a pair of gum arabic shoes: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Vol. 1 Young Man in New York 1835–1849 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
He told her she was exactly what he was looking for: Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 146–47.
“If a philosopher wishes to observe”: Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1846), 174.
Hamblin had drilled peepholes for police: Ibid., 175.
when an actor playing a king pretended to fall asleep: Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, November 28, 1832, quoted in Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 100–101.
“amused themselves by throwing pennies”: Ibid.
“rain of vegetable glory”: Quoted in Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, 28.
“Throw not the pearl of Shakespeare’s wit before the swine of the bowery pit” went one popular saying: Washington Irving compared the gallery gods to “animals” and the theatre itself to Noah’s Ark.
“Theatre is divided into three and sometimes four classes”: Quoted in Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, 43.
“licks the joints, but bites the heart”: Known as “Lasegue’s Dictum.” Ernst-Charles Lasegue, nineteenth-century French physician, 1864.
“ugly beyond average ugliness”: “Charlotte Cushman,” New York Times, February 19, 1876.
chapter five: American Genius
“after some important event”: James Henry Wiggin, “A House and a Name,” The Bostonian Vol. 1, 1894–95, 92.
“to create is the proof of a Divine presence”: Quoted in Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 29.
The joke was that “more members of both houses”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 28.
“bull in black silk”: Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland (London: William Heinemann, 1894), 101.
“harsh, but harmonious”: “The Career of Charlotte Cushman,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 18, 1876.
“magnificently attired”: Quoted in Waters, Charlotte Cushman.
“without injuring the harmony of the verse.”: Quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 39.
“My Dear Darling Sister”: Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress.
“The ground liquified under me”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman.
chapter six: Gypsy Queen
“suffer bodily to cure my heart-bleed”: Ibid.
“catch some inspiration”: “Charlotte Cushman: Her Debut as Meg Merrilies,” Robinson Locke Scrapbook, 139, New York Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 42.
she heard one gypsy say to another: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 149.
behind him in the darkness he heard a sound: Ibid.
imagines the character as an emblem of romantic wildness: John Keats, “Meg Merrilies,” 1818, poetryfoundation.org.
Charlotte crept into the gypsy tent: Mary Anderson, A Few Memories (New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1896), 37.
“strange, silent spring”: Ibid.
“If ever the dead come back among the living”: Daniel Terry, Guy Mannering, or, the Gypsy’s Prophecy (Boston: Wells and Lily, 1823).
“so wild and piercing, so full of agony”: “Women Who Have Assayed the Role of Hamlet,” New York Herald, June 11, 1899.
more time to rush backstage: Ibid., 152.
she heard a knock: Quoted in Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 149.
“How,” the artist asked incredulously: Ibid., 150.
“She seems to identify herself so completely”: Walt Whitman, “About Acting,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 4, 1846.
“The Meg Merrilies of Miss Cushman”: “Miss Charlotte Cushman’s Last Appearance in America,” Prompter, 1850, from the Brander Matthews Collection, Houghton Theatre Library, Harvard University.
“Unless one does”: Augustin Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 135.
“noble frenzy of eccentric genius”: “Charlotte Cushman, The Versatilities of a Great Career,” New York Clipper, nd (likely 1876), clipping from Charlotte Cushman Collection, Library of Congress.
Edmund Simpson, Charlotte’s new boss: Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, “Simpson, Edmund,” in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 625.
He had hair that curled up from his brow: Description from an image in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Collection.
Simpson had been an actor but taken up managing: James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, “Edmund Simpson,” in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1909).
the African Grove: Bruce McConachie, American Theatre in Context: From the Beginnings to 1870, Ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144–45.
lame in both legs: F. B. Sanborn, “A Concord Note Book: Ellery Channing and His Table-Talk,” The Critic, Volume 47 (Berkeley: University of California, 1905).
“I have felt what it is to be defenseless”: Charlotte Cushman to Park Benjamin, October 13, nd.
chapter seven: Descent into Five Points
“always given to actresses of little or no position”: Annie Hampton Brewster, “Miss Cushman,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 1878.
“I was at the mercy of the man”: Ibid.
“a large proportion of those connected with the Stage”: Quoted in Stephanie Rosa Galipeau, “Victorian Rebellion in Drag: Cushman and Menken Act Out Celebrity,” master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2003, 32.
“studying that bare skeleton of a part”: Quoted in Brewster, “Miss Cushman.”
around the lake grew a row of slaughterhouses: Five Points details from Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
“narrow ways, diverging to the left and right”: Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: A. and W. Galignani, 1842), 104.
Middle-class tourists might pay to go “slumming”: Ted Chamberlain, “Gangs of New York: Fact vs. Fiction,” National Geographic (online), March 23, 2003.
“hot corn girls”: Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), originally published in 1927.
decorating their mantels with pictures: Chamberlain, “Gangs of New York.”
“every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell”: Ibid.
crisscrossed with shortcuts: Joe Cowell, Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America: Interspersed with Anecdotes and Reminiscences of a Variety of Persons, Directly or Indirectly Connected with the Drama During the Theatrical Life of Joe Cowell, Comedian (New York : Harper & Brothers, 1844), 56.
Charlotte carefully navigated an alley knee deep with filth: Ibid.
The galleries were draped in a swath of baize: Ibid.
the Park was the only one considered fashionable: Trollope, Domestic Manners.
The Park had its own infamous “third tier”: Rosemarie Bank, Theatre Culture in America 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
She reaches for him, but he roughly pushes her away: Details and dialogue from George Almar’s stage adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, first produced in 1838.
“the most intense acting ever felt
