‘Leading Ladies, Walking Ladies, and Heavy Women’ by T.W. Robertson, for the Illustrated Times, 13 February 1864.

This is one of a cycle of articles commissioned by the Illustrated Times intended to shed light on the realities of working in theatre. T.W. Robertson was a playwright who wrote articles for the press before finding success with his play Society in 1865, which was put on by the actor-manager Marie Wilton. I found it reprinted in ‘Victorian Theatre; a new mermaids background book’ by Russell Jackson. The book is a resource of primary accounts I highly recommend for this time and second hand editions are very affordable.

I am using the below in my research for a video exploring the clothes an aspiring opera singer in 1862 might wear (keep an eye on youtube for when that will appear), but this is such a wonderful description it felt important to release for general internet usage. Enjoy!

‘The first time that a sensitive and impressionable lad, above thirteen years of age, visits a theatre and sees a play, the most vivid image he carries home with him, is that of a stately creature, with high forehead, or haughty mien, and thrilling voice; clad, not dressed, in heavy, massive, black velvet, or white aërial, floating, breezy muslin. In theatrical parlance this grand and noble divinity is the Leading Lady or in the cant translation bred of cheap return tickets and the desire to avoid simple English that Tragédienne…

The love of acting spreads over so wide a surface of society that Leading Ladies are recruited from all classes. Daughters of wealthy men who have bent their knees imploringly to soi-distant Siddonses; daughters of ruined gentlemen forced to seek their bread, and insufficiently accomplished for the dreadful trade of ‘governessing’; daughters of actors, born and reared to it; and daughters of publicans who keep theatrical taverns, where the portraits of popular actors and actresses are framed, glazed and enriched with autographs. All these are the raw material which time, tact, and the horse labour of a rising barrister manufactures into dramatic heroines. While speaking of portraits, it is impossible not to remark on the blessing of photography to small celebrities seeking publicity.

Leading Ladies begin by playing what is called, in greenrooms, dressing-rooms, and dramatic agents’ address-books, first and second Walking Ladies. Walking Ladies have been said to derive their appellation from the fact of their always being ready to escape from their father, aunt or guardian, and walk off with their lover…

This sort of dramatic infancy being endured for two or three years, in various country theatres, the walking lady casts off the sash of farce, the wings of ballet, the hood of melodrama and the hoop of comedy, and assumes the toga, robe and crowns of tragedy; and then what weight of work, what worlds of words are piled up for the aspirant! A Colonial Secretary leads a lazy life compared to the poor Leading Lady… A tragic actress must ‘study’- that is, learn by heart, as it is called, the text of the characters of Desdemona, Imogen, Cordelia, Lady Macbeth, Constance, Miranda, Rosalind, Beatrice, Portia, Juliet, Hermione, the two Katherine’s of Padua and Aragon, Julia, Virginia, Belvidera, the ladies fo Teazle, Townley, and Randolph, mistress Jane Shore, and a host of heroines of dramas such as Black-eyed Susan, Rachel Heywood, Miami, Cynthia, and the like…

The leading actress in the country theatre will rise at nine, and, after laving her hot forehead and pale face with water, snatch a cup of turbid, provincially prepared coffee, rush to the theatre for the ‘call’ for the rehearsal at ten. The drama of Susan Hopley, in which she sustains the character of that pattern of domestic young ladies and service, occupies her till past twelve. She then waits till two, for the eminent tragedian, Mr Lara Thunderstone, who is a ‘star’ as Macbeth that night does not rise early, and always keeps rehearsal waiting. The ’eminent’ having at last arrived- bilious of stomach and fastidious of taste- protracts the rehearsal, and at half past four, faint, sick, and tired, the sinking actress reaches her lodgings. Her dinner has been waiting two hours. It is half cold and wholly clammy. She is past appetite and orders tea, which is prepared as detestably as was this morning’s coffee. Dresses have then to be looked out, unpacked, altered, trimmings changed and gold lace ripped off and ‘run on’. The basket, that wondrous mystery, is packed, and the actress follows it to the dressing room where she is installed by six. For five hours and a half she acts, and acts, and acts, speaks, speaks, and speaks, changes her dress, changes her dress, and changes her dress; and all this time she never sits down for a moment. Home by midnight, she eats and enjoys her supper, the only meal hard fate permits her. ‘She sleeps well after that’, might say an unbelieving reader. Sleep! She sits up til daylight, studying Evadne, in Sheil’s play; for the eminent tragedian Mr Lara Thunderstone, of the Theatres Royal Everywhere, has chosen to play Colonna on the following evening. Ladies at the head of establishments, school-mistresses, governesses, shopgirls, milliners, cooks, housemaids, laundresses and charwoman- what is your work to this?

A power that sustains the actress through her enormous daily and nightly task is the artiste’s nervous irritability, love of applause, and the hope of future fame- that hope so delusive that, in green room diction it is called ‘The Phantom’.

Six or eight years passed in the dreary drudgery a provincial theatres, the Leading Lady at last is to get an appearance in London. If she pleases her audience – that is, if the manager of the theatre permit her to appear in a part she can play, and does not compel her to appear in one for which she is unfitted, she is a great success, and, as dramatic slang has ‘her wood is made.’ Her income is at once raised from £2 or £3 per week to £20 or £30; her dismal lodgings changed to elegant apartments; her shabby black silk gown for new and lustrous moire antique; her old listless, half resentful, half despairing manner for a winning grace and proud consciousness of power; her relatives, particularly those who held her adoption of the stage in the strongest horror, call on, fawn, flatter and borrow money of her; and four and twenty photographers all of a row besiege her door determined not to move on under a sitting…

When the L.L. (Leading Lady) makes a failure she returns to the provinces; or, if she be gifted with a matronly figure and deep voice, drops into what is called ‘heavy business’- that is, she plays Emelia in Othello and Queen and Hamlet &c. ‘Heavy Women’, as they are elegantly and delicately designated, have often large families and rickety husbands, and support both with a heroism far more admirable than that of the wordy and blatant personages they represent. Those who know but little of theatres and their belongings often regret that actresses in private life so little resemble the heroines they portray. If they could look on them, not by the false medium of batwing burners, but by domestic daylight or economical composites, they would regret that heroines did not often idealise the real virtues of actresses – virtues intensified and polished by the cultivation of the most emotional of arts. Though all leading dramatic heroines do not become the wives of baronets, the practice of their education so refines and educates their sentiments that they are always ladies.

Notes:

Soi-distant Siddonses: Self Styled tragedy-queens (claiming to be successors of Sarah Siddons, 1755-1831) 
The horse labour… barrister. ie. in a play written in his spare time by a barrister.
batwing burners: Gas lights and candles

Jackson, R., (1989) ‘Victorian Theatre; a new mermaids background book’, A. & C. Black: London, p. 113-16