The Manchester Art Gallery archives are full of information about the gallery, its history, its collections and exhibitions. Buried amongst it all are the human stories. This one starts with a letter in May 1848 from the Royal Manchester Institution to its subscribers, a letter that still connects with us and with our exhibitions today.
Manchester Athenaeum and the Royal Manchester Institution both hosted famous speakers like Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. But who was Mrs Butler, nee Fanny Kemble?
Frances Ann Kemble was a genuine Victorian Celebrity and influencer. A spirited, intelligent, independent woman, she was an actor and also a dedicated diarist, keeping journals throughout her life, and publishing some of them. Fanny loved nature, too, and had an enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits like riding and walking. She was, in her own words, “a woman who had sat at dinner alongside Byron… and who calls Lord Tennyson, Alfred.”
Miss Fanny Kemble (after Sir Thomas Lawrence) 1831 © Manchester Art Gallery
Frances Anne Kemble was born into a theatrical family in 1809. Her father, Charles Kemble, owned the Covent Garden Theatre in London. Her aunt, Sarah Siddons, and her uncle, John Philip Kemble, were both famous actors. Despite this, her parents determined their children should not take up the theatrical life, and they sent Fanny to school in France.
In 1829, the Covent Garden theatre hit financial difficulties. The family faced ruin. With only three weeks of rehearsals and coaching, Fanny, at 20, reluctantly stepped onto the stage as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Her popularity, and the full houses it generated, saved her father from bankruptcy. She went on to play many of the principal female roles of the time, although she admitted later that she did not care for acting a great deal.
Fanny Kemble as Juliet, Belvidera and Euphrasia by J. Bishop (c. 1830) © National Portrait Gallery NPG D3467
Following her success in London, she went on tour. There, her celebrity status presented her with an exciting new experience. While staying at Heaton Hall, near Manchester, in August 1830, her host, Lady Wilton, treated her, and several other house guests, to a trial run of George Stephenson’s steam train, The Rocket, three full weeks before the official opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. It proved to be a joyous and thrilling experience;
“You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible, too. I could either have read or written; and as it was, I stood up, and with my bonnet off, ‘drank the air before me.’… When I closed my eyes, this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.”
While in the wake of her British stage success, in 1832, Fanny joined her father on a theatrical tour of America. There she met political and cultural dignitaries. President Andrew Jackson invited her to the White House, where she wasn’t afraid to call him out on some of his policies. She had a forthright feminist and political voice, held a heartfelt sympathy for lower-class suffering and was a cautious advocate for reform. She was also aware of her identity as a working woman in a man’s world.
In America, she met and married Pierce Mease Butler, heir to a large fortune. Fanny had expected a marriage of equals, but he disappointed her. The gentle character Butler exhibited during their courtship gave way to a stubborn, spoiled, and domineering nature. He talked her into giving up her stage career in return for a trust set up to secure her father’s future. Trapped, her married life soon became a round of rebelliousness and depression.
In 1838, Fanny visited Georgia with her husband and their two young daughters, Sarah and Frances. Her husband had inherited two large plantations on the Butler and St Simons islands–along with hundreds of enslaved people.
Anti Slavery Pin cushion (1800-1820) Gift of Mary Gregg ©Manchester Art Gallery
Britain had been working toward the abolishment of slavery from 1807 with the Slave Trade Act and the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Butler considered the enslaved as lower than livestock. His attitude horrified Fanny. It became a another source of tension as Butler tried to bully his wife into giving up her abolitionist ideals. But Fanny was aware of her privileged position, which only intensified her moral dilemma regarding the enslaved people.
“By their unpaid labour I live—their nakedness clothes me, and their heavy toil maintains me in luxurious idleness. Surely the least I can do is to hear these, my most injured benefactors.”
She sought to intervene with her husband on behalf of the plantation’s enslaved workers, while attempting to help them with food and clothing, setting up an infirmary and, in one case, teaching a enslaved person to read, a forbidden act.
She described their dwellings as “filthy and wretched in the extreme” and wrote about conditions in Georgia to a friend in the North.
“You are absolute on your own plantation. No slave’s testimony avails against you, and no white testimony exists but such as you choose to admit. Some owners have a fancy for maiming their slaves, some brand them, some pull out their teeth, some shoot them a little here and there.”
Her refusal to bow to her husband’s control increased the tension in an already toxic marriage. Butler threatened to deny Fanny access to her daughters if she ever published her letters about the plantation. But she found other ways to rebel, by ignoring female convention, cross-dressing and wearing male clothes for riding and fishing, and carrying on ‘quite like a man’ at dinner parties. The marriage later failed because of Butler’s marital infidelities and gambling. Fanny left her husband in 1846. After spending a year in Italy, she returned to England on her way back to America. There, in 1848, she delivered her reading of Hamlet at the Royal Manchester Institution.
Fanny Kemble (1848) by Peter Frederick Rothermel ©National Portrait Gallery NPG 5462
In England, she discovered her father had secured his financial future on the back of her early stage career, so she no longer feared the financial hold Butler had over her. To regain her financial independence, she returned to the stage on her own terms, not only as an actress but a solo performer. She gave readings of Shakespeare plays, of which the RMI reading might well have been part of a trial run, giving her the opportunity to act roles women would never have the chance to play on stage.
Back in America, by 1849 Fanny Kemble was wearing ankle-length pantaloons covered by a knee-length skirt, one of the first women to do so. Members of the National Dress Reform Association enthusiastically supported the practical nature of the clothing. Among them was Amelia Bloomer. She promoted the attire in her women’s newspaper, The Lily, so strongly that the outfit became known as ‘The Bloomer Outfit’.
The Bloomer Outfit c. 1850 credit: Wikipedia
That year, the Butlers divorced, although Fanny had to give up custody of her two daughters, seeing them only two months out of the year. While Fanny’s star rose again, Butler’s fell. By 1859, he had all but spent his fortune gambling. The threat of bankruptcy forced him to sell 436 of the people he held enslaved, two-thirds of those he owned. It was the largest single auction of enslaved people in American history.
Sarah Parker Remond, a black Abolitionist, referred to it in her speech on September 1859, at the Manchester Athenaeum (now part of Manchester Art Gallery).
“In March 1859, a slave auction took place in the city of Savannah. Three hundred and forty-three slaves, the property of Pierce Butler, the husband of your own Fanny Kemble, were sold, regardless of every tie of flesh and blood, old men and maidens, young men and babes of fifteen months.”
It was only later, during the American Civil War, that friends eventually persuaded Fanny to publish the letters she wrote during her stay at the Georgia plantation. She published her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1863. Her description of slavery did much to persuade the British to turn against the American South. It also contains possibly the earliest known written use of the word, ‘vegetarian’.
“The sight and smell of raw meat are especially odious to me, and I had often thought if I had had to be my own cook, I should inevitably become a vegetarian, probably, indeed, return to my green and salad days.”
Fanny eventually moved back to England, and published several more volumes of her journals. She died in London on 15 January 1893, aged 84.
Through that letter in the Archives, Fanny Kemble remains an indelible part of the Gallery’s past. But more than that, it connects her with our exhibitions today. With her constant challenging of gender stereotyping, to being a working woman in a male-dominated society, from moving continents to support herself and her family to her love of nature, right up to her interests in the wider politics of the day, Fanny is just as relevant to the Gallery now, embodying the spirit of our gallery rethink, with its exploration of themes such as migration, climate change, work and labour, joy and love, and identity, along with our current Trading Station exhibition in Gallery 19.