Abstract
Janice Norwood's Victorian Touring Actresses is a rich, entertaining, and lucidly written addition to the reliably informative Women, Theatre, and Performance Series edited by Kate Dorney and Maggie B. Gale. Wide-ranging and deeply researched, its reach is well beyond the modest limits implied by its title: it does indeed provide an in-depth account of the working conditions, hardships, repertoires, publicity strategies, and financial rewards of Victorian actresses on tour in the UK and overseas, but it also offers an extraordinary wealth of information and insights into the life-long challenges and choices facing all female theatre professionals. Norwood reconstructs actresses’ career paths from early training and stage debuts to the trials of old age and retirement long before the establishment of a state pension. Building upon the vital foundational work of Tracy C. Davis's Actresses as Working Women (1991) and The Economics of the British Stage (2002), Norwood draws on extensive archival evidence to reconstruct the on- and offstage lives of a varied collection of mid-tier actresses. Born in the early decades of Victoria's reign, the careers of Norwood's chosen actresses are concentrated in the 1860s and 1870s and in some cases stretch right through to the end of the century, their various lines of business ranging from burlesque to tragedy. Together these actresses give a full and vividly realised picture of the professional lives of the ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ female professional performer – though their tenacity, determination and stoicism render the term ‘ordinary’ patently inadequate.
Norwood's actresses – Alice Marriott, Emily Sanders, Louisa Cleveland, Lucy Rushton, Julia Seaman, Marie Henderson, Emily Cross, Adelaide Neilson, and Eliza Wethersby – were sufficiently successful for their names and careers to have left a trace in the archives, while falling short of the celebrity required to become stars of theatrical biography – the primary mode through which Victorian actresses have been recorded. Detailing and analysing the repertoires, schedules, and working conditions for female performers touring in Britain and overseas in North America, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, Norwood's study also considers actresses’ progression into theatre management, and the degree of agency and choice involved in their negotiations with critics, press, and the theatrical marketplace. Victorian Touring Actresses widens its focus far beyond theatre history's traditional stamping ground of London, illuminating the full span of female performers’ working careers across five decades and three continents.
Norwood's study is rooted in meticulous and strategic archival work, fully exploiting the recently expanded opportunities provided by online newspaper databases. As many of us have discovered, the focused precision of ‘Advanced Search’ can provide in minutes results that once required weeks of painstaking labour, peering into microfiche readers and endlessly scanning the miniscule print of Victorian back pages and advertisements. Norwood's methodology is expert and meticulous, combining digital searches with multiple further sources to impressive effect; so, for example, she calculates the ratio between female performers and available parts in 1881, and then the particular constraints faced by older actresses competing for a dwindling number of roles, by examining advertisements and notices in the Era Almanack and Dramatic Notes, comparing these with census records, consulting scripts in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays Collection, and then cross-referencing these with Tracy Davis's calculations of the numbers of professional actresses working in that year. Equally ingenious and patient use is made of news reports and census records to reconstruct the role of relatives, child carers, and foster parents in enabling actresses to combine motherhood and the exigencies of international touring. Building on the vital work of Tracy Davis and Jacky Bratton, Norwood mines the pages of the Era to identify many more women employed not just as managers of theatres but also as lessees than previously estimated, further expanding our appreciation of the managerial achievements of women who were for so long written out of theatre history.
Victorian Touring Actresses traces the impact on working women of rapidly changing material and cultural conditions across the decades as the speed of communication and travel increased. The challenges particular to nineteenth-century women's lives, such as legal bars on taking out loans, together with perennial obstacles facing female workers, from sexual harassment to the logistics of childcare, are shown to intersect with wider changes to transport, communication, and conditions of employment. Norwood's consideration of the issues is informed and insightful, considering questions from a variety of angles to weigh, for example, the advantages or otherwise of touring as part of a professional couple: companionship and double the clout for negotiating wages, but competition for top billing and the requirement for a revised repertoire should one partner fall ill. Questions of how an actress's personal and sexual reputation impacted her career are inevitably discussed, but the old critical chestnut of the actress/whore cliché is given thankfully little space. Instead, there is a thoughtful and precise analysis of the performers’ own agency in shaping their public narratives through autobiographies, interviews, and interactions with the press. Some neat scholarly detective work reveals how actresses such as Adelaide Neilson and Lucy Rushton manufactured more saleable origin stories for themselves, and Norwood deploys gift exchange theory to analyse the networks of mutual admiration and publicity constructed between performers, fans, and journalists. So Neilson, for example, presented rings (reputedly diamond, but possibly paste) to prominent members of the American press when on tour and left £1,000 in her will to the leading American theatre critic William Winter. International tours also required actresses to negotiate national rivalries – particularly notable in the form of anti-British sentiment in the United States in the wake of the Civil War – with differing notions of women's beauty used to belittle their charms in comparison with the allure of their local competitors. Norwood's analysis extends flexibly from the tightly factual to the sympathetically imaginative, from nifty detective work to reveal the true facts behind some fictitious autobiographies to a sympathetic consideration of the emotional demands for an actress separated from her children by the geographical distances of touring (or indeed by a professionally convenient false identity) who is then required to play the role of Lady Isabel in the popular tear-jerker East Lynne, a woman who is sent into exile in disgrace but returns in disguise to act as governess to her own children.
The book's in-depth study of touring actresses’ repertoires and roles is invaluable in providing a wider understanding of how lines of acting business developed. As Norwood's careful assessment reveals, the professional categories of burlesque actress, leading lady, and heavy woman were porous in practice; leading lady, for example, held the potential to cross the boundaries of genre, spanning parts from Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, and Emilia in Othello to the murderous Lady Audley and the penitent Mrs Haller in Kotzebue's The Stranger. Through the varied career trajectories and diverse expertise of Norwood's chosen case studies, some enduring patterns emerge, from the incidental – the extraordinary popularity of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's now-forgotten The Lady of Lyons, which remained a stalwart of provincial and international repertoires throughout the century – to the fundamental – the phenomenal hard work and resilience required of the professional actress, from the distances travelled to the number of roles and performances she was expected to deliver. An actress in a stock company was constantly required to undertake new roles; Julia Seaman played seventeen parts at the Victoria Theatre in just six months in 1856, most of which she never acted again. Higher status enabled the touring actress to exercise a greater degree of choice and to limit the number of roles she played – Adelaide Neilson, for example, played just twenty-six roles across her entire career – but hers was far from an easy ride: by 1874, just nine years after her debut, Neilson had played Juliet over 1,000 times, opposite some 200 different Romeos.
Above all, Victorian Touring Actresses offers an understanding of the actress as embodied history. Stage business and skills were passed down and preserved in each actress's repertoire and techniques. Skills were transferred from one generation to another, but such training risked rendering a performer out-of-date before their career had even begun. In the early 1860s, Neilson was tutored by the veteran actor John Ryder, but her resultant performance as Shakespeare's Juliet prompted critics to remark on its similarity to the performances of the French actress Stella Colas, who had previously debuted in the same role – not coincidentally having trained with Ryder. Even if starting with cutting-edge techniques, the older actress faced the challenge of adapting to new modes and fashions of performance. For good or ill, as Norwood observes, the ageing actress was ‘a living embodiment of experience and tradition’, a conduit for the transfer of cultural memory, reproducing consciously or unconsciously through her body some of the gestures, mannerisms, bits of business or emotional register of previous generations of performers (pp. 223–4). The consonances and continuities between actresses’ working lives and careers in the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century, as underlined by Norwood, are clear and dispiriting: economic disparities, sexual harassment, stalking and abuse, ageism and the lure of dangerous and spurious beauty treatments, and the difficulty of sustaining a family and a career. Nonetheless, it was the resilience, resourcefulness, dedication, courage, endurance, and sheer hard graft of Victorian actresses that laid the ground for subsequent generations, and Norwood's richly detailed and illuminating book fleshes out their lives in every sense – imaginatively, emotionally, materially, economically, and practically – with humour, deep knowledge, and great imaginative sympathy.
