The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Fanny’s name was not forgotten at Covent Garden, and early in 1827 another offer came, which her mother now advised her to accept. It was her chance to establish herself as an actress of the first rank. She found herself playing Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Othello and Portia to his Shylock; Ophelia to Charles Kemble’s Hamlet and Juliet to his Romeo. She arrived with a high reputation, but London audiences were not as appreciative as Irish or provincial ones, and London critics were sharp-tongued; one who had praised her performances in Bath now wrote, ‘She does all correctly – elegantly – well – but there is still something wanting. It is a performance – a picture – not the thing itself … we rather deem her an actress of study than of impulse.’4 It was crushing to be told at this point that she lacked the natural temperament of an actress; she had no alternative but to persist. She worked three winters at Covent Garden and became thoroughly familiar with the London theatre world; actresses who appeared with her were Fanny Kelly, Harriet Smithson, Helen Faucit and Miss Goward, later Mrs Keeley. She appeared at the Lyceum as well as Covent Garden. She quarrelled with Lucia Vestris over a boy’s part and was scolded by the critic of the Morning Chronicle because her legs were not as pretty as those of her rival.5 For any actress it was a solid commercial asset to be able to write ‘of Covent Garden’ after your name; Fanny Jarman earned it, but she did not become a favourite. It must have been a period of bitter disappointment, to have the golden chance and see it slipping away. Her sister Louisa enjoyed even less success; and when it came to Fanny’s third Covent Garden season, her mother complained that she was not being offered good enough parts. The management made this their excuse to end her contract.

  An Irish critic, taking up the cudgels on her behalf, asked, ‘Is it that Miss Jarman’s name has never been uttered by the lips of scandal that she has been thought less interesting by the Cockneys? Or is it that she would not condescend to those fantastic tricks and meretricious graces which have always a charm for the gross minds of a metropolitan mob?’6 But it was not a meretricious actress who displaced her at Covent Garden. At this point Charles Kemble, with many misgivings, decided to put his own daughter Fanny on the Covent Garden stage; she was not allowed to enter the green room, for fear she might be contaminated by the other actresses, and she was deeply reluctant, half wild with terror, she said, as she appeared before the public for the first time. Her success nevertheless was immediate and overwhelming. The irony of the situation only made it worse for poor Fanny Jarman, whose fate was now sealed; and the name of Kemble was received with displeasure in her family from then on.

  She had been spending her summers, when the London theatres closed, working in Glasgow and Edinburgh theatres, and now she took her wounded pride north and was received with consoling warmth. The Scottish critics, like the Irish, praised her not only for being a delightful and accomplished actress but for her simple, modest yet lively manners, ‘a temper which is the sure sign and constant accompaniment of purity and innocence. We must not lose The Jarman’, proclaimed ‘Christopher North’ in Blackwood’s magazine.7 Later he drew a comparison between Fanny Kemble, Fanny Kelly and Fanny Jarman, according superiority in ‘grace, elegance and beauty’ to Jarman. All three, his article added, ‘are as much respected for their virtues in private life, as they are admired for their genius on the stage’.8

  Fanny Jarman was pure, respected and admired; ‘the most inexperienced of her sex may safely follow the guidance of Miss Jarman when they seek to acquire the elegant ease and self-possession of a perfect gentlewoman’;9 but still she had failed the great hurdle of London. In Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1831, she found herself playing the Lady in Milton’s Comus opposite a short, stout Irish actor with a powerful stage presence, a loud voice and a great love of literature: Shakespeare and Byron were his idols, and he wrote occasional verses and prologues for his own performances. His name was Thomas Ternan and, though he never admitted it, he was forty-one to her twenty-nine.

  Ternan was the son of a Dublin grocer and, through his mother Susanna Lawless, the grandson of a brewer. He had fifteen full brothers and sisters, and his father had four more children by a previous wife. The Ternans claimed descent from a landowning family, dispossessed and denied entry into the professions by their Roman Catholic faith. Whether this was so or not, they were now without the land or the faith, and Thomas had to make his own way in the world. He was not inclined to go into the grocery business, and there was no money to spare at home. The obvious path was towards England, and there he went, about the year 1808, when he was eighteen.

  He found his first work as an actor in Kent, on the Rochester circuit; his brother William accompanied him, and there he settled, marrying a Rochester girl and becoming a barge owner. The life of an actor pleased Thomas, who was convivial as well as literary. It took him all over England and Scotland, and presently back to Dublin, where his acting was judged ‘forcible rather than finished’.10 Now it led him to his future wife.

  Thomas Ternan and Fanny Jarman finished their season in Scotland, went their separate ways, and then met again the following autumn. Each of them did seasons in Dublin; she appeared in London again, at the Coburg Theatre (later the Old Vic), and he went to Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was enthusiastically received. In 1833 Ternan was playing Othello in Edinburgh when Macready visited the city and gave him a few tips on his performance: ‘spoke very kindly to Mr Ternan, last night’s Othello, on some bad habits and on his merits,’ recorded the tragedian in his diary.11 Ternan, who was several years older than Macready, may have had mixed feelings about his kindly advice; still, fortified with it, he took himself back to his native Dublin. Clearly he was not pleased when Macready turned up again there in March, and they rehearsed Werner together. This time Macready noted, ‘I do not like Ternan’s mode of behaviour: it is difficult to say who will or will not be an actor, but I do not think this person in his private capacity will ever shed lustre on the theatrical profession. He seems to me opinionated, jealous and of course little-minded.’ Macready added that Ternan tried to disconcert him deliberately during the performance, ‘but I punished him by playing my best’. Macready was not an easy or a modest man himself, and his remarks probably tell us as much about his temperament as Ternan’s; but it’s a discouraging estimate of the man’s talent and character.

  Ternan may well have been edgy and distracted in Dublin. He had begun to woo Miss Jarman but was obliged to pursue her from a distance with letters, poems and valentines. Under the circumstances it was a slow courtship; but he persevered, and in due course he succeeded in touching her heart.12 In the summer of 1834 he made her a proposal of marriage, and she agreed to become his wife. Perhaps she was weary and lonely; she had been working since she was two and was now thirty-two. Perhaps she was intrigued by his plans, which were ambitious and adventurous, and ready to entertain the idea of an alliance that would be both matrimonial and professional. Perhaps she had fallen in love with his rough charm and persistent wooing. Perhaps her mother advised her to accept his offer. The general opinion – certainly shared by Macready – was that Ternan was the lucky one and had done very well for himself.

  They were married on 21 September 1834, in London, and on the very next day they embarked for the United States. It was a bold sort of honeymoon. The crossing by sailing ship took the best part of a month, and was still one that ‘few men, and hardly any women, undertook … as a mere matter of pleasure or curiosity’.13 But the British acting profession had begun to appreciate that there were good theatres, good audiences and good money to be made on the other side of the Atlantic. Macready had already done a tour in 1826 and was to return twice: he may have put the idea in Ternan’s head. Fanny Kemble, with her father and her Aunt Dall De Camp, had also set off westwards only the year before with the aim of restoring the family’s fortunes, and they were still there.

  The Ternans certainly hoped to earn and save more money in the new continent than they could expect to in England. His ebullience allowed hi
m to believe he could appear in America as the leading tragedian he considered himself; and if he could save enough, he might return to Britain to establish himself as the lessee and manager of some important theatre. The plan was a good one; but it was clear from the start that it depended heavily on Mrs Ternan. From their first appearances at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia in November she was the draw, delighting the critics with her ‘beautiful person, commanding stature, rich and flexible voice’.14 New York gave them a dustier reception, pronouncing them not up to the Kembles, and not taking particularly against Ternan’s bald head, which might just pass muster for Leontes but seemed altogether less appropriate when it came to Romeo, Macbeth or Rob Roy. Fortunately his temperament carried him over any disappointment he may have felt at his reception. Within a few months he was writing from Philadelphia to a Dublin friend:

  Our success has been brilliant – indeed far more so than our most sanguine and best friends could possibly have anticipated. We played a short engagement at Boston lately, and the receipts of the theatre, for two nights, were much greater than even the Kembles had drawn, within the same period. We cleared there, in that time, upwards of $2,200, say £500 sterling. We are equally fortunate here, and the same in every town we have appeared in. We return to Boston on 11th March, to perform fifteen nights more, and I have no doubt a second engagement will be even more productive than the first. So great was the excitement on the last night we played there (my benefit)* that the boxes were sold by auction, and double prices obtained in almost every instance. This is doing well so far; our next move will be back here again, then to Washington, and from thence to Baltimore.15

  When this jubilant letter was written, Mrs Ternan was in the early stages of pregnancy. It made no difference to their working schedule. Since she had been trained in a tough school, as the eldest daughter seeing her own mother work through all her pregnancies, it seemed quite natural to her to do the same. In June 1835, when she was seven months’ pregnant, the couple took a holiday trip to Niagara Falls.16 In August they were on a coastal paddle-steamer when a storm blew up in Delaware Bay, during which she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named after her, Frances Eleanor.17 The first few weeks of little Fanny’s life were nearly the last: as the family travelled on to another engagement aboard another coastal boat, it was accidentally rammed, and her cot was thrown into the air. Almost miraculously the tiny baby was preserved between two mattresses. Undaunted they continued their travels south to New Orleans, Natchez and Mobile for the winter; early in 1836 they were in Pittsburgh, and then went north to play in Canada.

  The transatlantic venture was a success. It was also taxing, especially for Mrs Ternan, who had to deal tactfully with the fact that audiences preferred her to her husband and to work as well as care for her child. In the winter of 1836 she found herself pregnant again. It was time to return to England. They gave a farewell benefit in Philadelphia and set their faces eastward. Fanny Kemble, at least, was left behind; she had acquired an American husband, for whom she had cheerfully – though as it turned out misguidedly – abandoned the stage. The £3,000 she had earned in the States were all handed over to her father, who returned alone to England. Fanny Jarman, her one-time rival, travelled back more cheerfully with her new daughter, now one, an active, inquisitive, precocious child.

  They arrived in Britain in the first weeks of 1837. During their two-and-a-half-year absence two notable things had happened. The railway had come to London; and The Pickwick Papers had begun to appear, establishing their 25-year-old author as the chief entertainer of the age. And the age itself was about to change its name; in June William IV died, and since all his children were Mrs Jordan’s, he was succeeded by his niece, Victoria.

  In London Ternan found his American experience did him little good with the theatre managers. They offered him only minor parts. Offended, he refused them and had to watch sulkily while his wife played opposite Charles Kean. In the summer she was obliged to take a short break when their second daughter, a black-eyed, dark-haired child whom they named Maria Susanna, was born on 10 August and baptized at Christ Church, Southwark, a month later. The family was living near by in Upper Ground Street; on the baptismal certificate Ternan described himself as ‘gentleman’. It was more than ever obvious that Mrs Ternan was the breadwinner of the couple. Things looked up momentarily in the autumn when Alfred Bunn of Drury Lane relented towards Ternan enough to allow him to try Shylock; and when Mrs Ternan was back playing Desdemona to Kean’s Othello, her husband was given Iago. But the critics again pronounced against him. There were no further prospects for him in London.

  Professionally marriage had put Frances Jarman into an awkward situation; still she made the best of it, loyally setting off on the road again with her two little ones. Soon she was pregnant for a third time. In November 1838 they were invited to play a winter season in Newcastle upon Tyne, old territory for Ternan, where he might regain his confidence in himself as a great tragedian. The Newcastle audiences had always enjoyed his large gestures, his pauses, his tears and rages. He would be able to play all his favourite parts, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, to shouted applause, and celebrate after the performance with drinking companions from his bachelor days.

  He installed his little family in lodgings in Westgate, high above the river and close to the theatre, which had been rebuilt since his last season there. It was now at least as splendid as any in London. Newcastle was booming on its coal, its docks, its shipbuilding, its iron and engineering works, and the whole of the city centre was in the process of being rebuilt to a magnificent plan, with elegant Neo-classical buildings in golden-yellow sandstone. It boasted an Academy of Arts, a Literary and Philosophical Society and a weekly newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle, which reported cultural events enthusiastically; and there was a strong theatrical tradition.

  There had been a Theatre Royal in Newcastle since the 1780s, managed at different times by Macready’s father and various Kembles; the old theatre had been pulled down in the spate of civic improvements, and the new one opened in Grey Street, among the fashionable shops, a year before the Ternans’ season. It was – and still is – a splendid theatre both outside and in, with a great classical colonnaded portico, marble pilasters and ceiling paintings representing Literature, Drama and Art crowned by Glory and Fortune. A statue of Mrs Siddons was planned for the portico (but never materialized). The stage was deep, with a movable section at the back, many traps and machinery for constructing elaborate perspectives and displaying dioramas, then the rage; £1,000 had been spent on stock scenery. Working here must have seemed at least as challenging and exciting as appearing in a London theatre.

  There was a vast gallery, with a separate entrance and staircase; soon after opening, its floor had to be leaded to prevent what was referred to as ‘nuisances’; but, coarse and uncouth as the gallery audience might be, it was eager to be entertained. In theory, at any rate, the gentry from the surrounding countryside and the rising merchant families in the city could be relied on to patronize serious productions regularly; in practice the best business came with race weeks and assize weeks, when the gentry and the farmers came to town.

  Ternan had his wife billed as ‘Late Miss Jarman’, in the hope that her old name would be a draw. Her pregnancy, now advanced, did not prevent her from playing a boy’s part – Ion in Talfourd’s play of that name – or Lady Racket in Three Weeks after Marriage, as well as her usual Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona and Rosalind. She also led in the musical farces and sang Irish ballads to her own accompaniment on the lute. The public took her to their hearts.

  The Ternans were not the only success of that winter season. It was also the occasion of the first performance in Newcastle of ‘an entirely original, ironical Burletta of Men and Manners founded on the celebrated Papers by “Boz” ’ – Nicholas Nickleby. The Ternans did not play in it, but they were in the theatre for its first performance, when it preceded Clari, The Maid of Milan, in which they both appeared;
for it was standard practice to give two or three full plays, starting early in the evening and continuing late into the night, and on this occasion several members of the cast appeared in both Nickleby and Clari.

  The curious thing about this Nickleby is that it was adapted from an unfinished work. Dickens was only half-way through his book, with ten or so more instalments to write; but the public appetite for anything even remotely connected with him was so great that it had been put together from the episodes that had already appeared and guesswork. There was nothing Dickens could do about this: he was already the property of the whole nation and was to remain so for the rest of his life.

  This seems to have been the first certain encounter of the Ternans with the work of Dickens, whose caricature of a country theatre manager and his family in Nickleby came uncannily close to reality. Ternan’s resourcefulness and optimism, his partiality for a drink, his often pregnant wife, with a scrapbook to rival that of Miss Snevellicci, his American tour – all have their equivalents in the account of Vincent Crummles; he even had an ‘infant phenomenon’ in preparation in little Fanny.†

  Two days after the Nickleby performance the season ended, and the Ternans travelled south again for Christmas, announcing that they were to appear at Drury Lane. This was wishful thinking, however, for they had no such engagement. On the two-day coach journey – the railway had not arrived at Newcastle yet – the idea of returning, but on a different and grander footing, was in their minds. They liked the place; Mrs Ternan may have felt at home, with her childhood memories of touring in the north, and it was evidently more welcoming to the talents of her husband than London. They had their savings from the American tour. Why should not Ternan start a northern circuit of his own centred on thriving Newcastle, make his name as an actor-manager with his wife as female lead and, in time, raise his daughters too to theatrical fame? It was a gamble; but if it worked, they could be rich. He was inclined to take a grand and optimistic view of things; and whatever proportion of the family income was earned by his wife, the disposal was entirely his.