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Edwin Booth's First Critic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
The chapter of the life of Edwin Booth which deals with his emergence as a tragic actor during his early years in San Francisco is haunted by a friendly but flickering ghost called Ferdinand Ewer, critic. Booth declared to Ewer, many years afterward, that, although many “puffs” had appeared previously, “the first criticism of my acting was written by yourself.” And ever since that remark was printed in Edwina Booth Grossmann's collection of her father's letters (Edwin Booth, 1893), the biographers have hunted for, and even satisfied themselves that they have found, what Ewer wrote that Booth prized so highly.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1966
References
NOTES
1 The Daily Placer Times and Transcript, which originated in Sacramento, moved to San Francisco on June 28, 1852. This was just a month before the Booths' arrival. The proprietors of the paper were Messrs. Fitch, Pickering, and Lawrence. It ceased publication on December 17, 1855, and merged its interests with the Daily Alta California. (See Soulé, Frank, The Annals of San Francisco, 1885, p. 396.)Google Scholar
2 Miss Jacobson published a long series of articles on early life in San Francisco, which appeared in the Bulletin on Saturdays between March, 1916, and August, 1917. Those touching upon Booth ran from January 6 to March 19, 1917. Before her death in 1928 she rewrote the series as a book, and this was published by the University of California Press in 1941 under the title City of the Golden 'Fifties. In the Booth chapter (pp. 222–246) she suppressed a good deal that I have quoted of her evaluation of Ewer.
3 Mrs. Grossmann misdates it October 1. Her editorial manners were as careless and unscrupulous as one generally expects in books of “family letters” of that generation. Whenever possible, as in this letter, she suppressed Booth's references to his wife (her stepmother), of whom she was not fond. For instance, where Booth wrote “My little ones join me in kind remembrances”, she printed “My little one joins me….”
4 This is not the last we hear of Mrs. Booth's project. In a letter to H. H. Furness in the following April (which Mrs. Grossmann prints at p. 192), Booth thanks Furness for “the suggestion that my wife should make some record of my ‘stage tricks’…. Ever since our marriage she has been ‘takin’ notes' of how and why I do certain things in the course of my performances, but will not be able, I fear, to accomplish what you are good enough to say should be preserved.” She would like permission to use Furness's letter “in the event of publishing what she is now writing for private eyes, and for her own gratification.” Mrs. Booth's book was not published, and probably, as Booth feared, never completed, for her nervous hysteria was steadily worsening toward insanity.
6 Folger Shakespeare Library: T.b.5.
7 Eight years later, in the New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement of August 24, 1902, Winter published the calendar of Booth's San Francisco performances, based, he said, upon “researches among old California records.” Quite plainly his “researches” went little farther than pages 28–31 of Ewer's letter to Booth, but he does not once mention Ewer's name.