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The Queen of the Vic: Eliza Vincent's Actress-Management of the Victoria Theatre, London, 1841–1856
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2024
Extract
Early in 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. One of several theatres sited close to the bridges linking the southern bank of the Thames with the north, the Vic was a prominent neighborhood institution catering to a mostly working-class audience. Launched in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, a move designed to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, its investors’ hopes of drawing a more upmarket crowd were largely disappointed. Visiting the theatre in 1820, William Hazlitt was distressed to find Junius Brutus Booth among an ill-assorted and noisy throng, and in 1831 Edmund Kean was reduced to haranguing the “unmitigated brutes” gathered before him. Pelted with orange peel and nutshells, he still drew his nightly fee of £50. Although research by Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow has revealed an audience more varied than once assumed, upon the changing of its name in 1833, the Victoria's core clientele was more or less established, as indeed was its reputation for the bloodier aspects of popular drama. It had also experienced regular changes of management, sudden spells of closure, and periodic clashes with the authorities. Suitably enough for what follows, by 1840, the Vic was judged to have suffered “more vicissitudes” than any other theatre in London.
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References
Endnotes
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42 Wilks, Kate Wynsley, 20. Page numbers are given parenthetically for subsequent quotations in this edition of the play.
43 Wilks gave Osbaldiston and Vincent another hit in 1842 with The Dream Spectre.
44 In the autumn of 1841, Mary Clifford and The Wreck of the Heart were also produced, with Vincent taking the lead in both.
45 Lucy Sussex, “The Detective Maidservant: Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley,” in Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Brenda Ayres (Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2003), 57–66.
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47 BL Playbills: Reel 391.
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58 BL Playbills: Reel 391.
59 The National Archives: Lord Chamberlain's Papers, LC7/6.
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70 BL Playbills: Reel 391.
71 Stoneman, “Editor's Notes,” Jane Eyre, 19–31, esp. 20.
72 Ibid., 30. From Brontë's correspondence with her friend (and reader for her publishers, Smith, Elder & Co.), William Smith Williams, dated 5 February 1848; cf. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2: 1848–1851, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 25.
73 Era, 14 November 1847, quoted in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 78.
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75 BL Playbills: Reel 391.
76 BL Playbills: Reel 391.
77 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 3 vols. [1861] (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 1: 19.
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80 Osbaldiston's will, which left the bulk of his estate to Vincent, was fiercely contested by his legal wife since 1819, the actress Harriet Dawson. The dispute was eventually resolved in Vincent's favor in 1853.
81 Rowell, Old Vic, 43; BL Playbills: Reel 391.
82 Era, 19 November 1854, 1.
83 Katherine Newey, “Melodrama and Gender,” in Williams, ed., English Melodrama, 149–62, at 161.
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91 Ridgwell, “City Women,” 204–8.