Fanny Kemble: Stage Celebrity and Witness to a Georgia Plantation

In the autumn of 1829 the Covent Garden theater in London was close to being sold off. Its proprietors, among them the actor Charles Kemble, had been locked for years in a Chancery suit, and his wife came home one day saying she had seen the building “all covered with placards and bills of sale.” Their 19-year-old daughter Frances Anne, known as Fanny, offered to become a governess so that her father would at least not have to support her. Her mother asked her instead to learn a part.¹

Within weeks her image was being sold on china in London, and three years later New York audiences were being turned away from her performances. A husband from Philadelphia then took her, for the winter and spring of 1838-1839, to the Butler estates at the mouth of the Altamaha River, where she lived among the people whose unpaid labor kept her household. The journal she kept there, printed in 1863, is why historians of American slavery cite her as often as historians of the theater do.

A debut staged to save a theater

Kemble’s own account of her start, written about fifty years later in Records of a Girlhood, is matter-of-fact about the economics. She first recited Portia for her mother, who judged that there was “hardly passion enough in this part to test any tragic power” and asked for Juliet. After a private recitation for both parents, her father took her to the empty theater to test whether her voice would carry. A family friend hidden in a box told him to bring her out at once, and three weeks later she was on the stage.¹ She wrote to a friend that Juliet would be her first part, with her father playing Mercutio rather than Romeo.¹

The first night was October 5, 1829, with her father as Mercutio and her mother, who had long since retired, returning as Lady Capulet.² Kemble remembered standing in the wings in tears while her aunt repaired her rouge, then being pushed on stage to “the tremendous shout that greeted me.” By the balcony scene, she wrote, she had forgotten the audience.¹ According to the Dictionary of National Biography, her appearances were profitable enough to clear 13,000 pounds of the theater’s debt.²

The money changed her life at once. Instead of an allowance of twenty pounds a year she now had, she wrote, “at least a thousand a year,” including thirty guineas a week at Covent Garden, and a carriage of her own.¹ She also recorded, with notable honesty, that she never liked the work. Acting, in her view, was a business of “incessant excitement and factitious emotion,” and “a business which is public exhibition, unworthy of a woman.”¹

Plates, handkerchiefs and the manufacture of fame

What makes Kemble useful to a historian of celebrity is that she watched her own fame being produced. “From an insignificant school-girl, I had suddenly become an object of general public interest,” she wrote. “I was a little lion in society, and the town talk of the day.”¹

Her memoir lists the merchandise. Shop windows were full of a sketch of her by the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. She was shown “plates and saucers” decorated “with small figures of me as Juliet and Belvidera,” and gentlemen showed her buff neck-handkerchiefs printed with what looked like lilac flowers but proved, close up, to be tiny copies of Lawrence’s head of her.¹

At the time she took all this as proof of success. In old age she was more skeptical: “I have since known more of the manufacture of public enthusiasm and public triumphs,” she wrote, noting how many people depended on keeping Covent Garden full on her nights. Shown a copy of her own play Francis the First marked “tenth edition,” she suspected bookseller’s puffery, and summed up: “At twenty I believed it all; at sixty-eight I find it difficult to believe any of it.”¹ Still, she gave a figure she evidently trusted: she played Juliet “upward of a hundred and twenty times running.”¹

America, 1832 to 1834: the lion of the season

In 1832 Charles Kemble took his daughter on an American tour. The New York merchant Philip Hone recorded their arrival on the packet ship Pacific in early September, and noted that the daughter was said to inherit the talents of a family that included Sarah Siddons, her aunt.³

Hone’s diary is a rare outside view of how a celebrity was received in person. After hosting the Kembles at dinner on September 15, he wrote that Miss Kemble, “like all young persons who have become celebrated, has many and strong admirers. But many dislike her on first acquaintance.” He thought allowance should be made for a young woman conscious that she was “one of the lions of the day, and as such the object more of curiosity than of affection,” and he guessed, correctly, that necessity rather than choice had put her on the stage.³¹ Three days later she made her American debut as Bianca in Milman’s tragedy Fazio at the Park Theatre. “I have never witnessed an audience so moved, astonished, and delighted,” Hone wrote.³² By November he recorded that hundreds were turned away from the doors.³

A short profile in Harvard Magazine (2000) adds the trappings familiar from modern fame: “Fanny Kemble caps” and “Fanny Kemble curls” in the shops, an invitation to the White House from Andrew Jackson, and Harvard professors threatening to cancel classes that clashed with her matinees because students were deserting them.⁴ Those details have not been checked here against newspapers of the 1830s, but they fit Hone’s picture of a performer whose presence filled houses wherever she went.

By September 1833 Hone was passing on a rumor that this engagement would probably be her last, because she was “married already, or about to be,” to Pierce Butler of Philadelphia.³ She married Butler on June 7, 1834, and left the stage. Writing to a friend that October, she said that in leaving it she “left nothing that I regretted.”⁵

A diary in print and a marriage into slaveholding

Early in 1835 Kemble published the diary she had kept on the tour, under her married name, as Journal of a Residence in America. Its preface calls it “my personal journal, and not a history or a description of men and manners in the United States.”⁶ The book was full of frank first impressions, and some of them concerned the very people who had entertained her. Her entry for September 15, 1832 describes a New York dinner of about twenty people, the women’s dress, the singing of a local musical favorite, and service she found lacking: not enough servants, no finger-glasses, and coffee but no tea.⁶

Hone recognized his own dinner party. In January 1835 he complained that extracts were being reprinted in the newspapers, that her remarks on her hosts were “all in bad taste,” and that if she had approved the publication “she is a greater fool than ever I expected it would fall to my lot to record her.” He added the old line, “Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!”³ For a celebrity, the journal was a lesson in how quickly admiration can turn when the observed begins to observe.

The marriage carried a larger difficulty that Kemble herself named early. In a letter from 1835 she wrote that “the family into which I have married are large slaveholders,” that their fortune depended on plantations in Georgia, and that she would rather earn her bread again than “answer for what I consider so grievous a sin against humanity.”⁵ According to Harvard Magazine, Butler inherited his grandfather’s Sea Island estates in 1836.⁴

Butler Island and St. Simons, 1838 to 1839

In the winter and spring of 1838-1839 Kemble lived with her husband and two small daughters on the Butler plantations at the mouth of the Altamaha River, near Darien, Georgia: a rice plantation on Butler Island and a cotton plantation at Hampton on St. Simons Island. She kept a journal in the form of letters to her friend Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick.⁷⁸⁴ By her report, the estates held about seven hundred people on three tracts of land.⁷

The journal has to be read for what it is: one white mistress’s view, written by a woman with power to ask favors but no power to free anyone. Some of her descriptions of the people she met use the demeaning racial language of her time. But it also records names, relationships and requests that would otherwise have left no trace, and much of what it records is the enslaved people’s own effort to protect themselves and their families.

Women came to her with petitions. One group, all pregnant, asked her to persuade their master to lighten their field tasks, because he had already refused them; the overseer told her afterwards that their work was not too much for them.⁷ She noted that a man named Frank ranked second only to the overseer, ruling over the drivers and running the island in the overseer’s absence, yet was himself enslaved and could be sold at his owner’s will.⁷ When she asked the overseer how many people on the estate could read, he answered, “No; very few, he was happy to say, but those few were just so many too many.” Teaching enslaved people to read was illegal in Georgia, and a Methodist preacher named London, who read the Bible to others, would not tell her who had taught him.⁷

The episode that shaped her most involved a young woman named Psyche, mother of two small children, and her husband, Joe. Psyche did not know who owned her and feared being taken to Alabama by a departing overseer. Then Joe learned that Butler had given him to that same overseer as a gift, which would have separated him from his wife, children and parents. Kemble witnessed his protest and pleaded with her husband; in the end Joe was left behind, and Butler bought Psyche and the children.⁷ The experience pushed her to measure her own past fame against the labor that now supported her. “For the last four years of my life that preceded my marriage, I literally coined money,” she wrote, money she had given up “for a maintenance by the unpaid labour of slaves.”⁷

The sale of 1859 and the book of 1863

The marriage did not survive. Harvard Magazine dates the divorce to 1849 and says it cost Kemble custody of her two daughters; the 1901 Dictionary of National Biography gives the year as 1848.⁴² She returned to the stage in 1847 and from 1848 found steadier work giving public readings of Shakespeare in Britain and America.²

The people on the Butler estates paid a far higher price for Pierce Butler’s finances. After losses in the crash of 1857-1858, his half of the people held on the plantations was sold at the race course near Savannah on March 2 and 3, 1859, to pay his creditors. A report printed by the American Anti-Slavery Society counted 436 people announced for sale and 429 sold, for a total of $303,850. It explained that buyers were promised sales “in families,” but a family meant only a married couple and young children, so parents, grown siblings and other kin could be scattered across several states. It told of Jeffrey and Dorcas, a young couple who hoped to marry but were sold to different buyers, and of Butler handing out a dollar apiece, in quarters, to the people he had just sold.⁹ A Georgia Historical Society marker near the site says the breakup of families and loss of home are remembered in African American heritage as “the weeping time.”⁸ The historian Anne C. Bailey has since written a book-length study of the sale and its memory.¹⁰

Kemble’s journal appeared in London in 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, with a preface dated January 16 of that year: “The slaves in whom I then had an unfortunate interest were sold some years ago.”⁷ The 1859 auction report was reissued the same year as “a sequel to Mrs. Kemble’s Journal.”¹¹

Kemble lived until January 15, 1893, long enough, she joked, to surprise people who “supposed I was dead.”¹² Her friend Henry James, writing just after her death, called her “a celebrity in the twenties” and judged that “She had encountered publicity as she had encountered bad weather; but the public, on these occasions, was much more aware of her, I think, than she was aware of the public.”¹² The fame came from Juliet. The writing that lasts is the record of Psyche, Joe, London, Frank and the women who asked for lighter work, people whose names survive because a celebrity was, for one winter, made to look.

Footnotes

1. Kemble, Records of a Girlhood (1878; Holt 2nd ed. 1880), chs. on her debut and first season. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. Knight, “Kemble, Frances Anne,” DNB Supplement (1901). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Diary of Philip Hone, vol. 1 (1889), entries for September 1832, November 13, 1832, September 30, 1833, and January 1835. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Harvard Magazine, “Fanny Kemble,” September 2000. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Kemble, Records of Later Life (1882), letters of October 26, 1834 and 1835 (Branchtown). ↩ ↩²

6. Kemble, Journal of a Residence in America (1835), preface and entry for Saturday the 15th. ↩ ↩²

7. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1863), preface and journal letters. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

8. Georgia Historical Society marker, “Largest Slave Sale in Georgia History” (2008). ↩ ↩²

9. Great Auction Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia (1859). ↩

10. Bailey, The Weeping Time (2017), Crossref record. ↩

11. What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? (1863), catalog record. ↩

12. James, “Frances Anne Kemble,” Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893). ↩ ↩²