Twenty-five years ago I researched and wrote this article about the soprano, Esther Jacobs. One of my first shots at a Victorian Vocalist. I hav'n't ever come back to it for a second try .. but today this photo turned up on e-bay, so ...
JACOBS, Esther (b City Road, St Katharine Cree c 1831)
Launched on a career as a soprano concert vocalist, with some success, in her earliest twenties, Esther Jacobs later moved on to a colourful career in theatre, and an even more colourful one in the world.
Miss Jacobs was born in the City Road, apparently the first daughter in the considerable family of John Jacobs, a tailor, and his wife Sarah née ?Davis (d 117 Queen’s Road, Peckham 12 December 1890). By the time of the 1841 census, the Jacobs household, at 8 Bury Street, St Katherine’s Cree, already housed, alongside their parents, Esther, Harriet, Ellen, Joseph, Henrietta and Henry Jacobs, and two further infants, Julius and James, would soon follow. By the 1851 census, John Jacobs had risen to the rank of ‘clothier’ and, by the following year, twenty-one-year-old Esther had made her first appearances as a vocalist.
I first spot her out in public on 7 January 1852, in a concert given for the benefit of the Youths’ Benevolent Society at the Sussex Hall. If the venue was one largely used for not-always-classy Jewish entertainments, on this occasion the bill was a splendid one: the young Esther shared the programme with Louisa Pyne, Joseph Swift, Charlotte Dolby, Henry Whitworth and Ferdy Jonghmanns, with whom she sang the duet from Lucia di Lammermoor.
On 3 March of the same year, she appeared at the same venue in a concert mounted by the tenor George Perren, this time giving a version of ‘Nobil signor’ (Les Huguenots) and, if her singing won pleased notices, her appearance attracted a different kind of notice: ‘[Miss Esther Jacobs] whose physiognomy as well as her name betrays her Israelitish origin sang ‘My Lords I salute ye’ (‘Nobil signor’) with great taste and substituted, as an encore, an Irish ballad which she rendered equally well, but while we acknowledge her taste as a musician, we must protest against her taste in decorating her pretty person as being altogether unsuited to display her charms to advantage…’
On 29 March, Esther produced herself in concert at the Whittington Club, with a bill including Perren, Rose Braham, Jonghmanns, and the Brougham sisters amongst its attractions, and then, two days later, she made her debut at Exeter Hall. Joseph Stammers’ Exeter Hall Wednesday concerts had already won notice and popular success, above all by the success of the new young artists they had introduced – Rose Braham and the Broughams amongst them: this series introduced a very old favourite in John Braham, but the new artists were there too and, in the third concert (31 March), Esther Jacobs was one of them.
She appeared in the next two Wednesday concerts as well, and went on to be seen at the City of London Institute, the London Tavern, at Crosby Hall, in concert at Sadler’s Wells as well as, on a regular basis, at the Sussex Hall. Her versatility was already making itself evident, for in the summer she appeared in concert at the Margate Assembly Rooms, in November she took a turn to Holder’s Variety Theatre in Birmingham, and in March 1854 she won grand reviews performing with E L Hime at the Dover Catch Club and in June at the Royal Panopticon alongside lectures on Frictional Electricity and the hot topic of Decimal Coinage. Later in 1854, after a further concert of her own at the Sussex Hall, she and Hime joined the actress Isabella Glyn to supply the musical accompaniment to her readings from Shakespeare at the same hall.
If the centre of Miss Jacobs’s musical world remained at the Sussex Hall, rather than the Exeter Hall (her concerts, Charles Lowick’s, David Miranda’s, The Creation with the City of London Singing Association), she also travelled frequently out of town, and also into town where, for example, she took part in the Saturday Concert series at St Martin’s Hall, in 1856-7.
In 1856, too, she took the step that would lead her definitively away from Exeter Hall and all it stood for. In May, she took an engagement at the Strand Theatre, where she came out in a comedy entitled Lovers at Play, which required her to play three separate characters, as well as, of course, sing the incidental score ('a clear, fresh voice and a good deal of dramatic talent'). She went on to appear in a run of pieces at the Strand, in comedy such as The Two Gregories, in burlesque, where she played Marietta in the Belphegor Travestie, in the favourite musical comedies (Perfection, The Loan of a Lover, The Queen’s Musketeer, The Beggar's Opera) and, come Christmas time, in the theatre’s pantomime, playing Lady Agnes and a Singing Columbine in The Magic Mistletoe.
In 1857, Miss Jacobs appeared in burlesque at the Olympic Theatre, playing Graceful, the King's minstrel, alongside Clara St Casse in The Fair One with the Golden Locks, in concert at Cremorne, and at Glasgow, guesting with George Honey in operetta, musical comedy, burlesque and tragedy. She also, unfortunately, got married.
The gentleman (and I use the word very loosely indeed) whom she married (4 June 1857) was named Abraham Levi Goodman. Now, there were two of these – father (d 1863) and son (?1832-1904) – and both were well known figures in London life and, most particularly, nightlife. They were also well known in the British law courts and on British racecourses. Goodman senior had been condemned for ‘robbery at the races’ as early as 1828, again as the ‘keeper of an infamous night-house’, for various gambling offences in 1838 and, as the proprietor of an ‘oyster and wine rooms on the corner of Bow Street, Covent Garden’, which was used as a front for a gambling business, in 1840. In 1844 he had been a key figure in the famous ‘Running Rein scandal’, in which a betting coup was pulled on a ringer, in the Derby. The press referred to him daintily, on the occasion of his bankruptcy in 1847, as ‘well known on the turf and in the play world’, and on several other delicate occasions – such as the elopement of his 14 year-old daughter with an army officer – as simply ‘connected with the turf’.
Goodman junior followed, if a little less dramatically, in his father’s footsteps, being involved in a gambling club at 14 Jermyn Street, another like establishment at 28 Coventry Street, being apparently connected with ‘a saloon in Piccadilly’ and also ‘well-known as a gambler on horses’. Esther was marrying into one heck of a family, even if – as it turned out – not for very long.
Professionally, she continued in what was now her established vein, mixing concert singing, at the Sussex Hall, the Royal Surrey Gardens (‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’) or at provincial music halls, with theatrical engagements, notably pantomime, Lalla Rookh, or The Princess, The Peri and the Troubador at the Lyceum (1857, Hinda), Oberon, King of the Elves (1858, at the Liverpool Adelphi) and at Astley’s Theatre in Harlequin Tom Moody (1859, the goddess Diana), and performing with Mr J H Ogden (‘the greatest delineator of Irish character since Tyrone Power’) (1859).
From 1861, however, Esther Jacobs moved definitively into the theatre, and over the next half dozen years she became a great favourite in, especially, two of London’s most roaringly popular houses – the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton in the East End of London, and the Surrey Theatre, south of the river in the Lambeth Marshes.
Among her credits at the Britannia were included Claude Melnotte in An Extraordinary Version of the Lady of Lyons, Lord Lovel in Ye Mysseltoe Bough (1861), Sir Rupert in Little Busy Bee, Apollo in Midas (1864), The Swiss Cottage (1866) and Mephistopheles in a burlesque of Faust (1867). In the burlesques she played opposite the theatre’s manageress, Mrs Sara Lane, whose rousing performances kept East End playgoers cheering for many years, and one critic commented that Mrs Lane was ‘hardly as demonstrative or saucy as Miss Jacobs’, which says something for the broadness of Esther’s acting.
At the Surrey, she again appeared in burlesque and pantomime – Hey Diddle Diddle and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Poor Tom, Mad Fred – singing a burlesque of ‘Sweet Spirit Hear my Prayer’ --, Old King Cole, Miss Leer &c), but also in musical comedy (The Loan of a Lover), and in opera. In 1861, she sang the role of William in Rosina, alongside Fanny Thirlwall and Thomas Wallworth, and, in 1862, she was seen in the title-role of The Waterman.
Between her engagements at the Britannia and the Surrey, Miss Jacobs played a season at the East End’s Standard Theatre (Midas, Cherry and Fairstar), and took turns to Weymouth, Birmingham, Margate and other provincial theatres. In 1864, when she appeared at Birmingham’s Theatre Royal as Leicester to the Amy of Ada Harland in Kenilworth and in the title-role of Endymion the local critic noted ‘she has a voice the equal of which is possessed by few burlesque actresses’. ‘Plays and sings with a wonderful amount of skill and spirit’. He also noted her East End habit of playing out front instead of to her fellow actors!
At Christmas 1866, when Esther appeared at the Britannia, it was recorded that ‘she was received with tumultuous applause’, and a survey of British burlesque beauties approved her as ‘a good-looking Jewess with a fine voice for singing’, but, soon after, her name disappears from the theatrical listings.
The only trace of her that I can find thereafter is in the theatrical press of May 1869, where the details of the divorce suit (24 April 1869) in which she finally rid herself of Mr Goodman, were displayed.
I tracked down the rest of the extended Jacobs family, in the hope that the divorced Esther might have moved in with one of them. In the 1881 census, mother Sarah, now 80, is living at 64 New Kent Road, with unmarried Julius (‘musician’) and James; Henrietta has become Mrs John Hopkins Keen, wife of a former hay merchant, now a traveller in photographic equipment, and Rebecca (with whom Esther was living in 1861) is now Mrs George Rogers Harrison, wife of the solicitor who managed Esther's divorce. Joseph is an auctioneer. But there’s no sign of Esther. Nor of ‘Goody Levy’.
So I don’t know what finally became of Esther Jacobs, East End vocalist and actress. Hopefully, one day, I’ll find out.
Just in case you are feeling sorry for Esther, getting mixed up with the seediest part of East London Jewry, I should add that she was seemingly bred in ‘the milieu’. Her father was up in court quite young (‘John Jacobs, a young Jew clothes salesman who keeps his shop in Crown Street, Finsbury square, was brought up on a charge of changing good money for bad’), a few years later for ‘stealing second hand clothes and trying to palm off a dubious 10 pound note’ and, in 1834, for another money-changing scam. It’s all in the blood, as they say. But Esther could really sing, it seems ..
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