Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes

Background

Barnes was born in 1818 in Massachusetts, the daughter of actors John Barnes, a popular comedian, and Mary Greenhill Barnes, a distinguished tragic actress.

Career

On March 22, 1822, Charlotte Barnes, at the age of three, was brought on as the child of her mother who was acting in The Castle Spectre. When her own début was made at the Tremont Theatre in Boston, it was as Angela in the same play, and her first appearance on the New York stage, March 29, 1834, was in that part. At Philadelphia in the same year she played Juliet to her mother's Romeo. Charlotte Barnes, however, never succeeded in reaching the position as an actress to which her mother had attained. Ireland tells us that physical defects in eyes, voice, and figure prevented her from ultimate success. Yet her training and ambition led her to attempt tragic rôles like Juliet, and in 1840 she played Thérèse to the Carwin of Edwin Forrest at the Bowery Theatre, New York.

In 1842 she visited England, where her performance of Hamlet was well received. She returned in 1846. She returned in 1846, married Edmon S. Conner, a well-known actor-manager, in 1847, and acted as leading woman in his company. During his managerial career at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, they raised the standard of production and of behavior in the theatre, being supported by the public press. Her playwriting began with the tragedy Octavia Bragaldi; or, The Confession, performed at the National Theatre, New York, November 8, 1837. Barnes acting in the title rôle. This romantic tragedy in blank verse has a singular interest in dramatic history.

Miss Barnes, a girl of eighteen, wrote the first play to be put on the stage, in which she acted with success in the United States and in London (Surrey Theatre, 1863) and Liverpool. In accordance with the literary fashion of the day, she changed the scene to Milan in the fifteenth century and deepened the sympathy of the audience for the heroine by a secret marriage between Octavia Bragaldi and the villain, Count de Castelli. Believing Castelli dead, Octavia has married Bragaldi, and, on Castelli's return and repudiation of her, she demands that Bragaldi kill her betrayer. After the murder, Bragaldi kills himself, and Octavia takes poison. Miss Barnes showed some skill in transferring the actual scenes to the new setting, especially in the murder of Castelli, which she surrounded with the glamour of romance in the court-yard of Castelli's palace in the moonlight. The play held the stage as late as 1854, when the author and her husband acted in it at the Bowery Theatre. Her play of La Fitte, a dramatization of the novel of the same name by J. H. Ingraham (Caldwell's New Theatre, New Orleans, 1838), in which she played a young man's part, that of Theodore, seems also to have been a stage success.

About the time of her marriage, Miss Barnes attempted a version of the Pocahontas story, which Barker, Custis, and Owen had already put on the stage. The Forest Princess; or, Two Centuries Ago was first played at Burton's Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, February 16, 1848. Mrs. Barnes had played Pocahontas in Custis's Pocahontas in 1830, and possibly her daughter was inspired to write this drama by seeing her in the part. Mrs. Conner's dramatic sense is shown in her statement in the introduction to the printed play, that the defect of the story lies in its division of interest. She endeavored to overcome this by taking Pocahontas to England, where she dies after Rolfe has been accused and cleared of treason.

Mrs. Conner also adapted a melodrama, A Night of Expectations, from the French. It was played at the Arch Street Theatre, April 9, 1850, where she took the leading part of Madame de Virely, but it may have been performed earlier, as Durang states that she acted in it in England and Ireland with great success. She also adapted Charlotte Corday from the French of Dumanoir and Clairville with some assistance from Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins (Arch Street Theatre, April 1851). Octavia Bragaldi and The Forest Princess were published, together with some verse and short stories of a romantic character under the title of Plays, Prose and Poetry (Philadelphia, 1848).

Achievements

• She is perhaps best known for her play Octavia Bragaldi, or, The Confession (1837). Next to Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, she was the most successful female dramatist of early American theatre.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Night of the Coronation: written on reading the account of the coronation of Victoria I. A poem.

    (Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)

  • Plays, Prose and Poetry 1848 Hardcover

    (Lang:- English, Pages 509. Reprinted in 2015 with the hel...)

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In an 1881 interview, her widower remarked of her, "She was a good woman and an excellent actress--kind, accomplished, good. "

Connections

She married Edmon S. Conner, a well-known actor-manager.

Father:

John Barnes

Mother:

Mary (Greenhill) Barnes

husband:

Edmon S. Conner

References

• A History of the New York Stage From the First Performance in 1732 to 1901