Michael Holroyd has written biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey as well as two volumes of memoirs; Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He is the current president of the Royal Society of Literature.
From the Hardcover edition.
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 biogr...