New Albion (27 page)

The morning was not propitious. Rain fell in torrents as I waited by the cemetery gates for the crude pine coffin to arrive. I had fortunately brought an umbrella with me, and I stood under it in my suit of black, waiting. Another mourner materialized out of the rain, at last, a woman in a fashionable crepe gown. As she drew closer, I recognized Fanny Hardwick, her face pale and her eyes downcast. I shook her hand and wanted to embrace her warmly, but didn’t. “Thank you for coming, Miss Hardwick,” I said.

“Have the others arrived?” She was pinning a crepe armband to my sleeve.

“Not yet,” I replied. “It would have meant so much to Mr. Farquhar Pratt that you attended today.”

“We must respect our own,” Miss Hardwick said. “The Theatre is a noble calling, and we do a disservice to the Theatre if we are unable to respect our veterans. That is what I have always believed.”

We waited in vain, the two of us, for the remainder of the company of the New Albion Theatre to arrive. I shared my umbrella with Miss Hardwick and she held my arm gently as the ground around us turned to a sodden mess. At last, a drayman arrived, the casket bouncing along in the back of his horse-drawn wagon. The rain had started to abate as clouds wisped by like phantasms overhead. We waited some time for the Sexton to appear and, when he did, we followed the dray wagon through the maze of gravestones – past the stone of the Great Grimaldi, whom I hadn’t realized was buried there – to a gaping, mud-filled hole at the far end of the churchyard. Notably absent from this maimed procession was Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s widow, who had likely been unable to obtain permission to leave the workhouse on this sad day. And I did think that Mr. and Mrs. Wilton would have made an appearance, whether out of a sense of fellow feeling or out of a sense of obligation.

The drayman set out two thick-knotted ropes in parallel lines on the wet grass. He enlisted the Sexton and me to lift one end of the casket while he lifted the other, and together we placed the pine box over the ropes. “My apologies for putting you to work,” the burly drayman mumbled, mud spattering his leathery cheeks, “but we don’t stand on ceremony at paupers’ funerals.” The Sexton and I each tugged on a rope’s end at one side of the casket while the drayman handled both ropes on the other side, and we managed to lower the box into the soupy mud of the grave without losing our footing and sliding into the grave with it.

Breathing heavily from the exertion, the Sexton then pulled a small Bible from the inside pocket of his greatcoat and began reading a passage from Job. At that moment, thunder cracked immediately overhead, causing Fanny, who was holding my elbow and weeping softly, to startle. The clouds opened again, and the rain fell in torrents, drenching my clothes, drowning the steeple of the church in its flood. The Sexton promptly closed his Bible and shouted, above the ratatatat of pelting rain, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He scattered a lump of wet dirt over the coffin, offered his brisk condolences to Fanny and me, and then hurried across the churchyard to the sanctuary of the church.

After a few moments, the drayman approached me and said, “If it is all the same to you, I’ll commence shoveling now.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, half-stunned by the brevity of the ceremony, Fanny still clutching my arm. We heard the harsh clang of the drayman’s spade on stones and gravel as we made our way past the Great Grimaldi, who was quietly buried here amidst no great pomp and pageantry some years ago. The Theatre is a hateful place, I thought to myself, a false, fickle, and primal place where one man might acquire great favour while all the rest might exist in a degraded state. Mr. Farquhar Pratt had been deserving of favour, if for no other reasons than for his tenacity and longevity, and favour had been denied him. The rain scourged us as I escorted Fanny through the churchyard gates and handed her over to her brother who was waiting in a private carriage in the street.

“Won’t you ride home with us?” Fanny asked. Her gloved hand was on the shoulder of my overcoat.

“I think I must walk,” I said to her. “It’s not far.”

“But the rain?” she said.

“I think I must walk.”

Thursday, 16 January 1851

This obituary for Mr. Farquhar Pratt appeared in
The Era
today:

On the instant of eight o’clock, January 8, 1851, Mr. Edward Farquhar Pratt passed away near the Nova Scotia Gardens, Shoreditch. His funeral took place at Islington churchyard on Sunday, January 12.

Mr. Farquhar Pratt trained as an actor in the company of
Edmund Kean in Exeter and with several other provincial theatre circuits. In 1820, he made his debut at the Surrey Coal-hole,
playing various comic roles, including Sam Snealy to T.P. Cooke’s William in
Black-ey’d Susan
. While his acting can be characterized as broad and archaic, Mr. Farquhar Pratt also became stock author at various minor theatres in the Capitol, most recently at the New Albion Theatre. He is the author of, we are told, upwards of five hundred burlettas, pantomimes, and melodramas, most notably
Sally Sadly
,
or
the
Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl
, which ran for over one hundred nights at the Royal Victoria during Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s employment there.

Through his life, Mr. Farquhar Pratt claimed to have derived from theatrical royalty; he purported to have been a descendant of the great George Farquhar, author of
The Recruiting Officer
, etc. We can find absolutely no proof for this assertion, however, and certainly Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s work does not manifest a wondrous inherited talent.

He leaves to mourn only his wife Anna Farquhar Pratt, cur
rently of the Spitalfields Workhouse.

Perhaps I am overly sensitized to innuendo, but I am left to wonder why the author of this obituary sought to mention Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s disputed claim to be descended from the great playwright? Why the mention of his wife in the workhouse? Is this an obituary or a cautionary tale about embarking on a career in the theatre?

Mr. Heywood’s
Hector, the Pirate of the Spanish Main
has been playing with great success these past few evenings. For some reason unknown to me – perhaps because there is little else to do – spectators have returned to the New Albion Theatre in droves.

In the mornings, we are rehearsing
Old Bones
, a minstrel show which Eustace Heywood whipped up, with locomotive-like efficiency, in a matter of days. I am certain that the play will entertain; the actors are hardly able to contain their mirth during rehearsals. I am nevertheless struck by the vacuity of the proceedings. Yesterday, Neville Watts appeared for the first time in burnt cork and sang “Ol’ Swanee,” but there was something
ludicrous in his impeccable Macreadyan diction and in his pon
derous acting style as he dialogued with the Master of Ceremonies on the virtues of black-eyed peas, grits, and banjo-picking. “Grits is truly a marvelous thing, massa,” he declaimed in a meticulous aristocratic accent, to the increased merriment of all present.

Mr. Wilton no longer calls me into his office for our daily conference on the state of finances, the state of the advertising, or the state of productions. He seems content to let me work out my remaining few weeks in the theatre with little fanfare and little input from him. That is probably for the best, considering the antipathy I feel towards him over his shoddy treatment of Mr. Farquhar Pratt.

Sunday, 19 January 1851

For no other reason than to satisfy my own curiosity, I absented myself from the bosom of my family this afternoon and walked to the gates of Spitalfields Workhouse. A yawning gatekeeper asked me if I had any relatives inside, and I said, “No, just the wife of a good friend.”

“I’m afraid we do not issue visitor’s passes to see wives of good friends,” he replied. “You can stay here and watch through the gates all you please, though.”

The sky was blue and cloudless, and the day pleasant, so I lingered awhile at the gates, peering through its bars at the imposing brick structure of the workhouse proper. What atrocities must be committed inside that building under the pretense of a new austerity program conceived by an uncaring government. “The system is abused,” the people say. “Make the blackguards work for their daily bread!” And so the workhouse authorities have their
inmates – I call them inmates because they are in a prison of sorts
– many of them aged or maimed, labouring sixteen hours each day. I picture poor Mrs. Farquhar Pratt forced to walk a treadmill, her aged legs fumbling with every misstep, because she cannot keep up with the new work ethic of the place.

While I was standing at the workhouse gates, two elderly men came gabbling up the cobblestones, stopping here and there to pick up a dirty apple peels and cores. These they unhesitatingly put into their mouths and chewed with little apparent enjoyment. What a state their intestines must be in if they are forced to consume the waste of others! I had thought at first
that they were madmen, and their state of dress further rein
forced that impression. Neither man wore cap or greatcoat; they braved the elements of this January day wearing little more than threadbare cotton shirts and gingham trousers, probably gotten in the waste bins around Petticoat Lane. When I heard them speak to the gatekeeper, however, I realized that they were sane, cognizant old men, no more deserving of their fate than I was. “Me mate and me spent twenty years aservin in Her Majesty’s Navy,” one said. “We’ve washed up short a few bob, and we need a place to slumber for a night.”

The gatekeeper’s comparatively friendly demeanor, which he had displayed toward me only moments before, vanished into the crisp air. “Place is full up,” he said with finality.

The two old men shared a weary glance between them. “Well, First Mate,” one of them said, with grim good humour, “looks li’ the streets again for us tonight.”

I watched as they disappeared in the direction from which they had come. Before long, my attention was again directed to the narrow front doors of the workhouse, which had been thrown open in preparation for a mass exodus of the inmates into the yard, there to enjoy the wintry sunshine for fifteen or twenty minutes before returning to their character-building labours. Among the entourage of unwed mothers, slender children, old men and women, was Mrs. Farquhar Pratt, who had been consigned to a wheelchair for some reason unknown to me and who was rolled on to the brown grass by a curt young lady in a dark dress. Mrs. Farquhar Pratt’s own attire was institutional and grey; she was afforded no sign of mourning, not in the week following her husband’s funeral. I could not see her eyes, but her aged grey head was moving about frenetically, like
a wounded bird’s, and she seemed to focus on nothing and no one. In her lap was a ball of wool and in her hands a carding instrument, and her fingers kept a deliberate pace, carding the wool, quite independently of what the rest of her body was absorbed with. As I watched her, my sadness deepened, and I was somewhat relieved when the staff herded Mrs. Farquhar Pratt and the others inside and the doors were shut behind them.

Tuesday, 23 January 1851

The theatre is abuzz today with a new scandal. Some young swell – Mrs. Toffat is certain that it is young Colin Tyrone himself – has seen fit to publish a poem about the ladies of the New Albion Theatre in a slim volume titled
Tales of the Green Room
which seems to be widely available throughout the city. The poem, one of several in the volume that treats of theatrical matters, delves into the personal lives of our actresses. I quote:

“Tale of the New Albion Theatre”

The Albion’s a theatre for doing the funny,

For riotous acts, burlettas and crime,

But mostly she’s known for all sorts of cunny

To keep the swells happy some of the time.

First Mrs. Simpson, who can sing and can dance,

Whose virtue is perfect, whose modesty’s known,

When her husband’s not looking, she’ll offer a chance

To Tom, Dick or Bancroft to cock leg and moan.

And then Fanny Hardwick who longs for a hard prick,

Of genteel airs and fainting and sighs,

She can sing “Hearts of Oak” while turning a trick

And play Sally Sadly while spreading her thighs.

The last and the greatest is fine Mrs. Wilton

Whose venal behavior nothing can cure.

Her breasts are ahanging, her __ smells like Stilton,

She’ll __ any man buys a theatre for her.

I feel sadness for Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Simpson, and especially for Fanny, in all of this. It is a journalistic cheap shot, whoever is responsible for its composition. At the same time, I wonder at the temperament of any lady who would voluntarily put her
good reputation in harm’s way by indulging in a life in the the
atre. Why would anyone volunteer to be an actress, as Fanny has done?

I must admit that I shall be relieved, finally, to be away from a world where everyone’s life is an open book. But I shall also miss these mad, mad actors, their quick wits and quick tempers, their flights of fancy and displays of emotion, their superficiality and their camaraderie. The furniture-making business cannot offer anything as jubilant in the high moments or as unhappy in the low.