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2. Anna Cora Mowatt
Anna Cora Mowatt Richie (1819-1870) was born in Bordeaux, France, the tenth of seventeen children of Samuel G. Ogden, a wealthy New York merchant. By 1825, when the family returned to America, the precocious Anna had already begun to take part in dramatic presentations which were a favorite amusement of her older brothers and sisters. Later she wrote that by the time she was ten she had read “the whole of Shakespeare's plays many times over.”(1) At fourteen she directed a group of younger girls in a production of Voltaire's Alzire. A year later she eloped with James Mowatt, a New York lawyer of some means.
In the early 1840's she began to contribute to the ladies’ magazines, frequently signing her pieces of prose and verse “Cora” or “Helen Berkeley.” For a few years she wrote at a very rapid pace. Her numerous volumes of hack work, which included biographies and works on etiquette, cooking, and housekeeping, were so profitable that her husband formed a publishing company to issue them. At this period also, when failing eyesight forced her husband to give up his career, she turned to giving [page 192:] public readings in an effort to increase her income, a course which alienated some of her friends.
In 1845 Mrs. Mowatt's popular comedy Fashion was produced at the Park Theater in New York. In the same year she began her very successful career as an actress. After appearing in the principal cities of the United States, she spent four years abroad, frequently performing before admiring audiences in England and Ireland. Following a second tour of American theaters she retired from the stage in 1854. [[James]] Mowatt had died in 1851, and in 1854 she married William F. Ritchie, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer. After 1861 she lived abroad, chiefly in Italy, as a result, it is said, of her disagreement with her husband's political views. At the time of her death her home was near Twickenham, England.
Mrs. Ritchie's dramas, in addition to Fashion, include Gulzara; or the Persian Slave (1841) and Armand; or the Peer and Peasant (1847). As a novelist she produced The Fortune Hunter (1842), Twin Roses (1857), and The Mute Singer (1866). Her stage experiences provided materials for her Autobiography of an Actress; or Eight Years on the Stage (1854) and Mimic Life; or before and Behind the Curtain (1855).(2) [page 193:]
During the spring and summer months of 1845 Poe seems to have been very much interested in Mrs. Mowatt's activities both as a playwright and as an actress, but there appears to be no evidence that he ever made her personal acquaintance. He saw on the stage more than once, and his description of her in the “Literati” sketch is largely taken from a Broadway Journal review of one of her performances.(3) this review Poe prefaced of Mrs. Mowatt with the assertion that he had never had the pleasure of seeing her before.” In November, 1845, Mrs. Mowatt began a series of appearances in Southern cities(4) and, therefore, was not in New York during what appears to have been the period of Poe's greatest social activity among the literati.
On March 24, 1845, Mrs. Mowatt's Fashion opened at the Park Theater with such success that the comedy was continued for nineteen additional nights.(5) A few days earlier Poe apparently had written to the author, asking to see the play in manuscript. Mrs. Mowatt sent the drama and wrote in an accompanying note, “Your criticism will be prized — I am sorry that they [sic] could not have been made before preparations for the performance of the Comedy had progressed so far.”(6) [page 194:]
Poe's opinion of Mrs. Mowatt's play was not a high, one, but he correctly predicted for it a successful run. After reading the comedy he began a review of it for the Broadway Journal. Fashion, he wrote, is a thoroughly conventional play, offering nothing original in either plot or character. The tone is imitated from that of Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and the events lack verisimilitude but are not incongruous enough to produce a compensating farcical effect. The asides and the soliloquies Poe classified among the “monstrous inartisticalities” of the Elizabethan theater, which the modern playwright should abandon. He found little to praise in Fashion except the admirable simplicity of the plot. After seeing a performance, Poe offered the opinion that the comedy compared very favorably with other American dramas, but, “estimated by the natural principles of dramatic art, it is altogether unworthy of notice.”(7)
A week later Poe wrote that he had seen the play nightly since its first performance. Continuing in the vein of his earlier review, he remarked upon the conventionality of the play, the unmistakeable flavor of the green-room” about it. He noted with pleasure that some of his suggestions had been put to use.(8)
Poe was far more favorably impressed with Mrs. Mowatt's abilities as an actress than as a playwright. Several times in [page 195:] the summer of 1845 he saw her on the stage and wrote appreciative ‘reviews of her performances. In July he saw her in Bulwer's The Lady of Lyons at Nibio's Garden. No actress could reasonably expect a more flattering review than Poe's:
Of Mrs. Mowatt, and of her acting, we have to speak only in terms of enthusiastic admiration.... Her manner on the stage is distinguished by an ease and self-possession which would do credit to a veteran. Her step is very graceful and assured .... We watched her with the closest scrutiny throughout the whole play, and not for one instant did we observe her in an attitude of the least awkwardness, or even constraint, while many of her seemingly impulsive gestures spoke in loud terms of the woman of genius — of the poet deeply imbued with the truest sentiment of the beauty of motion .... Her reading could scarcely be improved. In this respect no actress in America is her equal — for she reads not theatrically, but with the emphasis of Nature. Indeed the great charm of the whole acting of Mrs. Mowatt is its naturalness. She moves, looks, and speaks with a well-controlled impulsiveness [as different] as can be conceived from the customary rant and cant — the hack conventionality of the stage.(9)
By the end of July Poe had seen Mrs. Mowatt in at least four other roles, and in his Broadway Journal notices he continued to compliment the naturalness and the grace of her acting.(10) In one of these reviews he listed the qualities that would ensure success as an actress: [page 196:]
Her conceptions of character are good. Her elocution is excellent, although still susceptible of improvement. Her beauty is of the richest and most impressive character. Her countenance is wonderfully expressive. Her self-possession is marvellous. Her step is queenly. Her general grace of manner has never, in our opinion, been equalled on the stage — most decidedly it has never been surpassed. These qualities alone would suffice to assure her a proud triumph — but she possesses a quality beyond all these — enthusiasm — an unaffected freshness of the heart the capacity not only to think but to feel.(11)
To the “Literati” sketch of Mrs. Mowatt, published in June, 1846, Poe transferred from the Broadway Journal reviews opinions of her abilities as a dramatist and as an actress. In his survey of her earlier career, he wrote that, though she had read well, her recitations had produced little effect; her tales and essays were “cleverly written ... lively, easy, conventional, scintillating with a species of sarcastic wit, which might be termed good were it in any respect original.” He confessed himself “surprised and disappointed” at finding her poetry no better than mediocre.(12)
Mrs. Mowatt apparently read the sketch with some displeasure. In the single reference to Poe in her autobiography she commented, not upon his praise of her ability as an actress, but his adverse criticism of Fashion:
Edgar A. Poe, one of my sternest critics, wrote of Fashion, that it resembled the School for Scandal in the same degree that the shell of a locust resembles the living locust. If his severity [page 197:] was but justice, it must be that the spirits of the performers infused themselves into the empty shell, and produced a very effective counterfeit of life.(13)
It seems only just to Mrs. Mowatt to say that Fashion is, perhaps a more meritorious drama than Poe thought. When the comedy was revived in New York in 1924, it ran for 235 consecutive performances.(14)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 191:]
1 Autobiography of an Actress: or Eight Years on the Stage, Boston, 1854, p. 31.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 192:]
2 Autobiography of an Actress; Helen McAfee's sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 553-554; Arthur H. Quinn, The Literature of the American People, New York, [1951], pp. 505-508; Hale, op. cit., pp. 754-755; May, op. cit., pp. 435-436; and Julia D. Freeman (“Mary Forrest”), Women of the South Distinguished in Literature, New York, 1866, pp. 80-95; Fashion was reprinted in Allan G. Halline, ed., American Plays, New York, [1935], pp. 241-272.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 193:]
3 II, 29-30 (July 19, 1845); Works, XII, 187-188.
4 Broadway Journal, II, 325 (November 29, 1845).
5 George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, New York, 1927-1949, V, 99.
6 MS in the Griswold Collection, Boston Public Library; Mrs. Mowatt dated the note simply “Thursday evening”; Ostrom, op. cit., II, 605, dates it “ca. March 20, 1845.”
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 194:]
7 Broadway Journal, I, 203-205 (March 29, 1845). Most of review is reprinted in Works, XII, 112-121.
8 Broadway Journal, I, 219-220 (April 5, 1845); Works, XII, 124-129.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 195:]
9 Broadway Journal, II, 29-30 (July 19, 1845); Works, XII, 187-188.
10 Broadway Journal, II, 43, 60 (July 26, August 2, 1845); Works, XII, 189-192, 210-212. A short notice, not reprinted in Works, appeared in the Broadway Journal for August 30, 1845, II, 124).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 196:]
11 II, 60 (August 2, 1845); Works, XII, 211-212.
12 Godey's, XXXII, 266-267 (June, 1846); Works, XV, 27-32.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 197:]
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)