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74 5 A Western Actress in New York NOTHING SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE FOR a confident and growing New York in 1870. The city where Clara Morris and her mother settled in August was America’s largest, as it had been since the mid-1850s, with a population of almost one million. The nation’s leader in trade, banking, and commerce, New York was financially secure and thriving. Critics might complain about its rampant crime and “ill-regulated, badly paved, filthy streets crowded with vehicles.” They could object to political corruption in the era of William M. “Boss” Tweed, when bribery, graft, larceny, and fraud infiltrated municipal operations at every level. They could criticize the inadequacies of the urban transportation system, lack of bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, and ever-widening gulf between the flamboyantly wealthy and the desperately poor,1 but they had to acknowledge the city’s importance as the nation’s theatrical epicenter. Between 1850 and 1870, theater had found its permanent home on Broadway, a major urban thoroughfare. Paved and lighted, it was served early and well by public transportation. Although theaters clustered on Lower Broadway earlier in the century, Union Square had emerged as the center of New York’s theatrical district by 1870. Other theaters were beginning to open beyond its borders: Broadway (on the west), Fourth Avenue (east), Seventeenth Street (north), and Fourteenth Street (south).2 Booth’s Theatre had stood on the southeast corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue since 1869, the year after financier James Fisk Jr. bought the Fifth Avenue Theatre on the south side of West Twenty-fourth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. After renovating the interior, he installed John Brougham as its manager. When Brougham’s theater failed, Fisk leased the building for the then astronomical sum of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.3 The new tenant was Augustin Daly. Daly, who had recently opted for a full-time career as a manager, had been involved in the theater for more than a decade as a journalist and playwright. In December 1859, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the staff of the Sunday 75 A Western Actress in New York Courier, New York City’s first Sunday newspaper. Within a few weeks, he advanced to the position of drama critic and produced a series of articles under the pseudonym Le Pelerin (the Pilgrim),4 a name that reflected the almost religious devotion he would show towards the theater in the coming years. In 1864, he succeeded James Otis as drama critic of the Evening Express and in 1866 began contributing criticism to the New York Sun. Appointed drama critic of the New York Times and the New York Citizen in 1867, he continued to write for all five newspapers for a short time.5 Engraving of Augustin Daly by S. Hollyer after a cabinet photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. 76 A Western Actress in New York In that same year, he achieved his greatest success as a playwright with his spectacular melodrama Under the Gaslight. First presented on 12 August at the New York Theatre, it enjoyed more than one hundred performances in its first season in New York (as well as four weeks in Boston and seven in Philadelphia). Daly had begun to write plays in 1856 but did not attract critical attention until 1862 when he created Leah the Forsaken, based on Austrian playwright Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Deborah, for Kate Bateman. Other adaptations of French and German originals followed, including Taming a Butterfly for Mrs. John Wood and Come Here! for Fanny Janauschek. Griffith Gaunt won praise in 1866, but Under the Gaslight, whose courageous heroine defied gender stereotypes in rescuing a man from the path of an oncoming train, made him famous. Encouraged by the accolades Under the Gaslight received, Daly resigned as drama critic from every paper but the New York Times to concentrate on playwriting and management. In 1869, shortly after his marriage to Mary Duff, daughter of theater manager John Duff, he resolved to focus exclusively on the latter. Although he used neither term to describe himself, Daly assumed the roles of artistic director and producer for his company, devoting himself to theater with a singleness of purpose from which he never deviated. Honored by the New York Shakespeare Society in 1896, three years before his death in Paris, Daly expounded upon the significance of his achievement. In a...

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