Records of a Girlhood

At this moment a great political excitement pervades the country; it is the time of the Presidential Election, and the most vehement efforts are being made by the Democratic party to maintain the present President, General Jackson, in his post. The majority, I believe, is in his favor, though we are told that the "better classes" (whatever that may mean where no distinctions of class exist) embrace the cause of his opponent, Henry Clay.

It seems curious, if it is true, as we have been assured, that in this one State of Pennsylvania, eight thousand persons out of fifty who have the right of voting were all who in this last election exercised it; so that the much-vaunted privilege of universal suffrage does not seem to be highly prized where it is possessed.

From all the opinions that I hear expressed upon the subject, it does not seem as though the system of election prevalent here works much better, or is much freer from abuses, than the well-vilified one which England has just been reforming. Bribery and corruption are familiar here as elsewhere, to those who have, and those who wish to have, power; and I have not yet heard a single American speak of our Radical reformers without uplifted hands at what they consider their folly in not "letting well alone," or, as they say, in substituting one set of abuses for another, as they declare we shall do if we adopt their vote by ballot system.

I have now written you a philosophical, moral, and political letter, and beg you will score up my attempt to write rationally against the loads of gibberish I have from time to time discoursed to you. Good bless you, dearest H–! Three thousand miles away, I am still

    Always your affectionate
    F. A. K.
    Philadelphia, October 22, 1832.

Dear H–,

My first news is deplorable, and I beg you will lament over it accordingly. I eat little, drink less, rehearse six mornings and act five nights a week; in spite of all which, and riding a heavy-going, jolting, shambling, hard-pulling horse, I have grown so fat that I really cannot perceive that there is any shape in particular about me. Grotesque things sometimes are melancholy too, and it is so with me, for I am both....

My father and Dall are very well; at this moment he is busy saying, and she hearing him say, the part of Fazio, which he is to act with me to-morrow night. I dread it dreadfully; acting anything painful with him always tries my nerves extremely.

Bianca is a part of terrible excitement in itself, without the addition of having to act it to his Fazio. I cannot get rid of his being he, and it agonizes me really to see his sham agony; however, "'tis my vocation, Hal." It is very well that our audiences should look at us as mere puppets, for could they sometimes see the real feelings of those for whose false miseries their sympathies are excited, I believe sufficiently in their humanity to think they would kindly give us leave to leave off and go home. Ours is a very strange trade, and I am sorry to say that every day increases my distaste for it.... I do not think that during my father's life I shall ever leave the stage; it is very selfish to feel regret at this, I know, but it sometimes seems to me rather dreary to look along my future years, and think that they will be devoted to labor that I dislike and despise.... For many years—ever since I entered upon my first girlhood, indeed—a quiet, lonely life upon a small independence has been the aim of my desires and my notion of happiness. Italy and the south of France formerly constantly solicited my imagination, as offering pleasant places wherein to build a solitary nest.... And now a cottage near Edinburgh, with an income of two hundred a year, seems to me the most desirable of earthly possessions; but, though this is certainly not a very wild vision of wealth or magnificence, I fear it is quite as little within my reach as southern palaces, or villas on the Mediterranean.

My father has hitherto been able to lay by nothing, and my assistance is absolutely necessary to him, … and as long as I can in any way serve my father's interests by remaining in my profession I shall do so, and must naturally look forward to a prolonged period of my present exertions. It is useless pondering upon this, but I have been led to do so lately from a letter which my father received from Mr. Bartley, the stage manager of Covent Garden, the other day, which contained the plan of a new theatrical speculation, in which he is most anxious to engage us. I know not how my father feels upon this subject.... I, however, am well determined that neither Mr. L–'s opinion, nor that of the whole world besides, should induce me to own the value of a truss of straw in any theater. My father's whole life has been given over to trouble and anxiety in consequence of his proprietorship and involvement in that ruinous concern, Covent Garden; and now, when his remaining health and strength will no more than serve to lay up the means of subsistence when health and strength are gone, the idea of his loading himself with such a burden of bitterness as the proprietorship of a new theater makes me perfectly miserable. For my own part, I am determined to own neither part nor lot in any such venture: I will lend or give anything that I may earn to it, and I will act, at half the price I might get elsewhere, for it, if my father wishes me to do so; but not a demonstrable cent per cent profit should induce me to run such a risk of cursing the day that I was born, as to become owner of a theater. I write you all this (and I have written more than enough about it) because it has been lately a subject of much anxious meditation to me. The matter is at present without settled form or plan, but the proposal of such a scheme has caused me deep regret and anxiety.... I am going to act to-morrow in "The Hunchback;" Thursday, Mrs. Beverley; Friday, Lady Townley; Saturday, Juliet; Monday, Julia again; and Tuesday, Bizarre in "The Inconstant;" which ends our engagement here. This is pretty hard work, is it not? besides always one, and sometimes two rehearsals of a morning.

We begin our second engagement in New York on the 7th of November. Don't forget that the 27th of that month is my birthday, and that if you neglect to drink my health, I shall probably die, for want of your good wishes to keep me alive.

We act in Boston on the 3d of December; "further than that the deponent sayeth not."

I told you in my last letter that Philadelphia was the cleanest place in the world. The country along the banks of the Schuylkill (one of the rivers on which it stands; the other is the Delaware) is wild and beautiful, and the glory of the autumn woods what an eye that hath not seen can by no manner of means conceive. I have for the last week had my room full of the most delicious flowers that could only be seen with us at midsummer, and here, in these last days of autumn, they are as abundant and fragrant, and the sun is as intensely hot and brilliant, as it should be, but never is, with us, in the month of July....

Dall went into a Quaker's shop here the other day, when, after waiting upon her with the utmost attention and kindness, the master of the shop said, "And how doth Fanny? I was in hopes she might have wanted something; we should have great pleasure in attending upon her." Was not that nice? So to-day I went thither, and bought myself a lovely sober-colored gown. This place, as you know, is the headquarters of Quakerdom, and all the enchanting nosegays come from "a Philadelphia friend," the latter word dashed under, as if to indicate a member of the religious fraternity always called by that kindly title here....

I think my father has some idea of bringing out "The Star of Seville" here, and if he does I shall break my heart that it was not brought out first in England. Emily always reproaches me with want of patriotism. I have more than helps to make me cheerful here, and leaving England—not home, and not you, but England, England—for two years, seems to me now ridiculous, and fabulous, and preposterous, and disastrous.

I have finished my first volume of Graham, and I have finished this letter. God bless you!

    Ever your affectionate
    F. A. K.
    Philadelphia, November 2, 1832.

Dearest H–,

I received your fifth letter to-day, and one from Dorothy, and one from Emily Fitzhugh.... My last letter to you was a sad one, and sad in a fashion that does not often occur to me. I was troubled and anxious about my professional labor and its results, and that may be called a small sadness compared with some other with which I have lately become familiar. Of course none of these anxieties have been removed, for some time must elapse before I can know on what plan my father determines with regard to Mr. Bartley's proposal about this new theater. It does not affect me personally, because I am thoroughly determined to take no part in any speculation of the kind; but the possibility of my father entering into any such scheme is care enough to "kill a cat," and make a kitten miserable besides.... In all matters, but especially in matters of business, I hold frankness, straightforwardness, and decision as conducive to success, as consonant with right feeling; but I think men are much more cowardly than women, and believe a great deal more in policy, temporizing, and expediency than we do. "Managing" is supposed to be a feminine tendency; it has no place in my composition; perhaps I might be the better for a little of it—but only perhaps, and only a little.... This letter, as you will perceive by its date, was begun on the banks of the Delaware; here we are, however, once more in New York. It is Monday evening, the 5th of November, and you are firing squibs and burning manikins en action de grâces that the Houses of Parliament were not blown up by the Roman Catholics, instead of living to be reformed by the Whigs, and (peradventure) blowing up the nation.

The Presidential Election is going on here, and creates immense excitement. General Jackson, they say, will certainly be re-elected.

Our last fortnight in Philadelphia has been one of incessant and very hard work, rehearsing every morning and acting every night. I rejoiced heartily when our engagement drew to a close, for I was fairly worn out, and money bought with health is bought too dear, I think.... I have taken some very pleasant rides during our stay in Philadelphia; the horses are none of them properly broken for riding, which makes it a pleasure of no small fatigue to ride them for three or four hours. Luckily, I do not object to severe exercise, and the weather and the country were both charming....

I am glad you have been re-reading the "Tempest." … What exquisite pleasure that fine creation has given me! I like it better than any of the other plays; it is less "of the earth, earthy" than any of the others; for though the "Midsummer Night's Dream" is in some sort, as it were, its companion, the mortal element in the latter poem is far less noble and lovely than in the "Tempest." Prospero and Miranda, the dwellers on the enchanted island, are statelier and fairer than any of the human wanderers in the mazes of the Athenian wood. There is a deep and indescribable melancholy to me in the "Tempest" that mingles throughout with its beauty, and lends a special charm to it. I so often contemplate in fancy that island, lost in the unknown seas, just in the hour of its renewed solitude, after the departure of its "human mortal" dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the shining shore, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place, stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it; it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

    Ever your affectionate
    F. A. K.

Dearest H–,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us—that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of paper!… Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday—in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go when the candle is out?" … Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.

This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.

I have just finished Graham's "History," and am beginning John Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it, won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate

    F. A. K.
    December 9, 1832.

My dearest H–,

I received yours of October 16th yesterday.... You are not healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons.

Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over.... Mercy on me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had—on matters physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My brains ache to imagine them.... Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him highly.... Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; God forbid I should ever try them!…

We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect simplicity and unaffectedness—these are the usual details that follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know nothing.

I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost daily. The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country—that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map—so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!…

I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his "History" seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am now half way through Smith's "Virginia," which pleases me by its quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their heads on his shield is to me an admirable man....

I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington, and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets, and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H–.

    I am, ever yours affectionately,
    F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us uttered six words.

    Baltimore, January 2, 1833.