CHAPTER 9
Even during the early days following his admission to the London Hospital, the case of Joseph Merrick began to attract the attention of people who were in a position to bring social influence to bear on his behalf. Outstanding among these was the actress, Mrs Kendal, to whose actor husband, W. H. Kendal, Mr Wardell Cardew mentioned the fact of Joseph Merrick having been in Ostend. Wardell Cardew went on to suggest that Mr Kendal might care to go to the London Hospital to see the Elephant Man for himself, and so he did. In fact Kendal had studied medicine for a time before deciding to make his career in the theatre, and among his friends was John Bland-Sutton. He had made a point of keeping up his interest in medical topics.
When he returned home his wife asked him whether he had enjoyed himself amid all the medical activity. According to her memoirs, Dame Madge Kendal by Herself, he replied decisively:
‘No … I have not. I have seen the most fearful sight of my life.’
‘Don’t tell me about it,’ I replied.
‘The extraordinary thing,’ declared my husband, ‘is that out of the distorted frame came the most musical voice.’
The experience so affected him that he could hardly speak. When he recovered, he told me that Mr Cardew had said they would never allow Merrick to be in the hospital permanently, although he ought to be in there, as it was not fit that he should be seen in public.
‘Wouldn’t they let him remain in the hospital,’ I asked, ‘if the money was raised to pay for his keep?’
At this time Madge Kendal was appearing at the St James’s Theatre, Piccadilly, with her husband’s business partner in theatrical management, Mr John Hare, in The Hobby Horse, a new play by the rising young playwright Arthur Pinero. The fine cast also included Mrs Beerbohm Tree, and the drama critic of Punch said he really did not care in what Mrs Kendal and Mr Hare appeared, they excelled so in their playing. Evidently the play was not vintage Pinero, but Mrs Kendal had the rewarding and appropriate part of an irreproachable married woman whose one peculiarity was her philanthropic hobby of turning the family house into a refuge for waifs and strays, to her husband’s exasperation. It was a success with the theatre-going public, for whom Mrs Kendal was a star performer and could do no wrong.
Madge Kendal had been born into a family with strong theatrical antecedents, the Robertsons. Among her ancestors was James Robertson, an actor and playwright who was a contemporary of David Garrick and well known in the fashionable centres of Bath and York. Several generations of theatrical managers followed, and one of her elder brothers (there were twenty-two children in the family) was T. W. Robertson, the dramatist who had a decisive influence in introducing the new realism on to the Victorian stage. He saw this as a principle that would affect a production as a whole, from playscript to style of the acting and production details. He was one of the first to stipulate that when he asked for coat-pegs in the scenery they should be real coat-pegs on which real coats might be hung and not painted simulations.
When Madge Robertson married W. H. Kendal in 1869, her career as an accomplished and popular actress was already firmly launched. Her husband was similarly becoming well known as an actor manager, though in the end it was his wife’s fame that was the more durable. Nevertheless their partnership lasted throughout their lives and they became a byword for setting a respectable example in the theatrical world where a general raffishness characterized the more usual tone.
All her life Madge Kendal never flinched from performing acts of charity. Many years after the events concerning the Elephant Man she was to claim that she had been the one responsible for anonymously launching the fund that brought Merrick the financial security to maintain him in the London Hospital. Be that as it may, it needs to be emphasized that while her husband met Merrick, she herself probably never did so. The chapter on ‘The Elephant Man’ in her memoirs contains no indication of a personal encounter. The tone is detached and she even relies on Treves’s already published description to sketch in his appearance. Her incessantly crowded career could, in any case, have left her little enough time for charitable visits in the manner of ladies of greater leisure.
She nevertheless represented the starting point to a network of personages who would mobilize sympathy for Joseph Merrick’s welfare and incidentally enrich his experience of a social life in the few years remaining to him. In the meantime, he had begun to explore within the limits he could manage: a few limping steps in the darkness of late evening, a shuffling from his room, a painful toiling up the concrete steps and then the cold stillness of Bedstead Square with its shadows, the far-away glow of the high ward windows and the occasional echo of distant footsteps. Yet it prompted in him a sense of freedom to stand unmolested in the open air. With each night-time excursion, his confidence increased until at last he was able to make his way from the square, skirting beyond the patches of light thrown from windows, picking his way through the rubble of builders’ materials that littered the ground where new extensions were being built, moving in a hesitant exploration round beyond the end of the great block of the East Wing until he came to the hospital gardens and walked alone in the darkness. There he could feel the grass soft beneath his feet and savour the rediscovered scent of night flowers.
In the daytime, he spied cautiously on the comings and goings in Bedstead Square. He learnt to recognize the faces of those who passed daily above his window, and the workmen in their turn were aware of the unseen but watchful presence behind the curtains in the little basement room. Here, too, he unexpectedly found friends. Mr Taylor, the chief engineer, came one day to introduce Charles Taylor, his youngest son, a lad of about seventeen. A friendship quickly sprang up between them, and after that the youth came regularly, bringing his violin to play in private recital for Joseph’s entertainment.
Mrs Kendal sent him gifts, the first being an early gramophone of the type invented by Edison only about ten years before, the recordings for which were made on cylinders rotated by a hand-cranked handle at the side. Joseph wrote to thank Mrs Kendal for her kindness, and in fact he wrote her letters on several occasions. Alas, the letters did not survive. She presented them to the London Hospital, but they could no longer be traced when she came to write her memoirs in the early 1930s. He also sent her one of the cardboard models he had constructed with the aid of the nurses. It was a delicately detailed model of a Gothic church. This has survived, being preserved today in the museum of the London Hospital Medical College.
In one of his letters to Mrs Kendal, Joseph mentioned that he hoped one day to be able to learn basket-work. She promptly arranged for an instructor to teach him the craft. Now his room became littered with bundles of cane and small basket-work articles waiting to be given to whoever might accept them. The first basket he completed he sent to Mrs Kendal herself.
Since it was evidently not possible for her to go to see him, Joseph requested that she send him some photographs. These she forwarded, and he displayed them in his room in triumph.
It came as rather a surprise to Treves to find how Joseph was starting to develop into something of a celebrity. The letter to The Times had had the effect of arousing not only a phenomenal charitable response but also widespread curiosity. Requests to visit the Elephant Man were received by the hospital. Within a few months of the disturbing incident of his meeting with the pretty young widow, Treves came to the rueful conclusion that every lady of note in the social sphere would soon make the pilgrimage to the hospital to be escorted to the basement rooms and introduced. Each one who came was forewarned about his appearance, and each one sturdily summoned the courage to greet him with smile and handshake, even to spend some minutes in conversation.
To begin with, Joseph was reticent towards his guests, but every introduction seemed to bring him a little more confidence, and each day his manner became more self-assured. Treves still needed to act as interpreter. Joseph’s speech was improving with practice but it remained indistinct. His visitors, though perhaps drawn mainly by curiosity or the fact that it was fast becoming the done thing to visit Joseph Merrick, were entirely benevolent. They brought him gifts so that his rooms grew bright with ornaments and pictures. Sometimes he received autographed portraits or photographs of the ladies who called, and these joined the others displayed about the room. Some of the gentlemen left money to be spent on his behalf, and in this Treves acted as steward. The gifts that always pleased Joseph most were books, for he was slowly accumulating quite a respectable library and his spare time was increasingly given to reading.
The paradox was not lost on Treves as he saw Joseph emerging into an object of patronage and interest. His protégé, once a homeless and shunned waif, was beginning to become the sought after acquaintance of duchesses and countesses. It is doubtful, however, whether the surgeon could have taken the irony the one step further, and have seen the accident of his own intervention as carrying Joseph’s career as a freak on to a new, unimaginable level of success; or himself as the alter ego to Mr Tom Norman, the showman he so consistently despised.
As Joseph lost the last of his reticence, he would speak relaxedly and strike up acquaintanceship with anyone who paused to acknowledge him. It became his habit to sit at his window to have a word with whoever happened to pass in Bedstead Square. He no longer hung back behind the curtains, and regular passers-by often stopped and called to inspect his more recent gifts or hear tales of the distinguished guests he had entertained. Such tales were told with an innocent jubilation, steeped more in wonder than in pride. On a few occasions he wandered away from his room in search of company, and once raised an alarm by appearing without warning at the entrance to one of the main wards. Only a flurry of nurses rushing to gather about him and shepherd him back to his own quarters prevented his sudden presence delivering a shock to the other patients.
Joseph’s fresh curiosity about the outside world naturally extended to Treves. He questioned the surgeon shyly about himself and the home where he and his family lived. He seemed particularly inquisitive about the house, asking wistfully about its arrangement and how it looked. At last he remarked obliquely that he should like to see the inside of a ‘real’ house. The simple artisan terrace dwellings, such as he knew in Leicester, or the lodgings of the freakshow circuit, could never have counted as such. It was the elegant town houses of the rich, as he had glimpsed them standing splendid and remote during his travels, their doors perpetually closed, which teased his imagination. With the help of his reading he had been able to people and furnish their splendid interiors, but now he wanted to measure imagined images against the facts.
Treves recognized the wish implied by Joseph’s mention of the subject. Within a few days he arranged for him to be taken to his own house at 6 Wimpole Street, safely concealed inside a hansom cab. No doubt the household was suitably prepared, and Treves’s daughters, Enid, aged eight, and Hetty, aged four, safely out of the way when Joseph was hurried across the pavements and into the seclusion of the hallway.
Solemnly Treves escorted his guest from room to room. It turned out to be a slow process, for Joseph paused to examine every object. He gazed at each piece of furniture, each curtain, each fabric with almost comically exaggerated interest. As they progressed, Treves became aware of a sense of unease within himself. The house seemed in some way to be falling short of expectations. Joseph had clearly anticipated finding a larger and grander establishment and was puzzled by the lack of liveried footmen and other servants in attendance. (Treves himself, when writing of his consulting room, once described it as the smallest in London, ‘not much more than a cupboard with a fireplace and window’.)
Anxious that Joseph should not be disappointed, while hoping to explain circumstances and perhaps retrieve a certain lost prestige, Treves explained that this was never meant to be the home of an aristocrat. It was more accurately a town house, built in the more modest style of dwellings as described in the novels of Jane Austen. Joseph, who had read Emma, accepted the comparison with polite gravity.
From the time of its foundation in the eighteenth century, the London Hospital was forced to wage a continuous battle against not only lack of funds but also a shortage of accommodation. In 1887 two sets of new buildings were nearing completion. On the south side of Bedstead Square, beyond the end of the East Wing, the new Nurses Home was being constructed. In Turner Street, at the side of the hospital, new accommodation for the Medical College was almost finished. By the spring of 1887, both buildings were completed, and on 21 May the official opening was held.
The Prince and Princess of Wales accepted the invitation to perform the ceremony, and their carriage arrived at the main gates at five in the afternoon on a day wet with a steady drizzle. They were received by a formal reception party headed by the president of the London Hospital, George William, second Duke of Cambridge, Commander in Chief of the Army and a cousin of Queen Victoria’s.
As a young man of twenty-one, George William had defied the conventions expected of a royal duke by marrying a commoner who was worse still an actress. His successful life-long marriage was quietly ignored by the monarch, the court and society at large. He had been on active service during the Crimean War, and had his horse shot from under him at the battle of Inkerman, though he then managed to rally a hundred survivors from the division to break through the encircling Russians. By the 1880s the veteran warrior was ageing and gruffly formidable. He had as good as inherited the presidency of the hospital from his father, who died in 1850, and was untiring in the support he offered and rallied. He graced official occasions, spoke at innumerable dinners, presided over charitable gatherings and maintained a determined supervision of the hospital’s variegated activities. He never hesitated to voice displeasure should someone omit to consult him over some important piece of institutional business, though his irascibility was in general recognized as concealing genuine concern and kindness. He had even continued to meet these commitments during the years of Queen Victoria’s retirement from public life after the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, when he shouldered many of the public tasks expected from the head of state.
The Prince and Princess of Wales had themselves kept up an association with the London Hospital since 1864. One of their joint duties in that year, which followed the year of their marriage, had been to lay the foundation stone for the new block known as the Alexandra Wing. For 21 May 1887, the plans were more elaborate. The royal party would first be conducted to the new Nurses Home, to be received in the dining-room by the matron, Miss Eva Lückes, heading her nursing staff. The chapel choir would then sing a hymn, the suffragan Bishop of Bedford would read a collect and the Duke of Cambridge would ask the Princess of Wales to declare the building, to be called the Alexandra Home, open. From there the party would be escorted to the new Medical College buildings, where further speeches would be delivered and a similar ceremony performed by the Prince of Wales; but on the way the royal personages would be invited to visit several wards.
The slow, dignified procession duly passed from bed to bed, and the princess was visibly moved by the spectacle of so much suffering. Then, from the wards, the party descended to the basements of the East Wing so that she might be introduced to the Elephant Man, who had by that time been almost a year in residence. She was warned that his appearance was literally shocking, and Frederick Treves accompanied the party as a matter of course.
Thus Joseph Merrick suddenly found his small room flooded with strangers, but for him the most important person among them was the Princess of Wales. She had entered the room with relaxed grace, smiled and taken the introduction with perfect serenity, shaken him by the hand and sat beside his chair so she might talk to him. She examined his curios and gifts with an interest that left him transported with wonder. The Prince of Wales also spoke to him, being quietly amused to spot Mrs Kendal among the collection of autographed portraits. And then the royal party withdrew, leaving Joseph beside himself with excitement.
Later that night, the Duke of Cambridge confided to his diary some details of the afternoon:
1887, May 21st – Went to the London Hospital, where as President I received at 5 o’clock the Prince and Princess of Wales, who came to open the new home just finished for the Nurses of the Hospital. We passed through the wards, saw the unfortunate man called the elephant man, who is a painful sight to look at, though intelligent in himself, and then I read an address to the Prince and Princess to which the Prince replied. It was very wet, but we were able to return in open carriages. The crowds in the streets were very enthusiastic. All went off well.
It was probably on this occasion, though he did not mention it, that the Duke of Cambridge discreetly presented Joseph with a silver watch.
The following afternoon he paid a call on his mother, the aged Duchess of Cambridge. Lady Geraldine Somerset, who attended the duchess, kept a journal for her, and in this she recorded the duke’s visit:
May 22nd, 1887
… At 3 came the Duke. He gave H.R.H. an account … of the Princess of Wales … at the London Hospital, tearing up her bouquet, to give a flower of it to each sick child & each sick woman. Of their having seen the Elephant-man, poor creature – a sad spectacle! enormous, with two great bosses on the forehead really like an elephant’s head, & a protruding face like a snout, one enormous hand like the foot of an elephant, the other, the left hand, extraordinarily, exceptionally small! He can never go out, he is mobbed so, & lives therefore a prisoner; he is less disgusting to see than might be, because he is such a gentle, kindly man, poor thing! …
The Duke of Cambridge clearly put across a graphic account of Joseph to his mother. On his side Joseph treasured the memory of the meeting, recounting the events over and over, though the excitement was not yet done with. Before long he received a small package from Marlborough House. It contained a signed photograph of the Princess of Wales, sent so he might include it in his collection. For Joseph, whose emotions lay constantly just below the surface, the gift was overwhelming, and he broke down and wept over it. It was so important to him that he could scarcely bear even Treves to touch it. It was framed for him, and he hung it in his room, treating it almost as an icon.
Treves suggested he should write to the princess to thank her, and he did so, naïvely beginning his letter, ‘My dear Princess’ and signing it off, ‘Yours very sincerely’. When asked by Joseph to read the letter to see if it was all right, Treves was so touched that he let it go as it stood. The princess visited Joseph on other occasions, and when Christmas came sent him not one but three Christmas cards, each one personally inscribed with a message on the back. A further effect of her interest was to amplify the volume of other illustrious visitors. ‘It became a cult among the personal friends of the Princess,’ wrote John Bland-Sutton, ‘to visit the Elephant Man in the London Hospital.’ Neither did the Prince of Wales forget him. From time to time a bag of game would arrive for Joseph’s table following a shoot on the royal estates.
Some years later, at a charity garden fête given by Sir William Treloar in Chelsea, Mrs Kendal was selling autographed photographs of herself at one of the stalls. The former Prince of Wales, by now King Edward VII, surveyed each picture in turn before solemnly informing her, ‘I think, Mrs Kendal, you must have given your best photographs to James Merrick.’ Evidently something King Edward and Frederick Treves had in common was a difficulty with the Elephant Man’s correct Christian name.
Christmas at the London Hospital was always a well-observed festival. For weeks beforehand the nursing staff prepared decorations for the wards; for days gifts poured in at the main gates. Festivities began quietly in the early hours of Christmas morning when a choir of sisters and nurses moved from ward to ward, singing carols. Then, during the morning, Father Christmas himself arrived, helped by an assorted band of fairies to distribute a present to every patient.
At midday, as the resident doctors carved the turkeys in the lobbies to each of their wards, the patients settled down to a special dinner sanctioned by the house committee. This was finished off with a slice of plum pudding. For the sisters, nurses and probationers there were special dinners enriched with delicacies provided by the senior surgeons and physicians. In the afternoon, the consultant staff came with their children to watch the shows, for the residents, nurses, students and dentals then dressed up to tour the hospital and perform amateur entertainments for the patients. For the children there was a Punch and Judy show. In the evening, as the wards settled into darkness, a Christmas dance was given for the wardmaids, and later there was a midnight supper for the scrubbers.
The coming of Christmas for Joseph Merrick meant, in the first place, the arrival of his Christmas cards – not only the polite cards from nurses and staff but those from the various visitors who had befriended him, including the ones from Princess Alexandra. There were also many personal gifts.
One year, shortly before Christmas, Treves asked Joseph what he felt he would like, for several donations of money had been handed in for his benefit. Joseph showed no hesitation. He had seen an advertisement for a gentleman’s dressing case with silver fittings that appealed to him so much he had kept the cutting from the newspaper. The set consisted of silver-backed hairbrushes and comb, a silver shoehorn and a hat brush as well as ivory-handled razors and toothbrushes. It seemed an incongruous choice, but Treves understood the feelings behind it and purchased the set at once. He intervened only to prepare the gift by removing the mirror and carefully filling the cigarette case with cigarettes, though he knew Joseph never smoked and never could with his deformed lips; but then every item in the case was equally useless to him in any utilitarian sense.
The dressing case turned out to be the perfect prop for Joseph’s imagination. In the privacy of his small room, sitting quietly as he arranged its contents, opening and closing the cigarette case, he became an elegant, sophisticated man-about-town, preparing in his dressing-room for some formal dinner or glittering occasion.
By now Treves was beginning positively to relish introducing Joseph to new experiences. There was, he found, something about it of the pleasure to be derived from watching a child’s astonishment when surprised by a fresh and unexpected wonder. Among Joseph’s unfulfilled social aspirations was to enjoy an evening out at a West End theatre, but the difficulties here were immense. Any audience that caught a glimpse of Joseph Merrick among them was hardly to be expected to pay much further attention to anything on the stage. The matter reached the ears of Mrs Kendal, who saw at once that the answer could be for Joseph to watch the stage from a position of concealment. She moved to exploit her social contacts and went to call on the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
The baroness, who kept a private box in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was among the richest women in nineteenth-century England. She was a notable philanthropist, a patroness of the arts and of the theatre in particular, who had set up Henry Irving for his famous period of occupancy at the Lyceum Theatre. Now in her seventies, she still held a controlling interest in Coutts, the bankers founded by her grandfather, and so was banker to the royal family. Both the first Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were her friends, as was the second duke, the president of the London Hospital. Guests as diverse as the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Samuel Wilberforce, W. E. Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli had dined at her table.
She was formidably well informed, cultivating, as well as politicians, scientists such as Michael Faraday and Joseph Hooker, or writers such as Charles Dickens, who gave her the dedication to Martin Chuzzlewit. She helped to finance the expeditions to Africa of David Livingstone, and later those of Henry Morton Stanley. Her vast fortune was used for prodigious acts of charity in which, while he was alive, Dickens would advise her.
The baroness had made her private box at Drury Lane available to many people in the past, including Dickens and his family, but the prospect of the Elephant Man occupying it caused her misgivings. What, she asked, would the dreadful effect be if an unfortunate woman unexpectedly caught sight of him? The consequences could be unimaginable. Mrs Kendal assured the baroness that arrangements would lie in the capable hands of Frederick Treves, that no one would see the Elephant Man arrive at or leave the theatre, and that care would be taken to ensure he was in no way visible to the audience. The baroness withdrew her objections and plans for the operation were set in motion.
It was by now the pantomime season at Drury Lane, the Christmas pantomime being a firmly established tradition in the Victorian theatre. The famous sequence of annual pantomimes at Drury Lane that Augustus Harris mounted there after he took over its management in 1880 had become bywords for rich and elaborate spectacle as well as the use of star names from the London music halls to play the leads. As The Times critic remarked in 1883:
On the stage commanded by Augustus Harris the tales of Fairyland are annually illustrated with a magnificence which sets criticism at nought. They hardly fall within the domain of drama. They are a dream, a phantasmagoria, the baseless fabric of a vision, and are best appreciated in a spirit of childlike wonderment.
Neither Treves nor Madge Kendal tell us which of those famous productions it was planned for Joseph to see, but the year Joseph Merrick was taken to Drury Lane with Madge Kendal’s help can only have been 1887. It could not have been the previous year, since the business of Joseph’s admission to the London Hospital was then only just being resolved. From the summer of 1888, the movements and preoccupations of the Kendals make it unlikely that Mrs Kendal could have been available in London to assist. On 21 July 1888, the long partnership between the Kendals and Mr John Hare at the St James’s Theatre finally broke up. With The Weaker Sex, a new play by Arthur Pinero, under their wings, the Kendals established a company of their own. There were problems to be ironed out in the play’s presentation and, to run it in, they took it on a tour of the provinces.
Their first night was at Manchester on 28 September 1888. Not till six months later did they bring the production to London, opening at the Court Theatre on 16 March 1889. They stayed at the Court Theatre throughout the summer, planning their first great tour of the United States. By the autumn they had left England, opening triumphantly at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, in October 1889. They did not then return to England until 26 June 1890.
Had Joseph seen the show of 1888 he would have witnessed the début in pantomime of the great comedian Dan Leno in The Babes in the Wood. But the production he saw was Puss in Boots, a deduction confirmed by the fact that the pamphlet The ElephantManwas published in 1888 (see Appendix Two). It is doubtful anyway whether he would have been appreciative of Dan Leno, the element of the comedians holding little appeal for him.
The book for Puss in Boots was written by E. L. Blanchard, who scripted every pantomime at Drury Lane between 1852 and 1888 and had in his day been responsible for giving the genre a certain literary quality. Each year under Augustus Harris’s Management, however, Blanchard complained ever more bitterly at the way his scripts were ruthlessly reworked to make room for some ambitious scenic procession or the comic business of the music-hall artists. The tradition was changing and Blanchard was powerless to do anything except grouse‚ as he once did in his diary: ‘… hardly anything done as I intended it, or spoken as I had written: the music-hall element is crushing out the rest and the good old fairytales never again to be illustrated as they should be.’ In fact Harris was giving the public of the 1880s what it wanted, and his pantomimes usually justified the lavish financial investments that went into mounting them.
Such considerations would not have had even an academic interest for Joseph. The whole affair was to turn out to be for him an experience of unexampled wonder from the moment he was smuggled into Drury Lane Theatre from a carriage with drawn blinds. Permission was given to use the royal entrance with its private staircase, and, ‘All went well,’ said Treves, ‘and no one saw a figure, more monstrous than any on the stage, mount the staircase or cross the corridor.’ Once in the private box, a trio of ward sisters wearing normal evening dress who had volunteered for the job, sat to the front row to create a human screen. Treves then sat with Joseph effectively concealed in the shadows at the back.
To realize Joseph’s feelings at that moment would need a total recall of the biggest treat of childhood, before the encroachment of experience made such absorptions of innocent uncritical vision impossible. Under the direction of Mr Jimmy Glover, the resident conductor, the theatre band struck up the overture, and the curtain rose on the opening scene. Mr Blanchard kept his story line close to the fairy-tale Charles Perrault had made familiar to generations of children. It was one of those included in the collection of nursery tales he made in the seventeenth century, the Contes de ma mère l’Oye, though it had far more ancient origins in Italian folk story.
The youngest son of a miller inherits, when his father dies, nothing but the cat. In company with his feline friend, he sets out to seek his fortune in the world. One day, white he is swimming, a royal coach approaches and the quick-witted cat cries out to it to stop, for, it says, his master is drowning. Dragged from the water the bewildered youth finds himself introduced by the cat to the King, Queen and Princess as the Marquis of Carabas. Afterwards the boy and his cat travel to an ogre’s castle, where the cat tricks the monster into turning himself first into a lion, then into a mouse; whereupon he falls on him and eats him up. Having thus taken possession of the ogre’s castle, lands and treasure, the cat presents them to his master to make him a fit match for the princess of the realm. The young couple, needless to say, had already fallen in love when their eyes first engaged.
For Augustus Harris the simple scaffolding of the traditional tale provided a springboard for a variety of extravagances, not all of which had much to do with advancing the story. The list of performers was long. There were the music-hall songs, the balletic interludes, the harlequinade and the climax of the transformation scene all to be incorporated. The part of Jocelyn, the miller’s son, otherwise known as the Marquis of Carabas, was taken by Miss Tilly Wadman as principal boy, ‘handsome and plays and sings charmingly’, according to Punch, though The Times felt her singing ‘was not always very true, but she makes a capital Burlesque Prince’. Master Charles Lauri took the part of Puss, while another popular animal parody act was the tightrope-walking Blondin Donkey of the Brothers Griffiths. Letty Lind, a rising star among the dancing girls of the Gaiety Theatre who had made her début there only that year, was the Princess Sweetheart.
‘Neatly tripping, lightly dancing Letty Lind,’ enthused The Times, ‘who has already made herself a favourite with the children and their attendants.’ ‘These are leggy days,’ said Punch more cryptically.
The part of the King was taken by Herbert Campbell, a comic singer from the music halls who came to specialize in dame parts, though not on this occasion. The Queen was played by Harry Nicholls, a light comedy actor.
The one [said The Times] is a pantomime monarch worthy of Thackeray in The Rose and the Ring, and the other a depressed but loquacious Queen who manages to get in more than one word edgeways. All the matrimonial squabbles, all the domesticwrangling, all the polite sarcasms and family jars are conceived in the best spirit of humour by two actors who are singularly observant … The fun they get out of the journey in the stage coach, the incident of the pretended drowning of the Marquis of Carabas, and the struggle for supremacy with the costermonger’s donkey [the well-known ‘Blondin Donkey’ animal impersonation of the Brothers Griffiths], are all in the best and most legitimate spirit of pantomime fun.
The harlequinade towards the end was, of course, a link back to the very origins of pantomime burlesque, and by now almost anachronistic in the changing tradition. The leading part of the clown was in this case taken by Mr Harry Payne, resident clown in the Drury Lane pantomimes from 1883 until 1894, the year before his death. Prior to this he used to play Harlequin, and his father, W. H. Payne, had worked as a pantomimist with the great Grimaldi.
But, said Treves, Merrick ‘did not like the ogres and the giants, while the funny men impressed him as irreverent. Having no experience as a boy of romping and ragging, or practical jokes and “larks”, he had little sympathy with the doings of the clown …’ On the other hand he reacted with pleasure when the policeman’s dignity was decisively undermined by being smacked about the face and knocked backwards. Whatever he may have witnessed of police officiousness towards the freakshows was no doubt a factor in his response. For the rest it was the spectacle that entranced him.
His reaction was not so much that of delight as of wonder and amazement. He was awed. He was enthralled. The spectacle left him speechless, so that if he were spoken to he took no heed. He often seemed to be panting for breath … [he was] thrilled by a vision that was almost beyond his comprehension … The splendour and display impressed him, but, I think, the ladies of the ballet took a still greater hold on his fancy.
Three ‘Spectacular Scenes’ punctuated Augustus Harris’s ambitious production, two of them, according to The Times, being ‘veritable dreams of beauty’. The first showed the inner court of the King and Queen’s palace: ‘… a dazzling structure of marble, with high raised galleries, lofty columns and a grand staircase down which a dozen people can walk abreast’. And down the staircase tripped chambermaids in yellow and blue gowns, followed by a procession, heralded by trumpeters, of the entire court in costumes that exhausted ‘the whole catalogue of colours’. The Illustrated London News was carried into transports of exclaiming that bits of the production were ‘worthy of Paolo Veronese’.
The second great spectacle came after the pantomime cat had cunningly disposed of the ogre. The vast hall of the ogre’s castle was suddenly seen to be ‘filled with warriors in complete armour’, some mounted, others on foot. These forces launched themselves into an elaborate drill routine with halberds, whereupon a great expanse of tapestry at the back was drawn aside to reveal yet another staircase, down which swarmed
… some countless warriors in gold and silver armour followed by knights accompanied by their squires and standard bearers. The entire stage in its length and breadth is filled with glittering metal, nodding plumes and fluttering pennons which rival in colour the whole tribe of butterflies.
The third and last spectacle was that against which the fairy ballet took place and that became the transformation scene. In the foreground was an oak glade, the boughs of whose mighty trees overarched the stage, their trunks surrounded by a rich array of fern and foxglove. Beyond the glade stretched a lake, golden in summer light and surrounded by more trees. A line of distant hills on the backcloth closed the enchanted vista. The object of it all, said the Illustrated London News, was
… to present, by means of children and girls, a wedding bouquet. It is charmingly and fancifully carried out, and the most delightful result of white flowers and green leaves, maidenhair fern, roses, lilies, stephanotis, daisies and azalea is attained at minimum cost.
For some reason the culminating scene, meant to out-dazzle all that had gone before, was felt to fall rather flat. But it was placed at the end of an evening that had already stretched far into the night. Indeed, the fatigued critic of Punch suggested the pantomime might, next year, be drastically curtailed so the audience could rely on leaving for home by 11 p.m. Yet the opinions of critics played no part in Joseph Merrick’s responses. So far as he was concerned it could have gone on for ever. For Frederick Treves, on the other hand, it must have marked the end of a very long day indeed, since he had no doubt risen as usual at five in the morning. He still, moreover, had the responsibility of smuggling Joseph back out of the theatre and into his closed carriage before escorting him safely home to Whitechapel.
Time did nothing to fade the glow of Joseph Merrick’s bewitchment during the weeks that followed. He would talk of the pantomime continually, and relive each ephemeral moment. As with the faculty of make-believe in childhood, so, said Treves, every aspect of the show was real to him.
… the palace was the home of kings, the princess was of royal blood, the fairies were as undoubted as the children in the street, while the dishes at the banquet were of unquestionable gold. He did not like to discuss it as a play, but rather as a vision of some actual world.
The life of the pantomime story thus for Joseph went on living, even though he was no longer there to witness it. ‘I wonder what the prince did after we left?’ he would ask Treves among a host of questions. Or, ‘Do you think that poor man is still in the dungeon?’
There may well have been other visits to the theatre for Joseph, though no confirmation exists for those beyond an incidental remark contained in a later letter to The Times that Carr Gomm wrote after Joseph’s death. But it seems unlikely that anything he saw subsequently could have matched the intensity of his first experience of living theatre.