18. Fanny Kemble, Part Two

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

[OPENING THEME]

Hello! And welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. At the end of our last episode, we left Fanny Kemble, now Mrs. Pierce Butler, in the early days of her marriage in 1834. It was almost immediately evident to her, to her former friends in the theater world, and to everyone in both the Kemble and Butler families, that things in this marriage were not going well. Not at all. 

As we mentioned previously, one of her first discoveries was the source of the wealth of the family she had married into. The Butlers, it turned out, not only had large holdings in Philadelphia real estate, but possessed large plantations on the Sea Islands of Georgia. Nearly a thousand enslaved people were laboring every day to clothe and feed and enrich her, she realized to her horror. It really startles the modern imagination that she could not have known any of this before agreeing to become a Butler. But she repeatedly states in her letters and memoirs that she did not, and I suppose we must take her at her word. Nineteenth Century people could be surprisingly squeamish about discussing certain topics, and her husband Pierce Butler could be amazingly vague and evasive when it came to things he considered his business. For someone like Fanny, who was in complete accord with Parliamentary legislation to end slavery in the British Empire, and who already was in close friendship with American abolitionists such as the Boston Unitarian minister William Channing, it was a deeply disturbing revelation. Rather as if today an ardent environmentalist discovered that her new husband owned open pit coal mines and logging companies.

And it also turned out that Fanny and Pierce Butler had completely different ideas about what marriage even was. Fanny’s own parents’ marriage had difficulties over the years, but their relationship was certainly not based on patriarchy. Many years afterwards, Butler himself would complain that Fanny made an extraordinary statement, soon after their wedding: “She held that marriage should be a companionship on equal terms - a partnership, in which, if both partners agree, it is well; but if they do not, neither is bound to yield.” And to his mind that was simply a ridiculous proposition. What utter nonsense. A man controlled his household in all matters and it was the wife’s duty to support him in all his decisions. And to be fair, in that era, he would not have been wrong in believing that almost every other man in America would take his side about that. Pierce, who had been such a mild-mannered and doting suitor while courting Fanny, soon revealed that he had every intention of being an absolute ruler in his own home.

Early quarrels between the young couple were often about Fanny’s former associations in the theater world. When she wanted to invite to dinner the English actors Charles Matthews and Mrs. Matthews (better known in her day as Madame Vestris), who were great friends of her parents and were then touring America, Pierce icily said that now she was in a higher social situation than mere actors, why would she ever want to associate with them again? So the Matthews did not come over to dine, and indeed Fanny did not associate with other performers in Philadelphia or even attend the city’s theater for years afterwards.

Furthermore, Pierce was completely against her publishing her “Journal of a Young Actress” - which she had faithfully kept, as per her signed contract with a London publisher - about the two years she spent touring American with her father Charles Kemble. Fanny’s manuscript was full of backstage gossip, personal observations about American politics, fashions and customs, bits of her own poetry, and many long lyrical passages about nature and the local scenery. 

It was also full of what we might now call “hot takes”, and even about the American landscape Fanny had proved to be annoyingly and consistently Anglo-centric - she criticized the color of American trees in the autumn as being too garish and showy compared to those of her homeland. I mean, c’mon. But it was her breezy remarks about other members of Philadelphia and New York society that really appalled Pierce. Even with all the names carefully replaced with dashes and dots, it would mean social death if they were published, he felt. He tried to buy out the contract but the publisher, sensing he had a potential best-selling book here, refused. So instead Pierce insisted on Fanny letting him strike out offensive passages from the manuscript. And you can imagine how she felt about that. When Fanny also tried to write a vehement protest against slavery and attach it at the end of the book, Pierce absolutely forbid it. Why, if that got out it was likely that anti-abolitionist mobs would come and burn down their house! 

After yet another protracted argument, Fanny fled the house, resolving to find a way to get back to England alone. After wandering the streets of Philadelphia for hours, the reality struck her that she had no financial resources anymore that were not under her husband's control, so she could go nowhere. Defeated  and despondent, she quietly came back to the Butler family mansion on the corner of 8th and Chestnut, and shut herself in her room for a long time.

Fanny did at least agree not to become an active abolitionist, a political stance which was regarded as a radical extremist position by most Americans of her day. Her name never appeared on the rolls of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, nor did she join any other abolitionist group. She was never a public face of the movement like Lucretia Mott or Angelina Grimke. She certainly never assisted any of Philadelphia’s African-American population or Quakers in running the Underground Railroad, and helping escaped slaves find their ways to freedom. It would have been astounding if she dod, because the plain fact was that among Philadelphia’s upper crust, where the Butlers were, not a few of them also had fortunes that were originally based on the slave trade, or were involved in banking and insurance companies that dealt in accounts and loans that provided slavery’s financial foundation in America. In addition, Fanny seems to have believed, at least at first, the widely-held story that the Butler Family were somehow different, that their plantations were well managed and their slaves treated humanely, and that they took paternalistic care of their people and never allowed slave families to be separated and sent them to Church on Sundays. You know - the good type of slave owners.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But almost every day that her new married life continued, Fanny learned more and more about the truth of the source of the Butler family’s fortunes, and about the years of secretiveness, curdled resentment and intrigue amongst members of the family. It all went back to the first Pierce Butler, who was born in 1744, an emigrant from a large and powerful Anglo-Irish clan. As a younger son, he had no hope of an inheritance, so like many others of his class and era he set off into the world to wrest a fortune from wherever he could in the burgeoning British empire. He became an officer in the Army and his regiment was stationed in the colony of South Carolina. There Butler wooed and married a wealthy heiress of the Middleton family. Resigning his British commission in 1773, Butler became an ardent American patriot during the Revolution, fighting bravely in the cause of Independence, attaining the rank of General, and nearly losing his life and his wife’s estates many times. In the postwar era he became prominent in South Carolina politics and was a delegate from the state of South Carolina to the  Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. During the proceedings he was a fierce advocate for the interests of the white slaveholders and the planter elite. It was due to this Pierce Butler that the infamous 3/5ths clause was inserted in the US Constitution. He also introduced Article 4, Section 2, which ensured slaveholders rights to recover escaped slaves in free states. He signed the document upon its completion and adoption with pride. Under the new Constitution, he was chosen as a Senator from South Carolina multiple times, though he eventually lost popular support in the state due to his erratic and idiosyncratic switching of his political allegiances - rather like his friend Aaron Burr. Burr, by the way, would one day take refuge on Butler’s southern estates as he fled the North after killing Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel. 

In 1790, after the death of his wife, General Butler sold off her land, and had (rather illegally) transferred all the enslaved persons from her estate and moved them to two huge new plantations on the Georgia Sea Islands - St. Simons Island and what soon became known as Butler Island near the towns of Darien and Brunswick, Georgia. He set them to work growing rice and most especially long-fibre cotton. This prime crop was in huge demand in Britain’s cotton mills at the time, and Butler raked in the money, year after year. By 1805 he had settled himself back in Philadelphia, leaving his southern plantations in the care of managers and overseers. Like many former members of the US Congress who had served during the 1790s, he found he missed the amenities of the Quaker City, and most especially he wanted to get involved where the real money was to be made: Banking. Soon he was a director of the First Bank of the United States and was one of the wealthiest men in America. He built a showy and impressive mansion on the northeast corner of 8th & Chestnut Streets, and purchased a 300 acre property near Germantown northwest of Philadelphia, where he built a country estate, called Butler Place.

Although he was an ardent proponent of liberty and democracy - at least for white property owners such as himself, within his own family General Butler was famously controlling and tyrannical. He disinherited his only surviving son, who had moved to France in order to escape his awful father. In his will he left his money just to his three daughters. Only the oldest daughter had married - to a kindly and mild-mannered Philadelphia physician, Dr. James Mease. The Mease’s had two sons, but before he died in 1822, the family patriarch specified in his will that they would have to change their last name to Butler if they ever wanted to inherit his money. Which is exactly what Pierce Mease Butler, and his brother John had done, shortly before Fanny Kemble had arrived on the scene in 1832. And eventually into this family - not knowing any of its alarming history - she had cast her lot. In fact when she and Pierce were married at Philadelphia’s Christ Church on 2nd Street in June of 1834, the grave of his grandfather was in the churchyard outside only a few steps away. He’s one of several Founding Fathers buried there, to be sure - but his legacy was toxic, in so many ways. The Philadelphia diarist Sidney Fisher noted that to his mind, every woman who had ever been a member of the Butler family had eventually become miserable. Fanny was to be the next of their victims.

Her fate was sealed, it seemed. Soon she and her new husband had moved out to make their home at the family’s country estate, Butler Place in Germantown. While Pierce attended lazily to his supposed law practice in Philadelphia, Fanny attempted to spread local goodwill by being a typical Lady Bountiful of the Manor - on the Fourth of July; she sponsored a holiday feast for her neighbors with plenty of food and drink spread out on the lawn, not realizing that most of the population of Germantown back then were Quakers, and that they neither drank spirits nor took days off from work, not even for America’s Independence Day. Then Fanny became pregnant and her daughter Sarah was born in May of 1835. The child was healthy and beautiful but it had been a difficult labor for Fanny. To lose extra weight Fanny was soon out determinedly riding horses for exercise, scandalizing Philadelphia by insisting on wearing male riding attire, with Turkish trousers instead of skirts. A portrait shows Fanny looking thin again, but also distant and somewhat drawn. The vivacity of previous images made when she was an actress had seemingly drained away.

Perhaps the wan look she exhibits in this portrait was because of the public reaction to the recent publication of her book, Journal of a Young Actress. As the publishers had supposed, the book had become an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, even the future Queen Victoria read it. But young Vickie’s opinion of it, it turned out, was about the same as everybody else's: that though it was highly entertaining and vividly written, there was much in it that was just scandalous, silly and embarrassing to Fanny. American journalists, for their part, certainly didn’t like it that at one point she compared them to swarming insects. Even her friend the American novelist Elizabeth Sedgwick allowed that the book lacked ‘tact, judgment, and good sense’. Fanny tried to ignore the reviews and busied herself with the tasks of motherhood. Ominously, Pierce began to find excuses to stay ‘in town’ during the week, and often didn’t come back to Germantown at all at night. Arguments between the young couple got worse. Fanny began to suspect he was already unfaithful to her, and seizing an opportunity when she heard her father was ill, she took little Sarah and rushed back home. As Fanny left these shores for the first time in four years, it was clear that she had gone through the first full cycle of American celebrity: from initial enchantment and adulation, to disenchantment, public scorn and then ridicule. As she boarded the packet to England, the New York Mirror wrote: “ What with her playing, scribbling, riding and marrying, she has been as much talked about as a comet!  . . From the silent manner of her departure, we fear there is a settled coolness between her and our republican publick.”

Well, the story of her marriage keeps getting worse from there. I’m sorry I don’t have time to cover every aspect of Fanny Kemble’s life during her long exile from the theatre, but after all, that’s not strictly our mission here. And I’m happy to report that her story has been detailed by many great writers and historians, and if you want to know more I direct you to the blog entries and bibliographies that we always post about our subjects on our website: AITHpodcast.com. 

Suffice it to say that Fanny and Pierce had some moments of reconciliation, as it were, and during one of those she returned to Philadelphia and the couple had their second daughter, also named Frances Anne. The baby was born on the exact same date as her sister had been in May of 1838, and because of her imminent confinement, and perhaps to the family’s relief, Fanny could not join the famous Pennsylvania Hall meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia that month, and the subsequent riot and attack on the building by violent anti-abolition mobs. As her husband had predicted, they burned the place down - though the zeal of the undaunted abolitionists continued to burn, too.

That summer, with the new baby in tow, the entire family finally went off together to inspect their property in Georgia. Upon the death of their last surviving aunt, Pierce and his brother John had finally received their full inheritance and rights to the Butler plantations. Fanny had long begged him that she at least be allowed to see the place, and her husband at long last acquiesced. Throughout the arduous journey and despite the multitude of motherly and wifely chores she had to attend to, Fanny, being Fanny, kept a meticulous journal, detailing everything she saw and experienced. 

Upon their arrival, it seemed like almost the entire population of the Butler slaves turned out to greet the arriving young master and his family, effusively and happily. Which is not perhaps what you might expect, but some historians have pointed out that since the worst thing that could happen to a long established community of enslaved people was the death or bankruptcy of their owners, and everyone being sold off and fed into the terrifying and remorseless spread of American slavery. Pierce Butler actually showing up with a young and healthy-looking wife and children was a welcome sign of stability and continuity in their lives, that their own families perhaps did not face the danger of being broken up. That may be true, but admittedly we don’t have much direct testimony or evidence from their point of view about the event. 

Be that as it may, we do know that Fanny could immediately see that the Butler plantation was not - contrary to its reputation - a well-run and beneficent place. The supposed ‘big house’ where she and her family were installed proved to be a much smaller and more primitive affair than she expected, with few rooms and a detached dirt-floored kitchen. The enslaved people, for their part, were disgracefully ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill treated. For example, Fanny noted in painful detail all the gynecological issues and complications from frequent childbirth most of the enslaved women faced, even as they were sent daily into the fields along with their small children. It was almost overwhelming, but during her stay she did what she could to at least ameliorate the misery - establishing an infirmary, paying small wages to her personal servants, and leading hygiene campaigns among the children. She even furtively taught one boy the alphabet, which she knew was illegal and dangerous. About the larger issue of the injustice of slavery that she now saw first hand, she felt increasing indignation but felt she could do little, for the moment.

Reading the journal today, Fanny’s description of the people of the islands with their Africanized Gullah dialect is done with many words that are more than a bit jarring to modern sensibilities, though clearly she tries to be sympathetic. But it is her description of the white people, their supposed civilized and civilizing masters for which she reserves her most pointed and withering prose. Her own husband came in for the worst of it. Every day Pierce Butler seemed to shrink in her eyes, as the magnitude of his moral hypocrisy and cruelty became more evident to her. Once again, as in our last episode, I am deeply honored by having the actress Jessica Bedford to voice the words of Fanny Kemble from her journals and letters:

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:]  “Mr. Butler was called out to listen to a complaint of overwork from a gang of pregnant women. I did not stay to listen to the details of their petition, for I am unable to command myself on such occasions and Mr. Butler seems positively degraded in my eyes as he stood enforcing upon these women the necessity of their fulfilling their appointed tasks.”

And another thing that deeply worried Fanny was watching the bad moral influence upon her three year-old daughter Sarah. The little blond girl was petted and made much of wherever she went, usually surrounded by admiring playmates who were her own age, but who were already keenly aware of the yawing difference in their social rank.

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] “I was observing her today among her worshipers, for they follow her as such and saw, with dismay, the universal eagerness with which they sprang to obey her little gestures of command . . think of learning to rule despotically your fellow creatures before the first lesson of self-government had been well spelled over! It makes me tremble; but I shall find a remedy, or remove myself and the children from this misery and ruin.”

But what, in her current situation, could she actually do? For the four years of her life that preceded her marriage, when Fanny was a successful actress, she had literally coined money, she could not help remembering. And never until this moment, she wrote, did it really strike her, what exactly it meant that she had so gladly agreed to give up her own independence forever for a maintenance by the unpaid labor of slaves. She never could be the same person after this. And upon the family's return to Philadelphia, later that year, she entered into one of the most difficult periods of her life.

Her marriage was effectively over, and she banished Pierce from her bed. Her anti-slavery journal was privately circulated in manuscript form among her abolitionist friends, so people she cared about at least knew what she thought now. But nonetheless she sank into a depression. Pierce, for his part, began a new series of affairs with other women. He even fought an actual duel in Delaware with a man named Schott who publicly accused Pierce of having an open affair with Mrs. Schott. It was the standard pistols at dawn encounter and both men missed their opponent. So, said the local wags, fortunately Schott did not get pierced by his wife’s seducer, but unfortunately neither did Pierce get Shot. 

Back at home, the Butler’s marital battle went on for years, and the situation was not helped by the fact that Pierce’s financial mismanagement of his enormous fortune had forced the family to vacate and rent out Butler Place in Germantown. For a long period the family was living in a tawdry boardinghouse on Washington Square in Philadelphia. but it wasn’t until November of 1843 that Fanny asked him for a formal separation.

This meant losing access to her children, which was agonizing. Though she was occasionally allowed to see little Sarah and little Fan, Pierce was always finding ways to separate them from her mother and to control her. In 1845 he finally announced that she would no longer be able to raise the children, and Fanny was forced to give up the fight. Marriage laws of the day gave the husband complete control over the children until they reached the age of 21. Maddeningly, he also had complete control over her financially. Legally any money she earned belonged to him, and Pierce expressly forbade her from going on the stage again or even associating with theater people or certain others of her friends that he disapproved of. 

With no bearable life left in America, Fanny sailed again for England again in October of 1845. She wrote to a friend disconsolately that  “He has sent me penniless as well as husbandless and childless home.” 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

The famous dictum of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’ has been disproven so many times that it almost seems ridiculous to quote it anymore. But since the theatrical metaphor is particularly apt for our subject, in this case perhaps we can trot it out for yet another refutation. We do find a second act in Fanny Kemble’s, well, Anglo-American life. After casting aside what she felt was the wretched practice of acting on the stage earlier in her life, she found that now she was able to return to the dramatic arts to support herself. It was a lucrative source of income, and one that was not controlled by her husband.

In England, she found her feet again. Her mother had passed away, but her father Charles Kemble, who was now retired from the stage and was still living off the income of the money Fanny had settled on him, from their earlier tour back in happier days. Although her two brothers were struggling in their careers in academia and the army, her younger sister Adelaide had become a famous opera singer. Indeed, the Kemble name still worked like magic in the theater world, and Fanny soon found work performing Shakespeare again, first at provincial theatres, then back in London at Covent Garden, and then at the Princess Theatre, co-starring with the most famous leading man of his day, William Charles Macready. She felt keenly how much her neglected skills had grown rusty and how much her older body little suited some of her former roles. But the fees she earned were gratifyingly large. True, the work with Macready she found extremely trying, because he was famously openly judgemental about his fellow actors and he tended to hiss and carp at them under his breath during scenes together on stage. In his private diaries, he acidly remarked that Fanny was essentially untrained and to his mind shockingly amateurish. “I have never seen a Desdemona so bad, so unnatural, so affected, so conceited,” Macready fumed.

There was not only the insults of her costars but other issues she had always hated about the stage - paying for one’s own costumes, and dressers, and accommodations and dealing with the constant appraisal by the audience of her body.

But soon Fanny found herself engaged in a much better and even more lucrative career. Her father had begun giving readings in lecture halls of the works of Shakespeare, from his own edited versions of the Bard’s Complete works. He could earn twenty pounds or more from a single performance - all he had to do was show up with a book, and audiences would flock to hear him. But increasingly Charles Kemble was growing deaf and could not hear them, or himself. So he happily turned over that side of business to his daughter. With just three or four bookings a week, traveling about the country visiting lecture rooms and concert halls, she found she could make quite a respectable living, and even start to save again, longing for the day when she could be reunited with her daughters once they came of age. She was not even sure Pierce was giving them her letters. She published articles, books and poetry when she could, but her journal about her time in Georgia she dared not print, lest he punish her for it in some way.

But she had at last found the work of her life. Her rich and resonant voice filled the largest rooms. She would make her entrance simply, sit down at a little desk with her text with a reading lamp, arrange her skirts, and begin. She read some poems and short pieces, but principally she read the entire plays of Shakespeare. No longer confined to just embodying the female roles, she read every part in the play. She could be Hamlet, Romeo, Macbeth, King Lear. She could be Oberon and Titania, Othello and Desdemona, Prince Hal and Falstaff. And audiences flocked to hear her, a greater number of people than had ever seen her on stage, because in that era many people were still unwilling to enter a theater because of religious beliefs or moral scruples - but a lecture, well now that was something different. And for her it was deeply satisfying work:

[Jessica Bedford as  Fanny:] “For more than twenty years, as a wandering rhapsodist, I never consciously sacrificed my sense of what was due my work . . . to my own profound feeling of the sense of these noble works I owed whatever power I found to interpret them. My greatest reward has been, passing a large portion of my life in familiar intercourse with the greatest and the best English mind and heart, living almost daily in that world, into which he lifted me.”

It’s true that she was reading somewhat expurgated versions of Shakespeare’s texts, and her performance never lasted more than two hours. But she did not shrink from offering to her audience even the more obscure ones such as Cymbeline or the ones previously considered problematic, like The Tempest. She did not condescend to her audiences. In response to a Boston friend who asked her for a version of Measure for Measure that was edited down so as to be readable by school girls, Fanny wrote back: 

[Jessica Bedford as Fanny:] “My dear Mary, the story of ‘Measure for Measure’ is incorrigible, and though I read the play because it is full of fine things - and also the best version of the text ‘let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall’ - is is not suitable for babes but strong meat for men . . Shakespeare’s plays were written neither for women nor for children.”

By 1847, Pierce Butler finally agreed to a divorce settlement, although he had threatened her again and again with a full divorce trial, in the end her lawyers, including Charles Sumner and her powerful friends the Sedgwicks brought him to agree to a settlement with what he considered his disobedient and fractious wife. Although, typically he never was to really honor his promise of regular payments to her, she did not care anymore, for she no longer really needed them. She began to tour America (at least the Northeast and Midwest, where she was welcome, and never the South, where she was not), in the same way she toured in England. In November of 1849 she even played Philadelphia again for the first time in fifteen years. She read King Lear to a packed room at Sansom Street Hall, a public lecture room right near Independence Hall. A kid named Horace was in the audience, a 14 year-old red-headed son of Fanny’s friend the Unitarian minister William Furness, and this experience would make him a lifelong addict of the Bard. Later, of course, Horace Howard Furness would become one of the most eminent Shakespeare scholars in America, a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the editor of the Variorum Shakespeare. Thirty years later he would also receive one of Fanny’s prized possessions, a pair of old leather gloves that her Aunt Sarah Siddons had been given by the actor David Garrick, who claimed it had been made in the shop of John Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, perhaps worked on by another 14 year-old kid, the young Will Shakespeare himself.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Though she never was to settle completely in one spot ever again in her life, Fanny was able to travel between Europe and America for the next thirty years. She bought a house in Lenox, Massachusetts near her dear friends the Sedgwicks. And when her daughters reached the age 21 she was able to meet with them freely once again. True both of the girls retained significant attachment to their father - especially the younger one, Frances. The older daughter Sarah, married Dr. Owen Wister, one of their neighbors from Germantown, and was able to settle down at Butler Place to raise a family as their parents had once tried to do. Fortunately it was separated from their father’s control before he lost almost all his money by speculating in stocks before the great Panic of 1857 - a calamity that had led him to finally do the thing the Butlers had always sworn they would never do. In an enormous and ghastly auction in 1859 near Savannah, hundreds of Butler slaves were sold off to pay his debts. Pierce Butler tried to keep families together, he claimed, and he solemnly pressed shiny new quarters into their hands as they went off with their new owners. The tight-knit community on Butler Island was forever shattered - though with the outbreak of the Civil War two years later, monumental change was coming anyway, as we now know - but they, of course, did not.

Fanny herself spent most of the Civil War period living in Germantown, as a guest of her son-in-law in her old home. Fortunately, Dr. Wister doted upon Fanny - sometimes much to Sarah’s annoyance. Pierce Butler was arrested by the US government as a suspected Southern sympathizer and spy for a long period. His former plantations on the Sea Islands became a magnet for black people fleeing the Confederacy, and they were occupied by Union Soldiers - indeed the famous 54th Massachusetts regiment of African American soldiers was quartered there for a time. Their leader, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was the son of friends of hers and had known Fanny as a boy in Boston, was able to convey to her by letter greetings from some of the former Butler slaves, who remembered her fondly, it seemed. Sadly, Colonel Shaw and many of his men were soon after killed in the attack on nearby Ft. Wagner outside Charleston, the news of which caused Fanny considerable sadness and distress.

During the war Fanny continued her readings, and often dedicated the earnings to charitable causes supporting the Union. But her most profound action during this time was finally releasing to the general public her long-held memoirs of her time in the South, published under the title Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1863 both in England and America. It received glowing reviews in the British and the Northern press. And though we know today that there exists many other first person narratives of American slavery - indeed most importantly from former slaves themselves. Fanny Kemble was already a well known public figure, a celebrity, and so her searing eye-witness depiction of Southern slavery, coming out so soon after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was regarded by many as a confirmation of the justice of the Union cause. It was sort of a “Why We Fight”, shoring up the moral basis for continued efforts to utterly rid America of the stain of its original sin, at times when it seemed like the war would never end, and some were even urging compromise and settlement in the wake of Southern victories. The American edition of the book came out in June of 1863, and so was widely distributed and read in the wake of the Battle of Gettysburg in early July of that year. Lengthy reviews by abolitionists such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Horace Greeley added to its reputation. It was reportedly read aloud to assemblies of workingmen in England whose factories were idled by the dearth of Southern cotton, and it may have strengthened the British public’s resolve never to recognize the Confederacy. Though some have argued that the book's greatest impact came in the Twentieth Century, as writers and historians eagerly mined it for vivid details, it more than anything else served to burnish Fanny Kemble’s historical reputation. It has lasted far longer in the national memory, more than any performance she ever gave.

Even though the book begins with a clear-eyed description how how unjustly even free black people were typically treated on the streets of Northern cities such as Philadelphia, it was its forceful denunciation of the physical, psychological and moral cruelty of American Chattel slavery in the South that had made its reputation. In the South, in particular, some people bristle to this day at Fanny’s blistering denunciations about how white men had children with women they held in bondage, and how white women gave their own children to black women to suckle from the very bodies they supposedly so disdained. It was rough stuff. Fanny's own daughter Frances would one day return to the property, which stayed in the family’s possession, and write her own refutation of it. Even Fanny’s grandson, the writer Owen Wister, would later write a novel that defended the moral principles of the Southern planters.

But after the Civil War was over, Fanny Kemble had largely turned away from both the private and public battles that had consumed much of her life. After a final series of readings in Philadelphia and elsewhere in 1869, she largely retired, giving in to the issues of her aging body. But not before receiving a final encomium from the Philadelphia press, which in former years had not always known what to make of this brash and difficult Englishwoman. In her final years in the public eye, she was now a Great Person. In May of 1869, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a glowing tribute announcing her final appearance at the Academy of Music reading Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a benefit for the Mercantile Library: “This gifted elocutionist and most estimable lady will give one of her inimitable readings on Wednesday . . . those who attend may confidently count upon an evening of unalloyed intellectual enjoyment.”

Fanny stayed in Philadelphia up through the Centennial Exposition of 1876, and when she found it difficult to walk through the enormous fairgrounds her daughter Sarah pushed her in a wheelchair. Typically, she compared it unfavorably with the grander exhibitions she had seen in London and elsewhere, but she allowed that she was very excited by the steam engines of Machinery Hall. She was looking forward to returning to England at last, in her final years, her finances now firmly anchored by the hefty earnings of her reading tours. Her other daughter Frances had married an English clergyman - indeed he was posted for a good while at Stratford-upon-Avon, which allowed Fanny to make frequent visits to the Bards birthplace and grave. Interestingly, in her final years she spent a lot of time writing even more memoirs, poems, and even her first novel. It was the literary life she had always wanted. She even became a close friend of the American expatriate writer Henry James, and once told him a story from Kemble family history about her ne’er do well brother Henry which James eventually used as the basis for his novel Washington Square, and so which eventually became the play and movie entitled The Heiress. She lived on in London until her death in 1893.

 But back here in Philadelphia, what remains? Well, as the memories of Fanny Kemble faded, Sully’s stunning portraits of her still glow on the walls of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and The Rosenbach museum. And those gloves that she gave to Professor Horace Furness are still in the library at the University of Pennsylvania, along with a carefully preserved lace handkerchief that she herself dabbed her brow with while she gave her final 1868 reading of the play Hamlet in Philadelphia.  But there’s another monument to Fanny Kemble in Philadelphia I’d like to mention, more obscure, but perhaps more meaningful. There’s a delightful triangle of greenery and open space in the Germantown/Olney area of Philadelphia named Kemble Park. Part of the former Butler Place estate, it sits close by to the campus of La Salle University in Northwest Philadelphia. Nearby is Wister Wood, and also Einstein Medical Center and Central High School. At the corner of Olney Avenue and N. 16th Street, across from a row of neat houses, is set a large stone with a brass plaque. “Fanny Kemble Abolitionist Memorial Park,” it reads. “Named in honor of Fanny Anne Kemble  . . . Abolitionist, Shakespearean Actress, Poet.” And to me that seems as fitting a tribute as she could have ever wished for.

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. Look there for information about our upcoming walking tour! Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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