Though he belonged to a suspect social class, Macready’s celebrity won him invitations to dine alongside the wealthiest and most respectable families in England—and their patronage had helped make him rich. In London, he was close friends with Charles Dickens, with whom he shared the experience of rising from penniless youth to fame and fortune. He was also prone to the kind of attention-grabbing tantrums that made news. Once, when a costar’s death throes threatened to upstage him, Macready broke off mid-sentence to hiss that the upstart should “die further off.”
Inside the Tremont, Charlotte sank down into a plush velvet seat. The mixing scents of sawdust, varnish, shoe polish, hair oil, lavender water, and under it all, filtering through layers of damp, summer-weight wool and broadcloth, the yeasty, dirty-penny smell of sweat and excitement filled the air. Hundreds of bodies waited for the curtain to rise. Then Macready took the stage. He was handsome in his Roman armor, and his short tunic showed off his long legs. He had a mane of thick, dark hair; expressive, wide-set eyes; and full, sensitive lips. His Coriolanus “seemed a man of quick, irritable feelings, whose pride was rather galled than wounded,” both “the Coriolanus of Shakespeare and of nature.”
Coriolanus was a strange choice for an American audience. The play is unabashedly anti-democratic. The Roman general Coriolanus returns from battle and his fame ensures him a place in the Senate. Not-so-secretly, however, he despises the populace, comparing them to a ravenous belly and a many-headed monster. Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to demonstrate that the rabble are ill-suited to governing themselves. Written at the turn of the fifteenth century, it was the same criticism Americans still had to stomach from their former rulers in England.
But if the audience suspected anti-Americanism at the heart of Macready’s performance, they were too overawed to say so.
Leaning over the railing of her uncle’s box seats Charlotte could see families in the pit unwrapping a dinner of dark bread and cheese, apples, a whole roast bird pulled from a hamper and torn limb from limb. The women’s gallery was a murmur of silk, the self-satisfied sheen of beaver pelt, the glow of red fox, green cloth dresses, fashion-forward paisley silk from France. The ladies glinted in constellations, the gaslight refracting off their jewelry in the dark like stars.
Charlotte was impressed by Macready, but not so overwhelmed she couldn’t begin to see how it was done. Like him, she was drawn to heroic characters, but there were few of these written for women. To be a successful actress you ought to be beautiful. Charlotte knew she was not a beauty like the British acting legend Sarah Siddons or her niece, Fanny Kemble, a rising star. Still, she longed to perform. Opera had a better reputation than theatre and so she determined to become a professional singer.
She had reason to hope. Everyone who heard Charlotte’s voice said it was remarkable. Where most singers labored to perfect one range, Charlotte could sing in nearly a full two registers. She could sing soprano parts, stretching her vocal cords long and thin to reach the highest notes, and she had a deep, textured, resonating “chest voice” that could reach some of the deepest notes. She could also sing contralto, the lowest range for a woman—so rare that most opera companies cast these roles with male castrati.
Charlotte had been singing in the choir at the Unitarian church, where her pastor was a brilliant young scholar named Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was born in Boston as the son of a preacher. He entered Harvard at fourteen and when he graduated he entered the ministry. Emerson’s ministry allowed him to sketch out a radical philosophy that elevated the individual’s spiritual path above the hierarchies of the church. When Charlotte met Emerson he was newly married, and besotted with his nineteen-year-old wife, Ellen. When Ellen died suddenly of tuberculosis, Emerson was distraught and found that his faith gave him little comfort. Ultimately, he discovered he could not bring himself to give the sacrament in good faith and left the church forever.
Whether or not Emerson’s radical philosophy shaped Charlotte’s own, she shared his uniquely American belief that the path toward God could be charted by the individual. American Unitarians believed that one must exercise reason in interpreting the Bible. Strict interpretations of the Bible that held, for example, that Jesus’s reincarnation was real were hard to accept for more scientifically minded parishioners. But Charlotte, like Emerson, took this philosophy a step further, believing that if you cultivated your own moral character, then your own intuition would lead you down the right path. Young and ambitious, there was tremendous spiritual and intellectual energy coiled inside her and it seemed like the more she spent, the more she had.
Anxiety, too, drove her. In the four years since her father left, Charlotte had gone from being the protected eldest daughter of an upper-class family to a striving, working-class woman. Fear of artistic failure coupled with her sense of moral obligation to her family. If Charlotte could
