Having seen Fanny Kemble for the first time on 17 April 1833, one day after she and her father made their initial appearances in Boston, Charles Francis Adams, together with his father just arrived from Washington, on the 19th saw her in the role in which she had made her American debut in New York: as Bianca in the tragedy of Fazio. By that date the Kemble conquest of Boston was complete. See p. 71, below. During the week following, Charles Francis Adams saw her in three additional roles on successive evenings. He was as faithful in attendance when she returned to Boston on a second tour in March and April 1834, her last before abandoning her theatrical career to enter upon what proved an unhappy marriage with Pierce Butler of Philadelphia. When she did return to the public platform in 1848 to do enormously successful dramatic readings from Shakespeare, which she continued through the 1850’s, Charles Francis Adams’ journal for the period reveals that he remained a faithful auditor to the last.

In the years between, Fanny Kemble had become a controversial figure after her frank and tactless impressions of America and Americans were published in a Journal in 1835 (vol. 6:132, below; Clifford Ashby, “Fanny Kemble’s ‘Vulgar’ Journal,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 98:58–66 [January 1974]) and after she became an active abolitionist following her residence on the Georgia plantation of her slaveholding husband. It was in connection with the first of these that Miss Kemble has a further place in the Adams family records. In that portion of her Journal relating to her first season in Boston she entered an account of a conversation on Shakespeare she had had at an evening party with a famous gentleman she did not identify, but who was easily identifiable as John Quincy Adams, and which treated the gentleman’s expressed opinions with more mirth than respect. Her report of the conversation led the ex-President, under the urging of his friend Dr. George Parkman, to undertake his own account of the conversation and a fuller exposition of his views on Shakespeare in the theater. Publication of these opinions as review articles brought the matter to a close. The affair and its issues are recounted in an editorial note, p. 84–87, below.

In the first days of the Kembles’ Boston success John Quincy Adams wrote that “Fanny Kemble passes here for a great Beauty, and a great Genius, both of which with the aid of Fashion and Fancy, she is” (Diary, 19 April 1833); and in a letter to his wife he put it that “She is very well formed—not unhandsome” (20 April 1833, Adams Papers). Initially, Charles Francis Adams, while fully acknowledging her dramatic gifts, was less taken with her appearance: “I thought her an ugly, bright looking girl,” but he later acknowledged that “Her eyes give her great power” (p. 74 and 291, below). Her features would seem then to have been not conventionally beautiful but of a sort that strangely fixed the attention of the beholders. The problem of properly rendering her face must have fascinated Thomas Sully. In his “Register of Portraits” are entered ten likenesses of Fanny Kemble between 1832 and 1834 (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 33:62 [January 1909]). The portrait reproduced, one of two of her by Sully in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and perhaps his most successful effort, has been in that collection since 1843. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 1/2 inches, it is signed, “TS 1833.”