Oliver Twist was a story that reminded readers of Guy Mannering: a young boy abandoned to criminals who is saved by a woman who sacrifices everything for him. The prostitute Nancy is torn between loyalty to her lover, who is in thrall to the criminal Fagin, and her strong desire to save the orphaned Oliver. Charlotte immediately grasped Nancy’s struggle between good and evil, something that resonated with her audience as many found themselves torn between the lures and snares of the city and their own moral compass. Many in the audience did not yet know Nancy’s fate. Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist had been released in serial form, and the final installment had only recently been published in America.
Toward the end of the play, Nancy betrays her lover, Bill Sikes, by freeing Oliver from captivity. When the crime boss discovers what she’s done, he orders Sikes to kill her. In her final scene, Nancy is in bed. Hearing a noise, she sits up suddenly. She is not alone. A shape in the doorway moves toward her, but with relief she realizes it is only Sikes. She reaches for him, but he roughly pushes her away and blows the candle out, ordering her to get up. Nancy pushes herself off the bed. “Is that you, Bill?” she asks. “Oh I’m so glad! But you’ve put out the candle.” Bill Sikes snarls at her, “There’s light enough for what I’ve got to do.” Nancy pleads with him, then tries to scream. Sikes strikes her in the face with his pistol.
In other productions Sikes dragged Nancy away to murder her offstage. But Charlotte had a better idea. She choreographed a “fearful struggle” between Nancy and Sikes, which her height and strength made into a real contest. She gave the audience a chance to believe Nancy might actually get away. This was true to Dickens’s novel, which described the murder in gruesome detail.
“The ‘murder of Nancy’ was the great scene,” enthused one critic. Charlotte instructed the actor playing Sikes to drag Nancy around the stage by her hair, while looking defiantly at the gallery. The audience hissed him, cursing “like a Handel Festival chorus.” Sikes dragged Nancy around the stage twice more. He shook his fist at the audience “like Ajax, defying the lighting.” The crowd’s roars grew louder and more blasphemous, the noise and excitement rising to a climax Charlotte had carefully orchestrated: “Sikes, working up to a well rehearsed climax, smeared Nancy with red-ochre, and taking her by the hair (a most powerful wig) seemed to dash her brains out on the stage, no explosion of dynamite invented by the modern anarchist, no language ever dreamt of in Bedlam could equal the outburst.”
The audience mourned and screamed foul play, so totally caught up in empathy for the poor murdered woman they seemed to forget entirely that she was a prostitute, the likes of whom died on the streets or in the Tombs prison in Five Points every night. Charlotte, drawing inspiration from her five days in Five Points and from Dickens’s novel, had done the inconceivable and made Nancy into a martyr.
Once again, Charlotte had taken a supporting role and made it into theatrical gold. Tickets sold out and critics raved. One critic, Walt Whitman, argued that Charlotte’s performance was proof that America was at last ready to compete with Europe as a cultural powerhouse. Whitman was part of a growing group of American writers calling for more recognition by their countrymen—they included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and other members of the “Transcendental Club.” The club’s first meeting had been titled “American Genius: the causes which hinder its growth and give us no first-rate productions.”
Whitman was one of many watching Charlotte’s career in the hopes that she would finally prove that Americans could produce more than pale imitations of European art. When he saw Nancy, he found her delightfully appalling, writing in his column for the Brooklyn Eagle that it was “the most intense acting ever felt on the park boards.” He believed that no one who watched her could help but “marvel at the towering grandeur of her genius.” He was convinced that audiences would now stop flocking to see “fifth-rate artistic trash” from Europe.
Simpson and Price, however, seemed immune to Charlotte’s charms. When her contract expired after three years, she asked for a raise, but they turned her down. Furious, Charlotte quit.
She spent a year as the manager of the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia. Then William Macready arrived in New York and asked her to come act with him, but the problem was that she had a contract with the Walnut she could not get out of. She made a plan. She said yes to Macready and took the train back and forth from Philadelphia to New York, acting different parts every other night. It was grueling, but she hoped that Macready’s seal of approval would help her gain recognition.
Macready was the British star she had seen on her first visit to the theatre as a young girl. His star power meant he could essentially set his own schedule, decide what plays he wanted to do and whom he wanted to work with, and demand a cut of ticket sales. Charlotte wanted all that for herself.
She and Macready became friends, and she confided her ambitions to him. His advice was simple: save your money and go to London as quickly as you can. Her talent would never be appreciated by American audiences until she succeeded in Europe. As proof, he pointed to the American actor Edwin Forrest. Forrest had done well in London and this made him a star at home.
