Mourners waiting to be admitted lined up along Tremont Street, the crowd stretching past the Commons, where men groaned over the hundred-foot branches of the Great Elm, sawing them down to size.
After the viewing, the body was brought to King’s Chapel for the funeral service. Family, intimate friends, and colleagues sat in the wooden pews facing the coffin while the public found whatever space they could in the galleries above. Many who had bought tickets could not get in, and the street outside grew so packed no one could get in or out. Police were stationed around the church. Charlotte’s body had not been carried by train around the country, as Lincoln’s had been, but her death cast the whole nation into mourning. Thousands of people came to Boston from across the country for the funeral, waiting in line for hours just to get a glimpse of her coffin.
Inside the chapel, young girls from the Cushman School, recently renamed in Charlotte’s honor, walked solemnly down the long aisle between the pews. Against their white dresses they wore black sashes, and each girl carried a small bouquet of fresh flowers, which she laid inside Charlotte’s open casket before taking her seat.
The chapel was “profusely ornamented” and scented with flowers, which like the dignitaries filled “every available space.” A large cross made of ivy sat on the altar, surrounded by white floral stars made of creamy, sweet-smelling camelias, lilies, white lilacs, and tea roses. Maidenhair ferns drooped among rosebuds, violets, heliotrope, and “rare orchids.”
Reporters from around the world, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Irish Times, were in attendance. They made notes as the coffin was carried out and placed into a carriage that slowly led a long and winding procession up the slope of Mount Auburn. It was a scene to rival the finest Greek drama. “We find little difference,” said one pastor who included Charlotte in his sermon that Sunday, between “the true aim of both actor and preacher.”
The public spectacle of Charlotte’s Boston funeral was only the beginning of the national mourning that followed her death. In New York, nearly ten thousand people gathered in the streets for a candlelight vigil. It would have been difficult to find a newspaper that did not carry her obituary. All repeated the up-from-her-bootstraps story of a difficult childhood, a failure in New Orleans, and a remarkable success in London. Charlotte was compared to the best male actors of her age, and more than once to Beethoven.
She was even compared to Napoleon: “Thus we see that Charlotte Cushman did something more than walk upon the stage with a fine talent, and turn the world upside down at once. She did, indeed, what Napoleon did on another scale; she conquered circumstance; and she did it with laborious effort and indomitable will,” declared Harper’s Bazaar. “There was hardly a hearthstone among the English-speaking families of the world,” wrote one reporter, “where her name was not a household word.”
In life she had been famous, but in death she became a myth, one of the “Titanic beings, capable of lifting the drama to the place it held when in the old Greek amphitheaters beside the sea no roof intervened between the players and the sky above them,” as Harper’s Bazaar put it in a feature, published a month after her death, on March 18, 1876. Onstage, the writer explained, she had merged seamlessly with her characters, and in memory she fused with them entirely, making them “new beings.” She even usurped the authors of the plays themselves. Charles Dickens’s character Nancy was remembered as “the character [Cushman] made famous,” while “her Meg Merrilies was something beyond the wild woman of Walter Scott’s imagining. The indignation and defiance and pathos of her Queen Katharine made a magnificent apparition that escapes us when simply reading Shakespeare at home.”
In mourning Charlotte Cushman, America also mourned its youth, forever obscured behind the fog of war: “To see her Romeo was to see the height of love and youth and joy, the very apotheosis of tragic loss at last, that made old veins tremble with the impulse of young blood spinning through them, as if it were night and summer and youth in Italian gardens and under Italian skies.”
“Into a face that every man called ugly,” the Harper’s Bazaar feature continued, “she gathered a divine sweetness and strength that every woman called beauty.” Her life was held up as a model for women across the world. Her success had been “snatched from the fate that has brought women so little… something silencing to the vast defamatory tongue that declares women of so small purpose.” Charlotte’s career had proved them all wrong. Since she was a girl, she had been confident of her larger purpose, and when she failed she drove herself forward anyway, creating a life of daring adventure.
epilogue
Culture is not a fixed condition,
it is the unremitting interaction
between the past and the present.
—Lawrence Levine
But even as Charlotte was being eulogized, she was being forgotten. The late nineteenth century had been a decade of steady progress for women, including legal protections for married women, programs to keep poor women out of prostitution, and new women-only universities, but these advances had created a backlash among socially conservative critics in America and Victorian England.
To these critics, Charlotte’s life was useful only as a morality tale, edited to show the most convenient and teachable moments. Many Victorian writers expressed surprise that she had been so successful despite her “plainness” and her “manly” appearance. Actors with whom she had competed for men’s roles wrote in relief that women would no longer “push us from our seats.” Shortly after Charlotte’s death, her former friend George Vandenhoff wrote that she was “neither man-woman nor woman-man,” but something unnatural and “epicene.” Another obituary said that while Miss Cushman was
