park had its own infamous “third tier,” and almost half of the city’s brothels were located within three blocks of the prestigious theatre. To succeed, Charlotte would need to appeal both to high and low, aristocrats and working-class audiences.
Oliver Twist was a story that reminded readers of Guy Mannering: a young boy abandoned to criminals who is saved by a woman who sacrifices everything for him. The prostitute Nancy is torn between loyalty to her lover, who is in thrall to the criminal Fagin, and her strong desire to save the orphaned Oliver. Charlotte immediately grasped Nancy’s struggle between good and evil, something that resonated with her audience as many found themselves torn between the lures and snares of the city and their own moral compass. Many in the audience did not yet know Nancy’s fate. Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist had been released in serial form, and the final installment had only recently been published in America.
Toward the end of the play, Nancy betrays her lover, Bill Sikes, by freeing Oliver from captivity. When the crime boss discovers what she’s done, he orders Sikes to kill her. In her final scene, Nancy is in bed. Hearing a noise, she sits up suddenly. She is not alone. A shape in the doorway moves toward her, but with relief she realizes it is only Sikes. She reaches for him, but he roughly pushes her away and blows the candle out, ordering her to get up. Nancy pushes herself off the bed. “Is that you, Bill?” she asks. “Oh I’m so glad! But you’ve put out the candle.” Bill Sikes snarls at her, “There’s light enough for what I’ve got to do.” Nancy pleads with him, then tries to scream. Sikes strikes her in the face with his pistol.
In other productions Sikes dragged Nancy away to murder her offstage. But Charlotte had a better idea. She choreographed a “fearful struggle” between Nancy and Sikes, which her height and strength made into a real contest. She gave the audience a chance to believe Nancy might actually get away. This was true to Dickens’s novel, which described the murder in gruesome detail.
“The ‘murder of Nancy’ was the great scene,” enthused one critic. Charlotte instructed the actor playing Sikes to drag Nancy around the stage by her hair, while looking defiantly at the gallery. The audience hissed him, cursing “like a Handel Festival chorus.” Sikes dragged Nancy around the stage twice more. He shook his fist at the audience “like Ajax, defying the lighting.” The crowd’s roars grew louder and more blasphemous, the noise and excitement rising to a climax Charlotte had carefully orchestrated: “Sikes, working up to a well rehearsed climax, smeared Nancy with red-ochre, and taking her by the hair (a most powerful wig) seemed to dash her brains out on the stage, no explosion of dynamite invented by the modern anarchist, no language ever dreamt of in Bedlam could equal the outburst.”
The audience mourned and screamed foul play, so totally caught up in empathy for the poor murdered woman they seemed to forget entirely that she was a prostitute, the likes of whom died on the streets or in the Tombs prison in Five Points every night. Charlotte, drawing inspiration from her five days in Five Points and from Dickens’s novel, had done the inconceivable and made Nancy into a martyr.
Once again, Charlotte had taken a supporting role and made it into theatrical gold. Tickets sold out and critics raved. One critic, Walt Whitman, argued that Charlotte’s performance was proof that America was at last ready to compete with Europe as a cultural powerhouse. Whitman was part of a growing group of American writers calling for more recognition by their countrymen—they included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and other members of the “Transcendental Club.” The club’s first meeting had been titled “American Genius: the causes which hinder its growth and give us no first-rate productions.”
Whitman was one of many watching Charlotte’s career in the hopes that she would finally prove that Americans could produce more than pale imitations of European art. When he saw Nancy, he found her delightfully appalling, writing in his column for the Brooklyn Eagle that it was “the most intense acting ever felt on the park boards.” He believed that no one who watched her could help but “marvel at the towering grandeur of her genius.” He was convinced that audiences would now stop flocking to see “fifth-rate artistic trash” from Europe.
Simpson and Price, however, seemed immune to Charlotte’s charms. Wh
en her contract expired after three years, she asked for a raise, but they turned her down. Furious, Charlotte quit.
She spent a year as the manager of the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia. Then William Macready arrived in New York and asked her to come act with him, but the problem was that she had a contract with the Walnut she could not get out of. She made a plan. She said yes to Macready and took the train back and forth from Philadelphia to New York, acting different parts every other night. It was grueling, but she hoped that Macready’s seal of approval would help her gain recognition.
Macready was the British star she had seen on her first visit to the theatre as a young girl. His star power meant he could essentially set his own schedule, decide what plays he wanted to do and whom he wanted to work with, and demand a cut of ticket sales. Charlotte wanted all that for herself.
She and Macready became friends, and she confided her ambitions to him. His advice was simple: save your money and go to London as quickly as you can. Her talent would never be appreciated by American audiences until she succeeded in Europe. As proof, he pointed to the American actor Edwin Forrest. Forrest had done well in London and this made him a star at home. (In fact Forrest’s London success was due in part to critics paid to “puff” the show—giving it good reviews—and audiences stocked with his friends.) Macready disliked Forrest, whom he found coarse. If Forrest could do it, Charlotte could, too. Unlike Forrest, she had taken elocution lessons so she could do dialects and hide her American accent. Her careful line readings and intellectual understanding of Shakespeare also gave her an advantage over most American actors.
