Fanny Kemble

English actor

• Born: November 27, 1809
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: January 15, 1893
• Place of death: London, England

Kemble ranks as one of the finest actors on the British and American stage. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 is one of the best firsthand accounts of slavery in the United States and is still considered one of the most important indictments of antebellum slavery.

Early Life

Frances Anne Kemble was born into the most famous acting family in Great Britain. Her father, Charles Kemble, had succeeded his brother John as the manager of the Covent Garden theater in London, and two of her aunts were well-known actors. Her mother, Maria Therese De Camp, was an actor who appeared on the London stage with her husband. Known as Fanny, Frances was reared primarily by her aunt, Adelaide (“Dall”) De Camp, but because of her excitable temperament she was sent to France for her elementary schooling. Her antics soon caused the school’s neighbors to refer to her as “cette diable Kemble” (that devil Kemble). She returned to France for a finishing-school education in Paris. She became fluent in French, developed a lifelong interest in religion, and began to read Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. She was a natural bookworm despite her excitable nature. During her years in Paris, Fanny also discovered her histrionic ability when acting in a school production.

Aside from singing and piano lessons, Kemble spent the next three years in England pondering the question of a career, finding herself drawn to writing except for the uncertainness of the income. Perhaps a career on the stage would provide the income for her to pursue her literary aspirations. Her enthusiasm for the theater evaporated, however, when she pondered how much it had cost other members of the Kemble family.

Life’s Work

Fanny Kemble’s return to London in 1829 marked a dramatic change in her life’s work. She found her family in dire financial circumstances because of the burden of managing Covent Garden, which was covered with bills of sale. Although Kemble disliked the theater and had never had any dramatic training, her mother enlisted her to learn the role of Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596). On October 5, 1829, Kemble made her debut, was an overnight success, and soon became the darling of the British theater crowd.

Two other important events happened in this two-year period: Kemble’s play Francis I was published, and Kemble met the woman who would be her lifelong friend and correspondent, Harriet St. Leger of Ireland. For two years, Kemble performed in London and the provinces and made enough money to keep the Covent Garden in business. The great economic and political crisis of the 1830’s, however, finally caused Charles Kemble to abandon the Covent Garden and to take Fanny and her Aunt Dall to the United States in the hope of recouping the family fortunes.

Kemble determined to keep a journal of her sea voyage and the tour of America. She was a good writer and a keen observer of the American scene, which she recorded in what others would later see as blunt and unkind language that was unsuitable for a lady.

The tour of the United States was all that Kemble and her companions had hoped it would be. Kemble was as popular in the United States as she had been in Great Britain, and American dollars flowed into the family purse. Although Kemble found being an actor distasteful, she believed that it was her duty to help her parents, and that was the only way that she could do so. As she had in Great Britain, Kemble met in the United States famous and about-to-be famous people, including John Quincy Adams, Dolley Madison, Andrew Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Sumner, to list but a few. She also came under the influence of William Ellery Channing, the spiritual leader of the Unitarians and abolitionists in New England.

During Kemble’s two-year tour of the United States, two important changes in her life occurred: She met and was ardently pursued by Pierce Mease Butler of Philadelphia, and her beloved Aunt Dall died as a result of a coach accident. Some of Kemble’s biographers opine that if her Aunt Dall had not died in April of 1834, Kemble might not have been so quick to marry Pierce Butler that June. Her marriage meant that Kemble was saying goodbye to both her father and her country. Her last act of filial duty was to arrange to turn over to her father the monies she expected to receive from the publication of her travel journal. Although Pierce Butler was well aware of Kemble’s independent ways, he soon endeavored to make her over into the submissive wife that he wanted, a wife who would not embarrass him or his family by expressing her own ideas. His attempts resulted in failure and ultimately in the end of the marriage.

At the time of his marriage, Butler was heir, along with his brother, to a Georgia plantation that grew sea-island cotton tended by approximately seven hundred slaves. The Butler family had become one of the wealthiest Philadelphia families with the riches acquired from the absentee ownership of the lucrative slave property. At that time, Kemble knew nothing of the source of her husband’s wealth—a circumstance that was not at all unusual. By the same token, Pierce Butler was unaware that his new wife had decidedly antislavery views that had been formed in the agitation that had only recently resulted in the abolition of slavery in England. To Fanny, to be anything but antislavery would have been a disowning of her English heritage.

Once Kemble was aware of the source of the Butler money, the overwhelming concern of her life was slavery and how she could persuade her husband to free his slaves. During these early days of her marriage, Kemble devoted herself to reading, writing, and elaborating her thoughts on slavery, which soon caused disagreements between husband and wife. The first battle was over the travel journal, which was published in 1835 as the Journal . Kemble proposed to include in this travel journal a treatise against Negro slavery. Although Butler was unsuccessful in convincing the publisher to suppress the Journal, he did succeed in keeping Kemble from including the tirade against slavery by throwing the offending manuscript into the flames.

Kemble’s opinions about slavery were strengthened when she read William Ellery Channing’s Slavery (1835) in 1836 and adopted his idea that the slave owner must be won to repentance. Kemble accepted that her duty was to become Pierce Butler’s conscience and mentor. To accomplish this goal, she needed to go to the Butlers’ Georgia plantation. After much resistance, Butler took her there in 1838 when he had to assume the running of the plantation. As she was accustomed to do, Kemble kept a journal of her experiences while living in Georgia for fifteen weeks.

The state of Georgia had one of the densest slave populations of any state. When Kemble arrived, the residences for both the Butler family and the slaves were in wretched condition. The slaves were in poor physical condition, especially the women, who were sent back to the fields immediately after giving birth. This resulted in high infant mortality as well as many gynecological problems that were not treated. Kemble soon sought to remedy some of these conditions. Despite the fact that the slave owner’s wife traditionally served as a “doctor” to the slaves, Butler interpreted his wife’s interest as female meddling. Anyone who complained to Kemble was promptly flogged. Although Butler sometimes showed compassion—for example, by buying a slave’s children from another owner so that the family could remain together—he soon tired of Kemble’s complaints. In retaliation, she began to teach slaves to read, which was a serious crime, and to pay them for doing tasks for her.

When the couple returned to Philadelphia, their marriage was already breaking apart, although it would be almost ten years before Pierce secured a divorce. In 1849, the marriage formally ended, and the two Butler children, Sarah and Fan (Fanny), were given into the custody of their father.

For some years, Kemble spent her time between the United States and Europe; eventually, she found herself back in England during the American Civil War. There was much interest in England in the war because of the question of the recognition of the Confederacy as an independent nation. The one thing that might prevent that recognition was slavery. She tried to give an accurate picture of slavery to British authorities she knew, such as Charles Grenville, the diarist, and Lord Clarendon, a liberal peer. Her lack of success led Kemble to publish her journal of the time spent in Georgia. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 appeared in May of 1863, when recognition of the Confederacy was being debated in Parliament. There is no indication that it had any effect. It was brought out in the United States in July of 1863, shortly after the dual Union victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The book did serve to fan the antislavery fire in what by then were war-weary Northerners.

During her years as a divorcée, Kemble earned her living by doing dramatic readings, which had become more popular than plays. She was successful at this and toured both the British Isles and the United States. Upon the death of her husband in 1867, Kemble was able to reestablish contact with her two daughters. As she entered old age, she wrote her autobiographies based on the letters that she had sent to St. Leger and that St. Leger now returned to her. She died at her daughter Sarah’s home in England in 1893.

Significance

Fanny Kemble’s impact on her time rests on her acting and her writing. Despite the fact that she did not like acting, she is acknowledged to have been one of the finest female actors that England has produced. Her craft, whether acting or doing dramatic readings, brought the pleasures of Shakespeare and other writers to people throughout the British Isles and the United States. Her most significant written work, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, effectively gave the lie to the Southern claim that slavery had been a benign institution. Its publication ensured that Northerners would not lose heart in the struggle to end the Civil War and see that the slaves would be freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite efforts to discredit the book in the post-Civil War period, it remains the best available firsthand account of slavery in the United States. Kemble had indeed accomplished her goal of being a writer.

Bibliography

Blainey, Ann. Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2001. Dual biography of Fanny and her younger sister Adelaide, an opera singer, based in part on the sisters’ letters.

Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Detailed and comprehensive biography. Clinton is generally sympathetic to Kemble, whom she views as a woman trapped by her family and fame. Includes sixty-four black-and-white illustrations.

Driver, Leota Stultz. Fanny Kemble. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Provides portraits, pictures from Butler’s island, a bibliography, notes, and an index. Contains interesting facts not recorded in other biographies, but the reader must beware of the author’s opinions and her use of emotional terms.

Furnas, J. C. Fanny Kemble: Leading Lady of the Nineteenth-Century Stage. New York: Dial Press, 1982. Well illustrated with copious notes and a good bibliography. Provides thorough coverage of Kemble’s life up to the publication of Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. At times, the author exhibits a male bias.

Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. Edited by John A. Scott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Scott’s introduction provides a short biography of Kemble up to the publication of the journal in 1863. Evaluates the importance of the journal.

Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Written from an English viewpoint. Includes many illustrations of family and friends not found in other biographies. Accepts as fact that Kemble was mentally unbalanced.

Wise, Winifred E. Fanny Kemble: Actress, Author, Abolitionist. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. Places Kemble’s life in historical context by identifying persons whom other biographers simply name. Provides little information about the second half of her life.

Wright, Constance. Fanny Kemble and the Lovely Land. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. The best of the Kemble biographies. Places Kemble in her historical setting by explaining the historical importance of the various people in Kemble’s life. A good bibliography and many illustrations are included.