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Frances Anne Kemble (later Butler; 27 November 180915 January 1893) was a British actress from a Kemble family in the early and mid-nineteenth century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre. She lived for many years in the United States, primarily in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Lenox, Massachusetts.
Kemble's "lasting historical importance...derives from the private journal she kept during her time in the Sea Islands" on her husband's plantations, where she wrote a journal documenting the conditions of the enslaved people on the plantation and her growing abolitionist feelings. She was also an early adopter of spoken word performances combined with music.
One of her teachers was Frances Rowden (1774 – c. 1840), who had been associated with the Reading Abbey Girls' School since she was 16. Rowden was an engaging teacher with a particular enthusiasm for the theatre. She was not only a poet but according to Mary Russell Mitford, "she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils" (2025). 9783039110971, P. Lang. ISBN 9783039110971
In 1827, Kemble wrote her first five-act play, Francis the First. It was met with critical acclaim from multiple quarters. Nineteenth-century critics wrote that the script "displays so much spirit and originality, so much of the true qualities which are required in dramatic composition, that it may fairly stand upon its own intrinsic worth, and that the author may fearlessly challenge a comparison with any other modern dramatist."
In 1832, Kemble accompanied her father on a theatrical tour of the United States. While in Boston in 1833, she journeyed to Quincy to witness the revolutionary technology of the first commercial railroad in the United States. She had previously accompanied George Stephenson on a test of the Liverpool and Manchester before its opening in England and described this in a letter written in early 1830. The Granite Railway was among many sights she recorded in her journal.
Kemble retired from her acting career upon her marriage in 1834, but after her separation, she returned to acting as a solo platform performer, beginning her first American tour in 1849. During her readings, she rose to focus on presenting edited works of Shakespeare, though, unlike others, she insisted on representing his entire canon, ultimately building her repertoire to 25 of his plays. She performed in Britain and the United States, concluding her career as a platform performer in 1868.
He made trips to the plantations during the early years of their marriage but never took Kemble or their children with him. At Kemble's insistence, they finally spent the winter of 1838–1839 at the plantations at Butler and St. Simons islands, in conditions primitive compared to their house in Philadelphia, and Kemble kept a diary of her observations, later published as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, flavored strongly by abolitionist sentiment. Kemble was shocked by the living and working conditions of the slaves and their treatment by the overseers and managers. She tried to improve matters, complaining to her husband about slavery and about the mixed-race slave children attributed to the overseer, Roswell King Jr. Butler disapproved of Kemble's outspokenness, forbidding her to publish.
Marital tensions had emerged when the family returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1839. Apart from their disagreements over slave treatment on Butler's plantations, Kemble was "embittered and embarrassed" by Butler's marital infidelities.Malcolm Bell, Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1987, pp. 288–310 Butler threatened to deny Kemble access to their daughters if she published any of her observations about the plantations.David (2007), A Performed Life, p. 154.
By 1845–1847, the marriage had failed irretrievably, and Kemble returned to England.
Her ex-husband squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000 but was saved from bankruptcy by a sale on 2–3 March 1859 of 436 people he held in slavery. The Great Slave Auction, at Ten Broeck racetrack outside Savannah, Georgia, was the largest single slave auction in United States history. As such, it was covered by national reporters. "Great Auction of Slaves at Savannah, Georgia", New York Tribune, 9 March 1859, at American Memory, Library of Congress.
After the American Civil War, Butler tried to run his plantations with free labour but failed to make a profit. He died of malaria in Georgia in 1867. Neither Butler nor Kemble remarried. (2025). 9780812240238, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812240238
Kemble's success as a Shakespearean reader enabled her to buy a home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Harvard Magazine: Fanny Kemble, Brief life of a literary actress: 1809-1893 by Catherine Clinton Retrieved 2017-05-05.
In 1877, she returned to London to join her younger daughter Frances, who had moved there with her British husband and child. Using her maiden name, Kemble lived there until her death. During this period, she was a prominent and popular figure in London society and became a great friend of the American writer Henry James during her later years. His novel, Washington Square (1880), was based on a story Kemble told him about one of her relatives.Singer,
She waited until 1863, during the American Civil War, to publish her anti-slavery Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It became her best-known work in the United States: she published several other volumes of journals. It included her observations of slavery and life on her husband's Southern plantation in the winter of 1838–1839. It contains the earliest-known written use of the word "vegetarian": "The sight and smell of raw meat are especially odious to me, and I have often thought that if I had had to be my own cook, I should inevitably become a vegetarian, probably, indeed, return entirely to my green and salad days."Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1863, 197–198.
During her time in Philadelphia, Kemble acquired a pair of leather gloves which Shakespeare had reportedly owned and which the British actor David Garrick (1717–1779) had obtained from the descendants of Shakespeare. Kemble gave these, in turn, to the Shakespearean scholar and abolitionist Horace Howard Furness (1833–1912) who donated them to the University of Pennsylvania library which holds an important Shakespeareana collection. After separating from Butler in the 1840s, Kemble travelled in Italy and wrote a two-volume book on this time, A Year of Consolation (1847).
In 1863, Kemble also published a volume of plays, including translations from Alexandre Dumas, père and Friedrich Schiller. Other memoirs followed these: Records of a Girlhood (1878); Records of Later Life (1882); Far Away and Long Ago (1889); and Further Records (1891). Her various reminiscences contain much valuable material about the social and theatrical history of the period. She also published Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays (1882), based on her long experience in acting and reading his works.
In 2000, Harvard University Press published an edited compilation from her journals. These included Record of a Girlhood (1878) and Records of Later Life (1882).XIX Century Fiction'', Part I, A–K. Jarndyce, Bloomsbury, 2019.
Fanny's other daughter Frances met James Leigh in Georgia. He was a minister born in England. The couple married in 1871, and their one child, Alice Leigh, was born in 1874. An attempt was made to run Frances's father's plantations there with free labour, but no profit could be made. Leaving Georgia in 1877, they moved permanently to England. Frances Butler Leigh defended her father in the continuing post-war dispute over slavery as an institution. Based on her experience, Leigh published Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883), a rebuttal to her mother's account.
Professor of English, Dr. Laura Engel, has documented how Fanny Kemble, along with Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Mary Wells have an enduring legacy by helping create "the emergence of modern celebrity," casting "fame as the celebration of the individual."
While Kemble's account of the plantations has been criticised, it is seen as notable for voicing the slaves, especially enslaved black women, and has been drawn on by many historians. "Fanny Kemble" , New Georgia Encyclopedia As noted earlier, her daughter published a rebuttal account. Margaret Davis Cate published a strong critique in the Georgia Historical Quarterly in 1960. In the early 21st century, historians Catherine Clinton and Deirdre David studied Kemble's Journal and raised questions about her portrayal of Roswell King, father, and son, who successively managed Pierce Butler's plantations, and about Kemble's racial sentiments. On Kemble's racial views, David notes she described slaves as stupid, lazy, filthy, and ugly. Such views were then common and compatible with opposing slavery and outrage at its cruelties.Deirdre David, Kemble: A Performed Life, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007, p. 162.
Clinton noted that in 1930, Julia King, granddaughter of Roswell King Jr., stated that Kemble had falsified her account of him after he spurned her affections.Fanny Kemble, Fanny Kemble's Journals/ Edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Clinton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 15–16. There is little evidence in Kemble's Journal that she encountered Roswell King Jr. on more than a few occasions, and none that she knew his wife, the former Julia Rebecca Maxwell. But she criticized Maxwell as "a female fiend" because a slave named Sophy told her that Mrs. King had ordered the flogging of Judy and Scylla, "of whose children Mr. King was the father."Kemble, p. 269. Roswell King Jr. was no longer employed by her husband when Pierce Butler and Kemble began their short residency in Georgia. King had resigned due to "growing uneasiness... born of a dispute between the Kings and the Butlers over fees the elder King thought were owed him as co-administrator of Major Butler's estate."Bell, pp. 254 and 271.
Before arriving in Georgia, Kemble had written, "It is notorious that almost every Southern planter has a family more or less numerous of illegitimate coloured children."Kemble, p. 10. Her statements about Roswell King Sr. and Roswell King Jr. and their alleged status as white fathers of enslaved mulatto children are based on what other slaves told her. Individuals sometimes relied on hearsay accounts of their paternity, although European ancestry was visible. The mulatto Renty, for example, was "ashamed" to ask his mother about the identity of his father. He believed he was the son of Roswell King Jr. because "Mr. Couper's children told me so, and I 'spect they know it."Kemble, p. 249. John Couper, the Scottish-born owner of a rival plantation adjacent to Pierce Butler's Hampton Point on St. Simon's Island, had marked disagreements with the Roswell Kings. Clinton suggests that Kemble favored Couper's accounts.Kemble, pp. 265–267 and 391–392.
Some recent biographies that focus on Kemble's role as an abolitionist include Catherine Clinton's Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars: The Story of America's Most Unlikely Abolitionist (2000). Others have studied the theatrical careers of Kemble and her family. One of these, Henry Gibbs' , appeared in eight editions between 1945 and 1947.
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