Knowles watched “with astonishment” as Charlotte threw herself on the ground to take the measure of an unmade grave. “There is no trick to Miss Cushman’s performance,” he later observed. “No thought, no interest, no feeling seems to actuate her, except what might be looked for in Romeo himself, were Romeo reality.”
Charlotte reminded him of the famous British tragedian Edmund Kean, whose Othello was the stuff of legend. There are some transcendent moments in watching a play that stay with you always, pressed, as Shakespeare said of love, like a seal into wax. And as with falling in love, the impression stays with you even as the details fade. For Knowles, Kean’s third act of Othello was one of these moments. The third act is when Othello kills Desdemona for what he believes is her infidelity. A moment later he discovers she was innocent and he is therefore a murderer. Ever since seeing Kean’s interpretation, Knowles had hungered for another such moment, and it was with pure delight that he took in Cushman’s Romeo. She was at least as good as Kean, he later wrote to a friend. In fact, he was tempted to say better. It was a performance “of topmost passion!—Not simulated passion—no such thing—real, palpably real! The genuine heart-storm was on—on in the wildest fitfulness of fury!—and I listened, and gazed, and held my breath, while my blood ran hot and cold.”
Knowles could only assume the rest of the audience was responding as he was, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away long enough to check. He watched, enrapt, until “a thunder of applause” brought him back to himself. He felt that as soon as Charlotte walked onstage everything about her “attest[ed] the lover.” Knowles watched as Romeo tried and failed and tried again, with “aid of palm, and eye, and tongue,” to tell Juliet how he felt.
Theatre was Knowles’s life, and he felt Charlotte had given him a great gift. “My heart and mind are so full of this extraordinary—most extraordinary performance,” he wrote, “equal to the proudest of those which I used to witness years ago and for the repetition of which I have looked in vain until now.”
By the spring of 1847 Charlotte was surprised to find herself welcomed into the London home of Samuel and Anastasia Laurence for their Sunday evening salons. The young couple surrounded themselves with artists and radicals, and Charlotte was the newest addition to their bohemian group. Samuel was a portrait painter, and his famous clients stared down at her as she entered his crowded sitting room.
The group modeled their salon after the radical thinker Charles Fourier, the man who had coined the term “feminism” around the time Charlotte was making her stage debut. Charlotte and Fourier shared the conviction that women should be allowed to hold a job, as well as a suspicion that marriage was primarily a legal agreement that did women no favors. Salons like the Laurences’, in England and France, inspired the playwright Henri Murger’s celebrated drama Scènes de la Vie de Boheme, and were a safe haven for people who wanted to move away from the mainstream.
Each week, the guests had plenty to talk about. In America, Whitman had used his pulpit at the Brooklyn Eagle to denounce America’s invasion of Mexico and had been fined. Abolitionists worried about what a new Southern state would mean for their cause. One night, ensconced in an armchair, Charlotte listened to Jane Welsh Carlyle’s arguments for women’s right to hold property; she became friends with journalist and editor Mary Howitt, who was writing a long advocacy paper against capital punishment of women, and who soon took Charlotte under her wing. Howitt frequently wrote about her new actress friend in Howitt’s, the journal she edited with her husband. Mary’s feature on Charlotte and Susan—“the Misses Cushman”—helped make Charlotte even more of a celebrity. In it, she revealed Susan’s teenage pregnancy and her husband’s abandonment. Charlotte’s “heart bled” for her sister, wrote Howitt, and she determined to help her make a new life: “Charlotte’s was a character on which her sister, disappointed and heartbroken, could lean and from which she could derive strength.”
This new explosion in the use and power of the popular press meant Charlotte’s new writer friends were in high demand, and many women found jobs at newspapers and magazines, especially in New York and London. Mary Howitt immediately introduced her to other women writers, many of whom found her fascinating. She was a witty conversationalist, and continued to read voraciously even with her busy schedule. Though she was not particularly interested in politics, she continued to love literature—Jane Austen, George Sand—and poetry. She was young, intelligent, wildly talented, and self-supporting. “I am my own business-man,” Charlotte liked to say. Soon, others came to see her as a kind of mascot for women’s rights, and Charlotte was flattered by the attention.
But many of the women Charlotte found herself surrounded by were not only interested in her mind. They found her magnetic, and her strength intensely appealing. This made her both loved and hated. Jane Carlyle, a poet whose miserable marriage to the eminent critic Thomas Carlyle led her to rely heavily on her female companions, wrote bitterly that her intimate friend Geraldine Jewsbury was “all in a blaze of enthusiasm about Miss Cushman the Actress.” Geraldine’s letters were so full of praise of Charlotte that Jane wrote her a furious letter that she expected “will probably terminate our correspondence.” Geraldine, in turn, was frustrated by these rivalries. She hoped that recent
