1854: Emma Goes Transpontine

As I scrabble and scrape amidst the debris of Emma's life, it gets harder and harder to fill in blanks. After a while, one just doesn't expect to learn anything substantially new. Yes, there's some pleasure in filling in the details of her movements for the spring of 1873, or in learning precisely what lecture she gave in Liverpool (and where) on that day (cold, raining) in February 1882, but the big gaps -- all, for the most part, before 1855 -- remain: gaps. Curator becomes indeed a much more apt word than, say, historian.

But there's always the hope of something fundamentally new, and yesterday brought such newness.

We need to begin by recapitulating, in summary fashion, Emma's story of her life as an actress, adding in the dates that she declined to provide but we have since recovered. That story is, roughly: Emma was a working actress for seven (no, eleven) years in London, until "a baffled sensualist" ended her career by making it impossible for her to work in London theatre, so Emma would be forced to fall back upon the baffled sensualist's protection (that is, become his mistress). This condition persisted for a year, more or less (from late spring of 1854 until early summer of 1855), when Ann Sophia demanded that Emma end the liaison. Emma, at her wits' end, wandering in St. John's Wood, looking for Sir Michael Costa's house, runs instead into Mr. G. H. (George Honey, a member of her company at Sadler's Wells and after), who gets her engaged as a member of the Wallack Company, which is headed to Paris for the summer season to do Shakespeare.

I was, until yesterday, running with that story, so much so that I had published it in the Archive (where it still sits at this moment), and drafted it into the chapters of the biography on Emma's time on the London stage.

Wrong. Dead wrong. Or rather, woefully incomplete.

This failure on my part might serve as an object lesson for that oft-repeated grad school phrase: in important matters, do not depend on secondary sources. Well, I did. And I did so in a notoriously unreliable area of Victorian social history - the history of the London stage. I accepted the (complete and accurate) reconstructed records of the Adelphi Theatre as the sum total of the documentary evidence on Emma's theatre career, spot-checked them against the Times advertisements of the period, and called it good.

Shame, shame, shame...

After wading through every theatre advertisement in the British Library's newspaper database that mentions "Emma Harding," "Miss Emma Harding" or "Miss Harding", a different picture emerges -- one that's more interesting, plausible, and consistent.

As reported, Emma's career at the Adelphi ended in June of 1854.

In September of 1854, Emma is at the Strand Theatre, performing in Hard Times, "for the benefit of Mr. Sidney", who I believe was the owner of the Strand at that time.

Beginning in October of 1854, and running consistently (that is, multiple press mentions per month) until mid-May of 1855, Emma is a member of the company of the Royal Surrey Theatre, performing in a wide variety of work, including farce and panto, until (at least) her last recorded performance, which begins on May 17, 1855.

The Wallack Company was forming in June of 1855, so it's reasonable to assume Emma ended her stint with the Surrey in late May of 1855, and was in Paris doing Shakespeare a month later. Continuous employment as a working actress from 1844 until 1856.

There's a lot to say about this move, from the Adelphi to the Surrey via the Strand (including the discovery that Emma was in competition, in the eyes of the press, with her beautiful and talented Adelphi company-mate Miss Sarah Woolgar, whose career is central to Victorian theatre), but the salient facts to note now are:

• The Surrey at the time was run by Shepherd and Creswick, working actors (as were many theatres) who were known for taking risks of all sorts -- debuting edge-y dramas, running original light operas in the summer season, etc. Surrey's economics were unwashed: two shows at half-past six and half-past nine, two shillings for a box, one shilling for the pit, and six pence for a place in the gallery.
• The benefit performance of Hard Times had, I believe, the assistance and involvement of Charles Dickens.
• The Strand is south of the Thames -- Emma had to go "transpontine" as the then-current saying had it, to find work.

Going across the river for work must have made Emma sick at heart -- crossing the Thames, as an actress, was equivalent to crossing a class line, going down-market. Ann Sophia's not working, Emma's 32-passing-for-21 (we have to keep reminding ourselves of that fact), and her career is decidedly on the decline. Whether there was a "baffled sensualist" in the mix, effectively pushing Emma across the river for work by poisoning the first-tier theatre owners against her, or whether that -- as in other cases in Emma's later life -- is just a (paranoid) convenience, is something we'll probably never know with certainty. But the chance, in the summer of 1855, to go to Paris, and do Shakespeare (where she had begun her career, in 1844), must have seemed to Emma at the time to be the workings of providence.