Married at fourteen, a single mother at sixteen, Susan would likely have been forced into prostitution if Charlotte hadn’t been able to support the family with her acting. But with a new baby in the family, money was tight. Susan was young and beautiful and Charlotte had the idea that she could go onstage to play opposite her in the more feminine parts. When Ned was old enough to be left with Mary Eliza, Charlotte suggested Susan try a career on the stage. And if hard work had helped Charlotte recover from the blow of Augustus’s death, why shouldn’t it help Susan recover from her “disastrous” marriage? Their brother Charles was now supporting himself as a salesclerk and this was a rare opportunity for Susan to work, too, so she agreed to try.
Unknown to Charlotte, encouraging her sister to join her at the Park Theatre made her an enemy. Park Benjamin was an influential theatre critic whose mistress was a pretty young actress at the Park named Miss Clarendon. Benjamin was extremely handsome, described as looking exactly like Lord Byron, whom he copied in manner and dress. He was also lame in both legs, and walked “with difficulty on two canes.” Susan was now in direct competition with Benjamin’s girlfriend, and Miss Clarendon already disliked Charlotte for trying to give her unsolicited acting advice. Charlotte claimed she was being helpful, but Miss Clarendon “ridiculed [me] for my pains.”
Benjamin began by mocking Charlotte’s performances in the press. Then he wrote to her personally and promised to have her hissed out of the theatre if Susan didn’t leave the Park. Far from feeling intimidated, however, Charlotte wrote back immediately. The letter’s rhetoric was flawless. She instantly grasped that Benjamin saw himself as a cavalier defending his lady-love, and managed to flatter his ego by taking his chivalry seriously while challenging the assumption that she was any less vulnerable to attack than Miss Clarendon: “I have felt what it is to be defenseless,” she wrote to Benjamin, “and would not attack so unfortunate a young lady—but with due deference to you I do not consider her defenseless while she has a person willing to draw a band around him intending to crush one lady upon the ruin of whose reputation that of the young person might be built.” Regarding being hissed from the stage, Charlotte completely changed tack, treating this as a strictly business matter rather than a personal threat. Getting a large group together to intimidate her was “a matter requiring some time and trouble” and it would likely only hurt his own reputation. “I think,” she concluded, “you have business of more importance.” Perhaps calculating the cost versus the benefit of his attack, or feeling he had made enough of a show to please Miss Clarendon, Benjamin backed down, allowing Charlotte to get on with her work. But as she would soon discover, she still had enemies at the Park.
chapter seven Descent into Five Points
When Susan opened the paper, she gasped. She called Mary Eliza over and pointed out the announcement. “Charlotte will be furious,” she said. It was February 1839. Frost made paisley patterns on the windowpanes, and outside horses struggled to pull cabs down the street in deep snow. Charlotte had not gone to the theatre that day, staying home in front of the fire with Susan, Mary Eliza, and little Ned, now almost two years old. But the news Susan brought her was chilling: it was a cast list for the Park’s next production, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, with Charlotte in the role of the prostitute Nancy. It was not a starring role. Charlotte’s friend Annie Brewster recalled it was “always given to actresses of little or no position in the company.” It was also dangerous, since actresses already had to fight against the stereotype that they were essentially prostitutes themselves.
Charlotte was furious, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her contract explicitly said that she had to take any part they gave her. Charlotte suspected that Stephen Price, one of her managers, disliked her. “I was at the mercy of the man,” she later recalled. “It was mid-winter; my bread had to be earned. I dared not refuse, nor even remonstrate, for I knew he wished to provoke me to break my engagement.”
By casting her as a prostitute, Price was being reckless with her reputation. Playing a prostitute put her in the line of fire for moralizing journalists like Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Greenley wrote in one review that “a large proportion of those connected with the Stage are libertines and courtezans.”
In their New York apartment Susan tried to hush Ned’s crying, Mary Eliza mended costumes, and Charlotte sat in a chair reading and rereading Dickens’s play. It was clear she could not simply button herself into the role of Nancy as it was already made; she would have to take a seam-ripper to the thing and piece it out herself. She was determined to get the better of her enemy. “What he designed for my mortification should be my triumph,” she wrote to Annie Brewster.
Up to the night appointed for Oliver Twist she was not seen by anyone except at business hours. She took her meals in her room and spent her time there or out of the house on clandestine rambles. Charlotte was rehearsing in secret, “studying that bare skeleton of a part; clothing it with flesh, giving
