1
A Story in a Book
‘The past is now to me like a story in a book', Ellen Terry wrote almost forty
years later in 1906. It was a fairy story, her life; or perhaps one of those
melodramas she had been playing onstage for as long as her admirers could
remember. That June marked her fiftieth year in the theatre and the event
was celebrated with wild delight in the streets of London. Crowds filled
Drury Lane from midday till six o'clock in the evening – they would have
stayed longer, singing, dancing, growing hoarse from cheering, but their
rejoicings had to give way for Ellen's evening performance at the Court
Theatre in Sloane Square. She was playing Lady Cicely Waynflete, a
character Bernard Shaw had specially written for her, in Granville-Barker's
production of Captain Brassbound's Conversion.
In the public imagination Ellen Terry had become an enchantress.
Floating serenely across the stage, she was seen as a symbol of pure romance,
virginal, unblemished, still in need of male protection: a ‘wonderful being',
the American actress Elizabeth Robins described her, ‘with the proportions
of a goddess and the airy lightness of a child'. She ‘encompassed the age',
wrote the theatre historian Michael Booth, ‘in a way no English actress had
done, before or since'.
Her beauty was not created by paint and lip-salve nor was it the illusory
beauty of theatrical make-believe. She possessed a natural radiance and
‘moved through the world of the theatre', Bram Stoker recorded, ‘like
embodied sunshine'. The artist Graham Robertson believed her to be ‘the
most beautiful woman of her time' and many people agreed with him. With
the ‘Hair of Gold' and ‘Crimson Lips' celebrated in a sonnet by Oscar Wilde,
and a mysterious smile which perhaps concealed no mystery, she was
recognised as a Pre-Raphaelite ideal. Her reputation was extraordinary: not
only was she a monument to female virtue, but also said to be the highestpaid
woman in Britain. Virginia Woolf was to speculate as to whether the
course of British history might have dramatically changed had she actually
been queen, while Queen Victoria, meeting her at Windsor Castle in 1893,
acknowledged her to be tall, pleasing and ladylike – everything a queen
should be. Describing the scenes at Drury Lane as ‘a riot of enthusiasm, a
torrent of emotion', The Times dubbed her ‘the uncrowned Queen of
England' – though by now she had begun to resemble a Queen Mother.
Every Victorian gentleman who saw her at the Lyceum Theatre performing
opposite the great Sir Henry Irving fell in love with her – and no
Victorian wife objected. Some young men, it was said, would actually
propose marriage to their girlfriends with the words: ‘As there's no chance of
Ellen Terry marrying me, will you?' Others, equally dazzled, reacted
differently. ‘I ceased to consider myself engaged to Miss King forthwith',
wrote H.G. Wells on first seeing Ellen Terry walking one summer's day,
looking like one of the ladies from Botticelli's La Primavera. He remembered
being permitted to ‘punt the goddess about, show her where white
lilies were to be found and get her a wet bunch of forget-me-nots among the
sedges . . .' She seemed to have the secret of eternal youth, to live beyond
good and evil. In the opinion of Thomas Hardy, her diaphanous beauty
belonged to a different order of being – a ‘sea-anemone without shadow' or
a miraculous dancing doll like Coppelia, apparently brought to life by the
toymaker's magic, ‘in which, if you press a spring, all the works fly open'.
Even in her fifties she was still a marvellous child, delicious and fascinating.
Many people had expected her to marry Henry Irving – they were such a
romantic couple onstage. It was rumoured that he secretly loved her – for
how could he not have done so? Yet she was not regarded as a dangerous
woman like the notorious Mrs Patrick Campbell or Edward VII's mistress
Lillie Langtry. On the contrary she appeared an example of young
motherhood as well as First Lady of the London stage. Her public image was
all the more extraordinary since it conflicted dramatically with the facts of
her life. And if those facts now seemed ‘like a story in a book', this was partly
because she had recently decided to write a book. She began her memoirs
that year.
‘I never felt so strongly as now', she said, ‘that language was given me to
conceal rather than to reveal – I have no words at all to say what is in my heart.'
When the book was published, it appeared to Virginia Woolf like ‘a bundle
of loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch . . . Some very
important features are left out. There was a self she did not know . . .'
‘I was born on the 27th February, 1848', she wrote. After her death, when
these memoirs were being prepared for a new edition, her editors loyally
claimed that ‘we have found Ellen Terry the best authority on Ellen Terry'.
Yet there are potent omissions and genuine confusions in her writings which
cover little more than half her adult life and grow ragged towards the end. As
to the facts, she gives not only the wrong year for her birth but is also
uncertain where it took place.
Alice Ellen Terry was born on 27 February 1847, at 44 Smithford Street,
theatre lodgings above an eating house in Coventry, the city of three spires.
On her birth certificate her father gave his occupation as ‘Comedian'. Her
earliest memory was of being locked in a whitewashed attic of some lodgings
in Glasgow one summer evening while her parents and her elder sister Kate
went off to the theatre. The Terrys were strolling players who travelled the
theatre circuits and were then touring Scotland. But going further back,
Ellen wondered, ‘were we all people of the stage'?

2
The Terrys
Her maternal grandfather, Peter Ballard, was by profession a builder who
worked as a master sawyer in the docklands of Portsmouth, a busy seaport
and garrison town threaded with insalubrious cobbled streets and dark alleys
where, like nocturnal animals, beggars, prostitutes and thieves lay in wait.
He was also a Wesleyan preacher who spoke on Sundays in the smarter areas
of the town with their muddle of demure Georgian houses and medieval
churches. He disapproved of the town's theatre, a barnlike building in the
High Street, which had been temporarily shut down in 1836 for ‘unseemly
and improper conduct'. But his daughter Sarah was to run off at the age of
twenty-one with Ben Terry, the twenty-year-old son of an Irish innkeeper
at the Fortune of War tavern in Portsmouth, a mere boy who had been
picking up a meagre living working the drums in the theatre. In fact both
Ben and Sarah kept their marriage secret from their parents. They were
married on 1 September 1838 in the church where Charles Dickens had
been baptised: St Mary's in Portsea, an area, near the docks, of taverns,
shops and brothels that catered for the navy.
Their future was full of risk and excitement. They were a striking
couple: he ‘a handsome, fine-looking, brown-haired man' in peg-top
trousers; she tall and graceful, with a mass of fair hair and exceptional large
blue eyes. Ben seems to have taken it for granted that his wife would
belong to the theatre and that all their children would be ‘Precocious
Prodigies' like the celebrated juvenile actress Jean Davenport. She had
played at Portsmouth and was to become the original of Dickens's ‘Infant
Phenomenon' in Nicholas Nickleby, giving the theatre there a permanent
place in stage history. The stage was everything to Ben, and Sarah was
quickly caught up by his fervour and enthusiasm. As soon as they were
married, they set off for whatever adventures might await them on the
open road.
Ben had trained himself to be a competent supporting actor. As a teenager
he hung around the stage door of the Theatre Royal where his brother
George played the fiddle and got him casual work shifting scenery, painting
and repairing props, and then playing the drums. He became mesmerised by
what he saw: the frolics, farces and burlesques, the dissolving spectacles and
nautical imitations, the scenarios with songs, the ‘budgets of mirth and
harmony' and juvenile performances in which the current child genius
would dash round and about and in and out, playing all the roles, sometimes
assisted by a ‘marvellous dog'. When the professional season ended, the
theatre was used for lavish balls and assemblies, or taken over by smart
thoroughbred officers of the garrison and their well-groomed ladies who,
under aristocratic patronage and to the beat of rousing marches from the
regimental band, would put on ostentatious amateur performances, their
playbills beautifully printed on pink silk. From watching rehearsals of
the comedies and melodramas, Ben Terry learnt a good deal about the
technique of acting – how to play the well-recognised roles of Heavy Father,
Low Comedian, Walking Gentleman, Singing Servant, Character, Ingenu
and so on. He was particularly fascinated by the expansive actor-manager of
the stock company there. William Shalders appeared to be everywhere,
doing everything, all the time. ‘He painted the scenery, made the props, ran
the box office', recorded the biographer Joy Melville, ‘and even wrote
pirated versions of London dramas in which his wife and daughter acted the
minor roles, and visiting actors the lead parts.' He strongly influenced Ben
Terry, who saw him as someone on whom he might model his own career.
‘My sister Kate and I had been trained almost from our birth for the stage',
Ellen wrote, ‘. . . our parents had no notion of our resting.' Usually she was
bundled up and carried off to her mother's dressing-room in whatever town
or village they had reached. ‘Long before I spoke in a theatre, I slept in one',
she remembered.
These days of travelling suited Ben's cheerful and impulsive nature. On
him the sun always seemed to shine, though his family remained poor. It was
a more worrying time for Sarah. Moving from place to place on carts and
wagons, the children often slept on a mattress laid out on the floors of attics
and played in the small areas below. To add to their income, Sarah would
take on work as Wardrobe Woman or, under the name ‘Miss Yerret' (an
approximate reversal of Terry), play the role of Walking Woman to swell a
crowd or decorate a chorus whenever she was not pregnant or recovering
from a miscarriage. ‘She worked hard at her profession', Ellen wrote, and she
brought up all her children to be ‘healthy, happy and wise – theatre-wise, at
any rate'.
Six of her nine surviving children were to have careers onstage and
Benjamin, who felt he had no dramatic talent, was obliged to work his
passage to Australia and later seek employment in India so as to escape
the force-field of his family destiny. Sarah, whose mother came from a
respectable Scottish family socially superior to most theatre families, saw to
it that her children were kept neat, clean and tidy. She was forever sewing,
holding things together. The girls, she decided, needed little general
education and only the boys were initially sent to school.
Ellen was soon being taught to read, write and speak properly by her
parents. Ben was ‘a very charming elocutionist', Sarah ‘read Shakespeare
beautifully' and they ‘were unsparing in their corrections'. In the late
Victorian and Edwardian theatre Ellen Terry and Johnston Forbes-
Robertson were said to be the only actors who ‘delivered the language of
Shakespeare as if it were their natural idiom, and whose beauty of diction
matched the beauty of the words'. In the opinion of her son, Gordon Craig,
she ‘was very much a daughter of Shakespeare, and when she spoke his
prose it was as though she but repeated something she had heard at home –
something said that morning'.
Ellen quickly learnt how to walk, breathe and cry onstage: in short, how to
behave. She had a genius for pleasing people and even when she mixed up her
lines or got caught in a trap-door, fell over onstage or laughed when she should
have cried, they applauded her from the stalls and galleries. She was, as one
critic called her, ‘a perfect little heap of talent'.
Even so, she was not considered quite so talented as her elder sister. Kate
Terry began her career at the age of four, dancing a hornpipe in a sailor suit,
and was later to display what Charles Dickens called ‘the very best piece of
womanly tenderness I have ever seen onstage'.
The two little girls were born at a fortunate time in the history of the
British stage. In 1843, a year before Kate's birth, a new Theatre Act was
passed which finally broke the monopoly held by the Theatres Royal in
Drury Lane and Covent Garden. These had been the only two theatres in
the country licensed by the Master of the Revels to perform ‘legitimate'
drama under letters patent granted in 1662 by Charles II – though these
licences had been gradually extended to cities of royal residence and
elsewhere through special arrangements. The bawdy, licentious wit of the
late seventeenth century had reflected the amiable frivolity of Charles II's
court, and would eventually lead to a severe reaction. In 1737, provoked by
Henry Fielding's political satires and personal allusions, Robert Walpole
took statutory powers to control dramatic performances by appointing an
Examiner of Plays. On behalf of the Lord Chamberlain (who took the place
of the Master of Revels), this examiner was to license all dramatic works for
performance in public places. One consequence of this strict licensing
system was that Restoration plays were largely replaced by rowdy entertainments
that did not need a licence and that made theatres places of illrepute:
music halls and drinking dens at risk of being devoured by riots and
fires, abominable places to which respectable people – people like Ellen's
grandfather Peter Ballard – never went. The 1843 Act, which was to spread
‘legitimate' theatre through the country, retained the Examiner of Plays,
whose job was to encourage the staging of polite drama.
The Terry family belonged to a theatre that became dominated by a
procession of famous actor-managers. They produced the great Shakespearean
dramas, often in sentimentalised versions and with their parts adapted to
suit the type of character-acting at which each excelled – the specialist
eccentricities of John Hare, the graceful diction and classical good looks of
Forbes-Robertson, the delicious light comedy performances of Charles
Wyndham, Beerbohm Tree's luxurious decadence and genius for burlesque,
George Alexander's aristocratic charm, the perfect deportment of Martin-
Harvey, Gerald du Maurier's easygoing nonchalance. All these and others,
following in the steps of Sir Henry Irving, whose speciality lay in exploiting
the sinister components of romantic melodrama, were to reflect, with their
glittering knighthoods, the genteel revolution that had taken place in the
British theatre by the time of Ellen Terry's jubilee.
Though her attempted stage debut as ‘the Spirit of the Mustard-Pot'
ended in tears, Ellen was to remember her early years of travelling from one
theatre town to another as being intensely happy. Like her father she had a
naturally impulsive temperament whereas Kate seemed to have inherited
her mother's carefulness. In 1852 the actor-manager Charles Kean, hearing
of the eight-year-old Kate Terry's remarkable performance as Prince Arthur
in King John, invited her to recreate the role at the Princess's Theatre in the
West End of London. She went there with her mother and the younger
children, and the following year Ellen, who (aged six) had been ‘looking
after' her father, travelled down with him from Liverpool to join Kean's
company.
The morality of employing very young children onstage intermittently
agitated the Victorians. There were those who, like Bernard Shaw, were to
argue that ‘dressing the stage' with enticing seven- and eight-year-olds,
soliciting infants to make money for the proprietors of theatres, was an
exploitation of impoverished families. How was it possible to justify this
parading of prettily dressed boys and girls, who had not even reached their
teens and had never been to school, so that adults might enjoy a repertoire
of sensational entertainments? Why should theatre managers consider themselves
exempt from the regulations that protected young children from
being exploited in factories and workshops? Their descriptions of theatres as
perfect schools of deportment, where the charges' characters were moulded
by masterpieces of English poetry, were pure commercial bluff. But the
Revd Charles Dodgson claimed that listening to the words of elevating
plays – such as radically cleansed versions of Shakespeare – was an education
in itself and kept children away from truly vicious pursuits on the
streets. Besides, you had only to see these theatre children themselves to
understand how they rejoiced in their work. ‘They like it better than any
game ever invented for them', Dodgson wrote in a letter to The Theatre. This
passion for acting gave children ‘a better average for straightness of spine,
strength, activity, and the bright happy look that tells of health', he argued.
‘The stage child "feels its life in every limb" . . . where the Board school
child only feels its lessons.'
While writing her memoirs, Ellen Terry often wished she had been given
some school lessons on grammar, punctuation and spelling to guide her
through this task. They had worked her hard in Charles Kean's Company,
so hard that on leaving the stage with the other children, sometimes in the
middle of the night, her legs aching, she would creep into the green room
and fall asleep. She hated the labour that led up to her performances, the
wearisome learning of lines and the endless rehearsals lasting all day,
sometimes without lunch or supper. Charles Kean, ‘a short, thickset man'
with ‘chubby features', was a pedant of modest talent who liked to boast of
the verisimilitude of his sets and properties. He enjoyed conducting
rehearsals by ringing a hand-bell from the auditorium. His wife, a fine
intelligent actress called Ellen Tree, ‘parrot-beaked and double-chinned,
moving solemnly within the periphery of her crinoline', would then ascend
the stage and put everything to rights. ‘I admired and loved and feared
her', Ellen remembered. These were exhausting sessions, yet she would not
have exchanged her life with anyone. ‘My whole life was the theatre', she
wrote, ‘. . . during my three years at the Princess's I was a very strong, happy,
and healthy child.'
The Princess's Theatre was a narrow gas-lit building between a furrier's
and a tobacconist's in Oxford Street. It had opened in 1840 and been used
for concerts and operas until, following the new Theatres Licensing Act, a
few plays began to be performed there. Charles Kean, son of the famous
Drury Lane tragedian Edmund Kean (who had unsuccessfully tried to
detach his son from the stage by sending him to Eton), took over the theatre
in 1850 and gave his management there a reputation for extravagant
productions of Shakespeare played against ‘authentic scenery'. These were
interspersed with rather tepid translations of French comedies and some
swashbuckling historical dramas.
At the Princess's, Ellen learnt how to ‘walk the plank', dance a minuet,
draw her breath in through her nose and begin to laugh, how to produce her
vowels correctly, tuck in her chin and puff out her chest when making an
entrance, and also how to manoeuvre gracefully (not jumping like a
kangaroo) while wearing a trailing flannel dress. It was ‘heavy work for
a child, but I delighted in it'.
She delighted especially in what she called ‘the actual doing of my part'.
She played important parts, small parts, dumb parts (the best of which was
walking on carrying a basket of doves, agreeably aware of being regarded
with bitter envy by the other children, and feeling as if this dove-bearer were
the principal attraction in The Merchant of Venice). In Richard II she climbed a
pole to a dizzy height during a street scene; in Henry VIII she was ‘top angel';
and in a comedietta by Edmund Yates she played a tiger (‘Tiger Tom')
wearing a brilliant little pair of top boots. In another production she was ‘a
little boy cheering', but even in these tiny roles such opportunities for acting
precocious boy-girls were exciting. In the Christmas pantomime of 1857 she
played the blonde-haired good fairy Goldenstar, and the frightening bad
fairy Dragonetta with flashing eyes and dark looks. It seemed as if she could
be anyone and that everything was possible: changes of gender, character,
appearance, species and identity. The world of the theatre was limitless.
Ellen's London debut at the age of nine was as the little prince Mamillius
in The Winter's Tale. Increasingly aware of what she looked like, and getting
to recognise the effects she created, she was able many years later to recall
wearing a red-and-silver dress and oddly baggy pink tights for Mamillius,
and a row of tight sausage curls arranged with perfect regularity by her
mother. For two wonderful scenes (before she ‘died' offstage), she propelled
across the boards a splendid ‘property' – a go-cart built like a toy depicted on
a Greek vase in the British Museum. On the first night, with Queen Victoria
and Prince Albert in the theatre, when told by Leontes (Charles Kean) to ‘go
play', she did so with such verve that she tripped over the handle of her gocart
and fell on her back. But it did not matter. The Times described her
performance as ‘vivacious and precocious' and the Revd Charles Dodgson
noted in his diary on 16 June 1856 that he ‘especially admired the acting of
the little Mamillius, Ellen Terry, a beautiful little creature, who played with
remarkable spirit and ease'. Ellen cherished this role so jealously that she
did not miss any of the 102 nights of the run, and her understudy, Clara
Denvil, a little girl with eager eyes, never got the chance to show herself.
In the autumn of 1856 Ellen was given the role of Puck in A Midsummer
Night's Dream. She played it well, romping on the stage while putting a girdle
around about the earth, full of mischief and vitality. Looking in her mirror
she had been dismayed to see how gawky she was growing. But in the role
of Puck she could escape this dismaying image for it was ‘a part in which the
imagination can run riot'. In Shakespeare's moonlight she entered a
fairyland where every wish came true. ‘I grew vain', she remembered, ‘and
rather "cocky".'
Ellen's last major role at the Princess's Theatre was as Prince Arthur in
King John – the part in which her sister Kate had triumphed and which had
been responsible for bringing the Terry family to London. It was the first
really demanding character she had played and, aged eleven, she found the
rehearsals miserably difficult. In a moment of exasperation, Mrs Kean
slapped her face, unexpectedly getting from her the expression of morti-
fication and tears she wanted when Hubert threatens to blind the little
prince who pleads for his life.
Ellen was determined not to fail where her sister had succeeded. She
would get up secretly in the night to practise her lines, experiment with her
voice and examine her gestures in the mirror. For the first time she realised
what perseverance and labour a successful career in the theatre would
demand from her and ‘all vanity fell away from me'.
Her Prince Arthur was judged a success. But at the end of the 1859 season
Charles Kean gave up the Princess's Theatre and sailed to the United
States. Kate and Ellen were earning good money for their ages, but the
Terry family had been growing and, without a steady income, Ben had to
leave London with his daughters and once more seek his fortune on the
road.


Excerpted from A Strange Eventful History. By Michael Holroyd.

Copyright © 2009 by Michael Holroyd.

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in hardcover, and by Picador in trade paperback.



All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the publisher.