ECCENTRIC ENGLISHWOMEN : VIII. MRS. CHARKE
By HELEN WADDELL
00/VIE time in the autumn of 1755 Mr. Samuel Whyte (" of Dublin "), future editor of The Art of Speaking and of a book of poems called Hibernian Cresses, went with a bookseller friend to Clerkenwell on a business errand. The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, Youngest Daughter of Colley Cibber, Esq. : Told by Herself had come out in eight weekly parts in April and May, and had since gone into two editions (price, bound, 2S. 6d.) ; in it was mentioned as just completed, a novel, The History of Henry Dumont, Esq. : and Miss Charlotte Evelyn, of which the writer spoke hopefully. Hence the visit, as of any young publisher in search of an author, of Mr. Whyte and Mr. H. Slater, junior, of Holborn Bars. Mr. Whyte, however, is very much the elegant amateur ; that his name appears on the title page at all was the result of a sudden imprudence. For when his friend, " the wary haberdasher of literature," offered five guineas to Charlotte's plea for thirty, the tone- lessness, the utter absence of surprise or indignation in the voice that protested, was more than Mr. -Whyte could bear. He offered to double the five, and take half the risk of publishing.
Mr. Whyte wrote with elegance and knew it : he made great play with " the goddess Cloacina " and " this extra- ordinary seat of the Muses " as he picked his way through the refuse dumps of Clerkenwell, to the detriment of his white stockings : but his eye was exact and quick. It missed nothing : the noseless bellows that made Charlotte " a succedaneum for a writing desk," the snip out of the black pitchtr on. the dresser (" clean it must be confessed," says he, with the contempt of eighteenth-century respect- ability for the very poor), the melancholy aspect of the tabby cat sitting on the hob, the dinginess of the flounce on which the half-starved spaniel lay and snarled at them. " Have done, Fidele, these are friends.' The tone of her voice was not harsh : it had something in it humbled and disconsolate : a mingled effect of authority and pleasure." Twenty-four years ago this creature with the magpie perched above her shoulder had played Aurora at Drury Lane.
There were indeed few parts, on the boards or off them, that Charlotte had not played. At the age of four, " having even then a passionate Fondness for a Perriwig, I crawl'd out of Bed one Summer's Morning at Twickenham . . . and, taking it into my small Pate that by Dint of a wig and waistcoat I should be the perfect Representation of my Sire . . . I paddled down stairs, taking with me my Shoes, Stockings, and little Dimity Coat : which I artfully contrived to pin up as well as I could, to supply the Want of a Pair of Breeches. By the Help of a long Broom, I took down a waistcoat of my Brother's, and an enormous bushy Tie-wig of my Father's, which entirely enclosed my Head and Body, the Knots of the Ties thumping my little Heels as I marched along, with slow and solemn Pace. . . . Being thus accoutrcd, I began to consider that 'twould be impossible for me to pass for Mr. Cibber in Girl's Shoes, therefore took an Opportunity to slip out of Doors after the Gardener . . . and rolled into a dry Ditch, which was as deep as I was high : and in this grotesque Pigmy-State, walked up and down the Ditch bowing to all who came by. But behold, the Oddity of my Appearance soon assembled a Crowd about me : which yielded me no small joy . . . and walk'd myself into a Fever, in the happy Thought of being taken for the 'Squire."
At fourteen, Charlotte was a sportsman, " like the Person described in The Recruiting Officer, capable of destroying all the Venison and Wild Fowl about the Country " ; and when one of her mother's old-fashioned acquaintance protested that this was no Diversion for a young Gentlewoman, Miss spent a considerable quantity of powder and shot in endeavouring to shoot down the sober Lady's chimneys. But from a visit to a kinsman, Dr. Hales of Thorley, Miss Cibber, now sixteen, returned with other ambitions. Her fond mother was persuaded to allow her a little closet by way of Dispensatory : an apothecary's widow at Uxbridge (the Cibbers lived at Hillingdon) supplied a cargo of Combustibles enough to set up a Mountebank for a year : supported by these, a Latin dictionary, salmon and culpepper, Miss invited all the old women in the Parish to repair to her, when indisposed. No one died : a vast Concourse of both Sexes attended daily : and Miss peacocked among her gallipots till the widow sent in her bill for drugs to Mr. Cibber, " who was entirely ignorant of the curious Expence I had put him to," and " Dr. Charlotte's " credit was gone. Not in the Parish, however. Miss took to herbs, when drugs were denied her ; but when an old woman came, violently com- plaining of pains in her :12gs and a Disorder in her Stomach, the young physician was at a loss. She dismissed her patient with soothing words, and the promise of ease before no time, but she was at her wits' end.
" It happened that Day proved very rainy, which put it into my strange Pate to gather up all the Snails in the Garden : of which, from the heavy Shower that had fallen, there was a super-abundant Quantity. I immediately went to work : and, of some Part of 'em, with coarse brown Sugar, made a syrup, to be taken a spoonful, once in two hours. Boiling the rest to a Consistence, with some green Herbs and Mutton Fat, I made an Ointment : and clapping conceited Labels upon the Phial and Gallipot, sent my Preparation.
. . In about three Days Time the good woman came hopping along, to return me Thanks for the extream Benefit she had received : intreating my Goodness to repeat the Medicines. . . . But Fortune was not quite kind enough . . . the friendly Rain . . . was succeeded by an extream Drought, and I thought it necessary to suspend any further Attempt to establish my great Reputa- tion . . I dismissed her with a Word of Advice, not to tamper too much . . . otherwise a too frequent Use of the Remedy might lose its Effect. . . With as significant an Air as I could assume, I bid her be sure to keep herself warm, and DRINK NO MALT LIQUOR : and that if she found any alteration, to Send to me."
To the Eminent Physician succeeded the Gardener : to the Gardener, the Groom—" A Halter and Horsecloth brought into the House and awkwardly thrown down on a chair, with now and then a Shrug of the Shoulders and a Scratch of the Head, with a hasty Demand for small Beer, and a—God bless you make Haste. I have not a single Horse dressed or watered, and here 'tis almost eight o'clock, the poor cattle will think I've forgot 'em " : To the Groom—and no one more than Charlotte felt the anti-climax—" the married Miss." But " my indiscreetly plumping into the Sea of Matrimony " was a brief immersion : in a month or two Mrs. Charlotte Charke had scrambled out on the other side, to take the boards as " Mademoiselle " in The Provoked Wife at Drury Lane.
She took the town, as well as the boards, with a kind of youthful transport. That night, when Charlotte dropped her first curtsey to a London audience, Mrs. Oldfield swept her last. She praised the young creature, and the girl never forgot it. But between that February night in 173o, and the autumn day in 1755 when Mr. Whyte picked his fastidious way to Clerkenwell, Charlotte's life has the wild pattern of a shabby carnival. She was to act Cleopatra and Mercury and Captain Plum, Hamlet and Pyrrhus and Scrub (with special applause in Hamlet because " I so frequently broke out in fresh places," which was indeed true of Charlotte at all times) : she went from Drury Lane to the Haymarket, from Mr. Yeates' New Wells to Bartholomew Fair : she ran a puppet Show near the Tennis Court, where Orange Street is now : took to men's clothes and had offers of marriage from an heiress : became gentleman's gentleman to an Irish peer ; waiter at the King's Head ' in Marylebone : made sausages in Red Lion Square : turned pastrycook in Pill, and proof- reader to a newspaper in Bristol, and strolling player with a company so shabby that the Queen in The Spanish Friar stripped off her stockings to give them to Torrismond, who had no hoop to hide his bare legs, and so spirited that they gagged The Beaux Stratagem through before a drowsy audience, " and while I was making Love from jaffier, she tenderly approved my Passion with the Soliloquy of Cato."
She hacked with them and their like through Gravesend and Harwich, Cirencester and Monmouth and Aberga- venny, Devizes and Rumsey and Portsmouth and Cul- lompton and Tiverton in Devon. But always back, in spite of the bailiffs, to that queer maze of streets which has changed less in spirit than any in London, from Covent Garden, among the ladies " of irreputable reputation " who once, good souls, subscribed to get her out of a sponging- house, to St. James's Park, across which she would slip at five in the morning to lie close till it was time to pull the wires for Punch in the Italian Puppet opera in Brewer Street : from Drury Lane where she opened a lodging house, and found that the tenants used the beer tap in the cellar more frequently than the water, to the Haymarket where her brother Theophilus gave her sometimes a part and sometimes half-a-crown, till the Irish Sea drowned him on his way to try his luck on the Dublin stage : not a street but knew her " in the Owl-light," out to prog, with the pitiful wise elf of a small daughter at her heels ; surely the most reckless and not the least gallant of its ghosts. She is last audible, and individual still, in a play bill of the Haymarket, Sep- tember 28th, 1759, The Busybody, " for benefit of Mrs. Charke. As I am entirely dependent on chance for a sub- sistence and desirous of settling into business, I humbly trust the town will favour me on the occasion, which added to the rest of their indulgencies will ever be gratefully acknowledged by their truly obliged and obedient servant, Charlotte Charke." " Desirous of settling into business "—the phrase is familiar to every reader of her breathless autobiography ; and still hopeful of it, Charlotte died on April 6th, 176o, according to a brief obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine, which had never ceased to take a disapproving interest in her adventures.
But her obituary had been already written although she shares it with an older player :
" Never while you lived, Mernable, Had you either house or table, Never, poor soul, did you see On your fire a pot to be.
Death to you is profitable, Now you need nor pot nor table, And, what you never had before You in a house, for evermore."
Her autobiography, published five years before her death, had a quick ephemeral success, and was soon forgotten. Seventy years later it was reprinted in an odd collection of stumpy volumes, Autobiography, published by Hunt and Clarke in 1827, and again forgotten. A hundred years later, in 1929, it was printed in Constable's Miscellany with an introduction in part reproduced here, and again forgotten, till the editor of The Spectator picked it up for sixpence at a bookstall. Neither Charlotte nor her Narrative was ever much regarded. The neglect of it, except to its addicts, is perhaps explicable enough. Ungrammatical, insanely inconsequent, braggart and fantastic, the Narrative is not literature : it has the sudden nakedness of an actress's hurried speech in the wings. Yet an actress still : a shabby Viola, clowning an out-at-elbows Sir Harry Wildair. If the swagger has a quaver in it, it is against her will : barefaced beggar that she is, it is your purse she asks, never your pity : it is the clown's mask, and behind it the eyes of Columbine, courageous . and terrified.
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