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Fanny Kemble: England
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John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57) belonged to a family of famous actors and actresses (Fanny Kemble was his younger sister), but he earned his own renown as an Anglo-Saxonist. He was among the first to apply the principles of comparative Germanic philology to the study of Old English; he was the first editor (in England) of the poem Beowulf; he collected the texts of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters, published as the Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici, 6 vols. (1839-48); he ... produced a seminal two-volume study of Anglo-Saxon society and political institutions, published as The Saxons in England (1849); and he was latterly a pioneer in the use of archaeological evidence to throw light on the migration of Germanic peoples to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. This paper examines Kemble's intellectual background as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the late 1820s, when he flourished as a member of the free-thinking 'Cambridge Conversazione Society', otherwise known as 'The Apostles'. It describes his first visit to Germany in the summer of 1829, ostensibly to pursue his study of German philosophy at Munich, but leading to his exposure to the delights of Germanic philology. It recounts how he became a member of an expedition mounted in 1830 to overthrow the despotic regime of Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, and shows on the basis of Kemble's unpublished journal how his attention gradually wandered from political idealism to philology, and from philology to the comforts offered by a sixteen-year-old Spanish girl called Francisca.
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Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble was born on November 27, 1809 in London, England. From one of England's most prominent family of actors, she took to the stage herself to save her family from financial ruin. Though a brilliant actress, the stage was not the true love of Fanny Kemble -- her first love was for literature and writing. Throughout her life she would be a prolific and accomplished writer of plays, journals, poetry, letters, and memoirs.
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Fanny Kemble was born in London in 1809. Her earliest experiences were of life in the theater. Her aunt was Sarah Siddons, the most famous actress in England. Her father, Charles Kemble, was soon to take over from his father, John Kemble, the role of managing director of the Covent Theater.
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Kemble published a record of her 2-year theatrical tour, Journal of a Residence in America (1835). It was an incisive and genuinely good-humored account, but such publications by foreigners were the rage then and thin-skinned critics made her the target of journalistic wrath. Kemble's marriage, in the meantime, was becoming troubled. Her romantic notions about life on a plantation were rudely shocked by the facts. Unable to live with slavery, she withdrew, first visiting England in 1841 and breaking formally with her husband in 1846. For a year she returned to the British stage and in 1847 moved to Italy, where she wrote A Year of Consolation (1848).
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Kemble was still married at the time she wrote the journal, and publishing the "expose" was out of the question with her slave-owning husband. His influence over her actions diminished after their divorce in 1849, though, and with the sale of his slaves in 1859, the plantation she had written about no longer existed. Her decision to publish, though, wasn't triggered until after the start of the Civil War, in response to England's hostility toward the North and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. If only she could convince England of the reasons behind the Proclamation, she reasoned, they would side with the North.
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At the turn of the 19th century the Kemble family dominated the London stage. Actor John Philip Kemble was said to be the finest actor in England and his sister Sarah Siddons was regarded as one of the greatest ever tragedians. Their parents had been strolling players and John had earned a similar living on the road and in provincial theatres. Their younger brother Charles Kemble and his daughter Fanny were later stars of the London stage in the 1820s.
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