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64 MELODRAMA
years or more, dramatic critics had preached that nothing but death should come of a woman's lapse from virtue, and Lost In London obeyed this ordinance in defiance of the law of the land and the practice of medicine. The fate of the character compares curiously with the fate of the actress. Like that heroine, Adelaide Neilson came from the industrialized North. In a village near Bradford she had been known as Lizzie Bland — too well known, for her mother had been seduced by a handsome Spaniard and the child never escaped from gossips who had heard about it. This, even more than hard labour in a factory, drove her to run away to London, where she had no other lodging than a place on a bench in the Park, until pushed off by an old woman who claimed it as hers. Lizzie was rescued by an officer of the Carabineers. Putting her trust in a male who was (to her Yorkshire way of thinking) more like a young lady, she climbed into his cab and walked up wide stairs to his chambers. Life became pure nursery tale. He was a very young Heavy Dragoon ; other subalterns, let into the secret, came to see his protegee and find her a place on the stage.
As soon as she had learnt to walk and talk at the Theatre Royal, Margate, she returned to town — an exquisite fifteen, with steadfast eyes that suggested assurance until you saw the depth in them. Her friends, almost in awe of her now, took the Royalty (which lent itself to amateur stars) and there she played Juliet. Nothing came of it, but a face of such ethereal quality was destined for fame — until a parson's son carried her off as his sixteen-year-old bride to rninister to the sick and teach in a Sunday school miles from anywhere. She forsook that rustic happiness three years later to play in Lost In London, before she went with her husband to New York. She left him in order to win triumphs at Old Drury. Her beauty, likened by Ellen Terry to the ripeness of a pomegranate, for some fleeting years dazzled the stage. She took a holiday in Paris. One day she stopped in the Bois de Boulogne at a cafe to recover from pain ; and as was not uncommon when little was known of surgery, she died suddenly in great agony. That was in 1880 ; her age was thirty-two.
Where Watts Phillips took his ideas from is evident when a backward glance is given to the Surrey. The title of The Flower Girl ; or, The Convict Marquis, played there in 1858 and 1867, tells its own tale. Its author, T. Townsend, was responsible in i860 for Ralph Gaston ; or, The Three Lives, whose fashionable villain not only seduces a girl and leaves her to perish after the birth of her child, but also bears false witness against Gaston, her brother, to have him transported. A Surrey drama of 1864, The Orange Girl, by Henry Leslie and some lesser Nicholas Rowe, had a sensational climax by the Black Tarn, a flat piece