Henry Irving - Life and Career

Life and Career

Irving was born to a working-class family in Keinton Mandeville in the county of Somerset. W.H. Davies, the celebrated poet, was a cousin. He attended City Commercial School for two years before going to work in the office of a firm of lawyers at the age of 13. After seeing Samuel Phelps play Hamlet soon after this, Irving sought out lessons, letters of introduction, and, finally, work in a theatre in Sunderland in 1856. He married Florence O'Callaghan on 15 July 1869 at St. Marylebone, London. Irving labored against great odds from 1856 till his 1871 success in The Bells in London set him apart from all the rest.

His personal life took second place to his professional life. On opening night of The Bells, 25 November 1871, Irving's wife, Florence criticised his profession: "Are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" (She was then pregnant with their second boy, Laurence.) Irving got out from their carriage at Hyde Park Corner, walked off into the night and chose never to see her again. He maintained a discreet distance from his children as well, but became closer to them as they grew older.

His elder son, Harry Brodribb Irving (1870–1919), usually known as "H B Irving", became a famous actor and later a theatre manager. His younger son, Laurence Irving (1871–1914), became a dramatist and later drowned, with his wife, in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland. Dorothea Baird married his son H B and the couple had a son, Laurence Irving (1897–1988), who became a well known Hollywood art director and a biographer for his grandfather.

Florence Irving never divorced Irving, and claimed herself "Lady Irving" once he had been knighted. Irving never remarried. In November 1882 Irving became a Freemason, being initiated into the prestigious Jerusalem Lodge No 197 in London. He went on to take over the management of the Lyceum Theatre and brought the actress Ellen Terry into partnership with him as Ophelia to his Hamlet, Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth, Portia to his Shylock, Beatrice to his Benedick, etc. Irving might be said to have found his family in his professional company, which included his ardent supporter and manager Bram Stoker and Terry's two illegitimate children, Teddy and Edy.

Whether Irving's long, spectacularly successful relationship with his leading lady Ellen Terry was romantic as well as professional has been the subject of much historical speculation. Most of their correspondence was lost or burned by her descendants. According to Michael Holroyd's book about Irving and Terry, A Strange Eventful History:

Years later, when Irving was dead, Marguerite Steen asked Ellen whether she really had been Irving's lover, and she promptly answered: 'Of course I was. We were terribly in love for a while.' But at earlier periods in her life, when there were more people around to be offended, she said contradictory things.

Terry's son Teddy, later known as Edward Gordon Craig, spent much of his childhood indulged by Irving backstage at the Lyceum (from when he was eight years old in 1879 to 1897). Craig, who came to be regarded as something of a visionary for the theatre of the future, wrote an especially vivid, book-length tribute to Irving. ("Let me state at once, in clearest unmistakable terms, that I have never known of, or seen, or heard, a greater actor than was Irving.") George Bernard Shaw, a theatre critic at the time who was jealous of Irving's connection to Ellen Terry (whom Shaw himself wanted in his own plays), conceded Irving's genius after Irving died.

Before joining the Lyceum, Terry had run off from her first marriage and had conceived two children out of wedlock with bohemian artist Godwin. She was somehow able to maintain an exalted position in the hearts of her Victorian audiences, regardless of how much and how often her behavior defied their strict moralities.