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CHAPTER XV
FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW

The concrete personal result of the civic, social, and educational processes already described is now to be examined. The personal contrast between the new generation of young men and women of the middle class, most likely to strike an Englishman returned to London after long absence. Sex emancipation. The typical physique of both sexes has been visibly modified, amongst other agencies by bicycle practice. The stately maiden or matron of the period was unknown to John Leech; has been drawn faithfully by Du Maurier. Some social ideals are unchanged, but older middle class ideals have passed out of date.

In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete individual product of these forces? The epithet ‘middle class’ is employed in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. ‘They look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable, unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter.’ The restlessness which in the British visitor puzzled the Mussulman when Eothen was written as a national quality has of late increased among us.⁴⁴

From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation, into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied by a growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.

Late in the seventies of our century the social craze of what was called ‘rinkomania’ set in. Any available buildings were laid down with floors more or less lubricated, on which the sons and daughters of the various sections of the great middle class, shod with a peculiar adaptation of wheels, slipped about, and called it skating. These resorts were no doubt admirably conducted. Acquaintances made at them were probably blameless. They often perhaps ended in blissful and desirable marriage. But not without a shock to her sense of maternal propriety did the English matron of old-fashioned ideas see, or hear of, her daughter being twirled round in the arms of some youth just introduced, or perhaps without even the preliminary of that easy form. The young woman could cite plausible precedent for the process. The most fond and nervous of mothers suffered her fears to be allayed. No evil, and it may be hoped some good, to mind and body, came perhaps from these experiences.

It was, nevertheless, an innovation on the usage of generations to which bygone ancestors and ancestresses would not readily have reconciled themselves. In plain words it signified the revolt of the sons and daughters of the middle class against their exclusion from modes of social enjoyment that to their contemporaries slightly above them in the social scale had long been allowed. They had read of the subscription balls planned by the astute Scot, John Almack, at Willis’s Rooms, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. More recently they had seen accounts of subscription dances in what were then aristocratic watering places like Scarborough, or of the more cosmopolitan revels where chaperons were largely dispensed with by their well-born charges at Baden-Baden and Homburg. What claim did the accident of birth constitute to a monopoly of the more stirring and less exclusive forms of pleasure? Thus it came to pass that the pastime which followed the generally patrician Almacks at the interval of a century from being a romp of children became the mildly gymnastic function of youths and maidens of maturer years.

The next stage in this progress is marked by the popularity of the lawn-tennis ground. The private gardens of urban or suburban villadom were soon too small for the wielders of the racquet. The common enclosure of the crescent, the square, or the ‘Gardens,’ was coveted one day by the players. It was possessed the next. After this, the transition to lawn-tennis subscription clubs, with public grounds, and championship matches open to all comers was easy and natural. The parlour of home soon dwindled into an insignificant spot to the overgrown boys and girls engaged in ‘All England’ tournaments of their own.

Meanwhile, the gentlemen and ladies who called themselves society, and to whom a portion of the newspaper press was set apart, were indulging more enterprising tastes still, in a manner duly recorded by their daily and weekly journals. The rage for ‘making up a party’ for everything; researches into the London slums, or visits to the French play, came in; superstitious veneration for the ceremonial etiquette of a past day went out. The mere expedition to the theatre was scarcely stirring enough without the preliminary dinner or the subsequent supper at the modish restaurants which cause certain quarters of London metaphorically to abut on the Boulevard des Italiens or on the Palais Royal. They who now from afar imitated this glittering example had not, it is true, like their betters, any ‘smart’ sets of their own.

That was no reason why the favourites of fortune should have all the fun to themselves. The daughters of the professional class and of those below them in the social scale were as well educated, as intelligent, as personally presentable, as those whom a partial chance had made conventionally their superiors. Why should the persons born with the proverbial gold spoon in their mouths alone be emancipated? Friskiness was an attribute not confined to the born inheritors of that which called itself society.

Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales’s or the Gaiety on the amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or Chelsea. In all things the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of many hundreds among Her Majesty’s subjects whose special attribute was once supposed to be, in Froissart’s phrase, ‘to take their pleasures sadly.’ Lord’s Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.

In theory and in practice ‘society’ considers itself, and to some extent is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to say in his last novel Endymion that London which during the earlier days of the Queen’s reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted of its lighter pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made this remark.

As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.

In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen’s Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror. As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new régime has involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres. Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be unlet; his sons’ bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the old Hall at his ‘rent dinner,’ the squire, one of a long race of squires, has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton, Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since Lord Cairns’ Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new proprietors violates few of the old traditions.

The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county ball. He himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions, transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports. The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile, though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges against the least commercial of the squirearchy.

This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older, have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended to them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the broader and more purely social processes just described.

That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive, inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies, had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money, the oligarchies of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up, and better carried, among the young women as well.

The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is now seen to be no figment of the artist’s imagination. The feminine forms which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of Punch. English women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities, consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the pencil of John Leech’s successor. This latter development has been an unmixed good. The transition from the eventless purely domesticated existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds. The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel’s valet said of his master’s crumpled neckcloths: ‘These are our failures;’ in other words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the rôle will doubtless be played without any misadventures.

Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which those who are always ready to imitate their example have followed them. The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.

CHAPTER XVI
‘THE PLAY’S THE THING’

Summary of the agencies and incidents preparing the way for the revival of the theatre as a popular institution, Macready and his purifying influences inside the theatre. Charles Kean at the Princess’s. Usefulness of Rugby and Eton associations to each of these respectively. Miss Faucit (Lady Martin); her last appearance at Drury Lane; her enduring influence on the profession. Mrs Boucicault, Miss Kate Terry, Mrs P. H. Lee, Miss Ellen Terry and others. Henry Irving; his first London hit at the St James’s, afterwards at the Lyceum under Bateman. His success characterized. T. W. Robertson’s plays. Other circumstances of the time favourable to the new popularity of the play.

At the different seaside resorts fringing the greater part of southern England from Beachy Head to Penzance, by the new sort of life organized at Eastbourne, Hastings, and innumerable other places, one is reminded very practically that only twenty miles of intervening sea separate the French from the English coast. The British climate may be less favourable than that on the other side of the Straits for the open air existence of the French littoral. The more praiseworthy, therefore, and not the less persistent are the efforts of visitors and residents on the unsunny side of the Channel to acclimatize themselves to the al fresco habits of Boulogne, Dieppe, Trouville, or Biarritz.

Brighton has not yet very visibly changed its régime since the days when George IV. lived at the Pavilion. Its newer rival, Eastbourne, has taken advantage of a local conformation, and especially of a paved sea front to present the stranger with various little reproductions of what is most characteristic in the social exterior of French holiday life during the bathing season. It is not only one or two families, mutually intimate, which meet and pass together the greater portion of the day on the esplanade that lies in the shadow of Beachy Head. The whole place practically turns out, settles itself down for a day’s occupation, if the weather be fine enough, on the causeway above the pebbled shore. The ladies produce knitting instruments or appliances for domestic needlework. The men have their newspapers or books. The circle exactly after the French fashion is formed, big enough in compass to admit all the polite population of the place. When the luncheon hour approaches, there is a move not from off the sea front, but to some of the covered shelters that stud at intervals the esplanade. Improvised tables are covered with white cloths. The company, that the French stranger at a glance recognizes as belonging to the order of bourgeoisie, proves itself long to have outgrown the dislike to public meals common to most English men and women at the period of the Queen’s accession. At night the boarding houses, hotels, or private dwellings that in a long line rise just above the sea terrace seem practically to amalgamate themselves into a single dancing hall.

Other instances, more picturesque, or at least more suggestive, of the naturalization of continental examples, at English holiday resorts may be given. Eastbourne is indebted for the full development of its natural attractions and for the addition of its beauties of art to the Duke of Devonshire. Amongst other buildings with which the place has been enriched is a town hall of graceful proportions and artistic aspect. This building is crowned by a clock tower so exquisitely shaped and standing out in such classic profile against the dark South Downs in the background as to justify the local vaunt that had it been in Florence sightseers from all parts of the world would have flocked to see it; and guide books would long since have commemorated the glories of, a new Campanile added to the historic list of fair structures. While the Eastbourne clock tower is awaiting the architectural canonization it deserves, the town itself has still more closely approached to southern exemplars by starting a carnival of its own.⁴⁵ The slovenly and bedraggled mummeries into which the Italian saturnalia have degenerated have not prevented the enterprising authorities of the Sussex watering place from mimicking the battles of flowers and confetti that are still supposed to relieve the approach of Lent in the City of the Popes, but which as a fact have during late years only formed another feature in Roman vulgarity. One advantage over its more Southern original the Sussex shore imitation possesses. Real confetti are not employed. Pellets of tissue paper are missiles at once less costly and less dangerous than sugar plums. In other respects the continental type has been reproduced rather too faithfully. Whether on the Corso, the King’s Road, Brighton, the Esplanade or Terminus Road, Eastbourne, the whole pageant, as to the costume, the humours, and the hand artillery of the mummers, resembles equally the scenes on the return from the Derby by road to be witnessed between Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.

It was, perhaps, the foreign imitations in the social scheme of English life increasingly visible during his later years to Matthew Arnold which inspired that close observer with the advice to his countrymen to organize the theatre. To some extent, indeed, the counsel had long been anticipated. The organization of the stage into a wholesome agency of popular amusement and teaching began with Macready, the earliest of that line of considerable actors who have served their generation during the Victorian epoch. But the prejudice against the play prevailing among other than the austerer classes long survived the work of this great reformer of the English stage. The company which fills a theatre to-day in respect of ethics and behaviour is not inferior to the fashionable occupants of an opera box on a subscription night.

It was not always so. When between 1827, the year of his first, and 1851 the year of his last, appearance at Drury Lane, Macready was the head of the theatrical world, he found some difficulty in eliminating certain objectionable elements from the auditorium of Drury Lane. He persisted with his work. At last the moral atmosphere of a London playhouse was admittedly as unexceptionable as that of Exeter Hall. Macready himself who was born in 1793, and lived till 1873, had been educated at Rugby, as Charles Kean who followed him, had reached the Sixth Form at Eton. Macready, too, was in his day almost as much a favourite with the clergy of the Established Church as, since his The Sign of the Cross, Mr Wilson Barrett has become in ours. If the Etonian Keate inspired respect by the consciousness of his having birched future generations of statesmen, the Etonian Macready reflected the prestige of respectability upon his profession from the fact that during his retirement at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, most of the Anglican clergy noticeable for their elocution had received lessons from him in the art of reading.

Charles Kean’s acting life covered the period between 1820 and 1868. Like Macready, he was a favourite in the provinces before he made his mark on the London boards. With him there began, or was fairly established, the improvement of stage, scenery, costume, and in all incidental accessories that has been brought to so high a point of perfection by the genius, industry, and well-judged lavishness of Henry Irving. Byron’s enthusiasm still glows in the words of his famous eulogy on the acting of Charles Kean’s father, Edmund Kean, who seems to have been perhaps the most powerful and moving artist that the English stage has known. The energy, passion and fire of the Keans marked a reaction from, and were to some extent a protest against the stately and frigid classicism of the school of Kemble. They thus appropriately coincided in point of time with that romantic movement in English poetry which in his satire Byron ridiculed, but which in his practice he did so much to promote. The epoch, during which these attributes were displayed by Kean and his followers, roughly may be said to have synchronized with the season of the influence on the thought and diction of English poetry exercised through the publication of the Reliques of Thomas Percy, who, towards the end of the last, and early in the present, century, was successively Dean of Carlisle and Bishop of Dromore. This book probably did more than any other single volume ever issued from the press, to quicken and complete the revolt of English taste against the formal models of the age of Pope. From the personal life, character and wide social acceptance both of Macready first and of Charles Kean afterwards, the English drama directly, as well as indirectly, was a gainer. In those days the social fusion was not nearly so complete as it has since become; but Macready and the younger Kean had both been popular in their school days. In after life Rugby and Eton respectively rallied round them. The amalgamating agency of the Garrick Club, practically so familiar at rather a later day, was not then an operative force. But of the Athenæum and similar institutions Macready and in his turn Kean must have been free; their private acquaintances and visiting lists were as large and as representative as those of their successors during the present decade of the Queen’s reign.

It is not, however, under a dynasty of high tragedians that the full development, as a social and intellectual force, of the Victorian drama was to be attained. Long after the theatre became respectable, it remained dull. The audience seldom dwindled to the point of invisibility which a little time before was in some theatres habitual, and not infrequent in all. Before the period now spoken of, Lord Lytton, of whose place in letters more will be said elsewhere, had gone some way towards repeating the dual successes in Parliament and at the playhouse achieved by Sheridan in an earlier day. Money was produced in 1840. Exactly a quarter of a century afterwards a dramatic hit not less palpable and destined to have results more considerable was made by an author till then little known on the London stage. The year in which Society was played at the Prince of Wales’s, till then the Queen’s Theatre, in a street off the Tottenham Court Road, will be remembered by the theatre-goer as that in which Henry J. Byron’s last burlesque was produced on the same boards and in which one of the actors in that extravaganza, Don Giovanni, Mr John Hare, took, for the first and only time in his life, a woman’s part on the stage, wearing the petticoats of Zerlina, the simple peasant girl. The real significance of this occasion lay in its marking a new era in the fortunes of the nineteenth century drama. The germ of Anthony Trollope’s novels of domestic life, may be seen in Bulwer-Lytton’s fictions of The Caxtons school. The part performed by the author of Society and its dramatic sequels for the English play resembled the performances of Anthony Trollope with regard to the English novel. Like Bulwer, Robertson fashioned his dialogue on the model of Sheridan. The writer of Money laboured to reproduce the antithetic polish of his original. The author of Society and the series that followed it was attracted rather by the caustic repartee in which the author of The School for Scandal excelled. The change thus introduced at a theatre of which till then few had ever heard, was the substitution of the realities of contemporary life in drawing room, club, shooting field or camp for the threadbare traditions, stilted sentiment, and fustian talk of conventional melodrama. Whether the original were, or were not, too trivial for reproduction, it is at least human nature to which the mirror was now for the first time during recent years held up. The contrast between Robertson and most of his immediate predecessors who were nearly his contemporaries was not less marked than that between those masterpieces of the Laura Matilda school, which delighted Mrs Wititterly, and the works of Miss Edgeworth, or that between the Great Cyrus and the author of Waverley. The dramatis personæ of Robertson were the men and women, the youths and maidens, the old bucks and young officers, the pretty servant girls, their ogling followers, the dapper apprentices, the seasoned topers whom the English public had long known from Leech’s drawings in the ‘London Charivari,’ but who had not often been met with recently on the London stage. Now, for the first time within the experience of many, the theatre became the fashion; the stalls at the Prince of Wales’s first, and at other houses soon afterwards, were peopled by occupants as modish as the Italian Opera when Piccolomini sang in Traviata. Even then, however, the first night of a new drama, though at the most popular playhouse fell very short of reproducing the personal distinctions of a première at the Comédie Francaise or the Palais Royal. That was to follow in due time. Early in the sixties an impressario, with judgment sharpened by American experience, became the lessee of the same theatre, the Lyceum, which twenty years earlier had been managed by Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris. The first great feature in Mr Bateman’s management was the powerful and picturesque acting of his accomplished daughter in Leah first and in some Shakespearian parts afterwards. About the same time an actor with whose name in coming years the Lyceum was to be more widely associated had given the public specimens of an art surprisingly vigorous and picturesque. Henry Irving first played before a London audience in 1859. In 1866 he had the good fortune to be cast with Miss Herbert (Mrs Crabbe) in one of those character parts in which he has had few equals, the worthless, persecuting husband in Hunted Down. This was in the theatre that witnessed the first triumphs of the great singer Braham, that more recently had been filled from pit to gallery by the laughter loving admirers of Mr and Mrs Frank Mathews,⁴⁶ or by the appreciative few who realized the charm of the more subtle impersonations of Alfred Wigan. The place, therefore, was of good omen for the rising star. The most accomplished dramatic critic whom in England the century has produced, George Henry Lewes, and the lady who bore his name, but is best known to the public as George Eliot, author of Adam Bede, both witnessed the début. ‘Ten or fifteen years hence,’ said the gentleman, ‘that young man will be where Kean once was, at the head of the English stage.’ ‘In my opinion,’ faintly murmured the lady, ‘he is there already.’