Thursday, October 24, 2024

Victorian vocalists: the traces they left behind (part two)

Prompted by this sheet music cover, I pulled out this  article from my old files:




BLEADEN, Julia [Emily] (b St Margaret Lothbury, London, 28 December 1822; d 26a Albert Bridge Road, Battersea, 15 November 1905)

 

The ‘cradle’ of the Bleaden family was the village of Calne, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, and it was there that a large proportion of the Bleadens of Great Britain who saw the daylight in the later part of the eighteenth century opened their eyes.

 

However, Calne was evidently too provincial for some more energetic members of the family, and the not very widespread name of Bleaden became decidedly prominent, in the last years of the eighteenth and all of the early nineteenth centuries, in the city of London itself. The firm of Bleaden and company, led in the 1790s by John Bleaden and later by his eldest son Charles (1770-1851), were caterers and licensed victuallers, and the flagship of their increasing fleet of hostelries – which included at various times the Royal Hotel, Deal, the Plough Tavern, Blackwall with its whitebait speciality, and the King’s Head, Poultry, which went in for fresh turtle -- was none less than the celebrated and recently rebuilt London Tavern at number 120 Bishopsgate Within. The London Tavern boasted a dining room which could take over 350 people, and that room swiftly became the centre for more than just dining. In the more than half a century that Bleaden and co ran their magnificent hostelry, it became a favourite centre for city dinners, society meetings, annual general meetings, political beanfeasts, company directors’ beanfeasts and, consequently, a huge commercial and political centre where business of all kinds was transacted. (‘Mr Bleaden’s committee sits daily at the London Tavern’). The Bleadens transacted with the best of them, and John and, especially, Charles Bleaden’s name appeared on prospectuses ranging from the Royal Humane Society  to the Alliance Granite and China Clay Company, as director of the Liverpool & Derby Railway, Secretary of the Printers’ Pension Society, chairman of the General Mining Company, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers Insurance Soc, director of the Direct Western Railways, chairman of the Hotel and Tavernkeepers Provident Institution and many others.

‘The group of directors have floated so many companies that they are referred to as ‘the Lothbury Gang’’ commented the Times in the 1820s, with reference to the part of London from whence the family operated. And operated with a certain success for Charles, who was at various times a councilman for Cheap, and an alderman, boasted several addresses -- ‘of Colesden/Couldson Court Surrey & Adelaide Place, London bridge – and was also at one stage the owner of a private steamboat. 

By this time, Charles was doing much of his wheeler-dealing alongside another Bleaden – another John. John Bleaden of 47 Lothbury. A brother? A cousin I think, as it seems Charles had only one brother, Henry, and anyway this John had been born back in Calne in 1783. However, by 1816, he is up in London and operating from the Lothbury address, which would be his for very many years, as a stationer. A ‘stationer’ of 1816 did very much more than sell notepaper. A stationer’s shop was another wheeling-and-dealing centre of activity, commercial and personal, and John was not slow in following Charles into some of the multiplicity of activities in which his (?) cousin was involved. In 1823 I spot him canvassing for election as a director of the Eagle Insurance Company and a few years later he becomes, and for many years remains, secretary of the Commercial Steamship Company. He turns up (with Charles and a list of fashionable gents) as a steward of the Royal Asylum of St Ann’s Benevolvent Society, and so forth, and in 1851 when Charles Bleaden died it was (?) cousin John who was named as executor of his will.

John Bleaden actually came to London well before 1816, for in 1806 he was married at St Olave, Old Jewry, London to Miss Fidelity Mead, who spent the next twenty years regularly swelling the Bleaden population of Lothbury. George (1807-1879), John William (1809-1841), Fidelity Jane (1810-1890), Charles (1812), Martha (1813), Edith (1819-1891), Henry (1822-1823), Julia Emily (1822), Charles Edward (1825), Mary (1827-1903) …

George would follow his father into the world of City of London finance, as secretary to this and that Fund and so forth, Edith ended up as a boarding house landlady, Mary became an artist (‘Miss Bleaden’s classes for the study of the living costume model and elementary drawing for ladies are held at 74 Newman Street Oxford Street’), and Julia became the best-known of them all. As a vocalist.

 

Julia Bleaden was just fifteen years old when she made her first appearance as a singer. Evidently, she had been, since a rather early age, a pupil of William Howard Glover, a fact which thoroughly surprised me when it surfaced, as I wasn’t aware that that seriously semi-successful gentleman – composer, performer, teacher, critic – had had genuinely successful pupils before the days of David Miranda and Emily Soldene. But he did. And Julia was probably the most successful of them all. Until Soldene, of course.

 

Mr Glover put his pupils on display, for the first time, at a concert at his rooms in Soho Square (15 May 1848), and a number of them gained the approval of the press, notably Miss Julia Bleaden who was ‘highly successful in Meyerbeer’s trying aria ‘Idole de ma vie’’. Her master hurried her name before the public: His Lays of Many Lands was published soon after and alongside several ‘sung by Mr Sims Reeves’ was 'I list for the oar of his gondola’ ‘sung by Miss Bleaden’.

 

In September 1848, Howard Glover mounted a brief opera season at Manchester’s Theatre Royal. It was undoubtedly an attempt to make money – something else Glover was seriously and always unsuccessful at – for he hired Miss Rainforth and the tenor and baritone of the moment – Reeves and Whitworth – as his stars. Others of the principal parts were used to allow him to launch his pupils: Miss [Ellen] Rowland, Mr Delevanti, the Misses Macnamara, Teresa Brook, Isabella Taylor and Miss J Bleaden.

 

Julia made her debut alongside the Big Three as Lisa in La Sonnambula. The Musical World was less than impressed: ‘The Lisa—a debutante, Miss Bleaden—has a thin soprano voice, of some sweetness, but very feeble; her timidity, too, prevented her making the most of it.’ Mr Glover, being in this expensive venture to try to launch his pupils, riposted by taking an advertisement in the same paper quoting a rather kinder notice from the Manchester Times: ‘Lisa introduced to us Miss Julia Bleadon, a pupil of Mr. Glover. Her timidity interfered considerably on the first night with a voice that possesses much sweetness, and that bell-like quality so desired, but so rarely met.  Let her only have a little more confidence, and we augur well for her future. She has many qualities that only want faith to become valuable.’

The Manchester Times was right.

 

Back in town, Glover worked tirelessly to promote his pupils (he also married one) and, in December, he mounted a showpiece concert for seventeen of them at the Hanover Square Rooms. A large selection from Iphigenia in Tauris, a smaller one from a couple of unproduced operatic manuscripts of his own, and a miscellaneous selection made up the programme. Julia was chorus in the Gluck, but got to sing one of Glover’s songs and take part with the Misses Rowland and Taylor in ‘My lady the countess’, and the Musical World summed up ‘We should select Miss Ellen Rowland and Miss Julia Bleaden among the ladies and Mr Delevanti among the gentlemen as the most promising’. The Musical World got two out of three right -- there was a young sleeper amongst the gentlemen and Ellen Rowland rose only for a short while – but they were right about Julia.

 

Glover took his team to Scotland in the new year, and Julia appeared as Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo, teamed with a certain Sam Cowell as her Lord, and was given her chance in the star role of The Night Dancers. ‘Miss Bleaden scarcely came up to our idea in the part of Giselle, but it must be confessed that the part is a heavy one’ reported the Glasgow Herald recording that Miss Isabelle Taylor had played the tenor role, because Mr Payne was indisposed.

 

Thereafter, I spot her at Liverpool, at Easter 1849, giving her Lisa alongside Annie Romer, in June at Dublin with Teresa Brooke, Gregg and E L Hime, singing at Miss Ward’s concert (Glover’s ‘Sing on, sweet bird’) and, then, engaged at the Princess’s Theatre where she teamed her Lisa now with Louisa Pyne. She also played The Queen of the Naiads in the pantomime King Jamie or Harlequin and the Magic Fiddle and appeared in the comedy My Wife Sha’n’t Act. Next season, she rose to playing fairy in the Drury Lane pantomime, Harlequin and Humpty Dumpty.

 

James Anderson, the lessee of Drury Lane, had got hold of Auber’s vast operatic spectacle L’Enfant prodigue, but his style ran more to the spectacular than the operatic, and he had the opera de-operaticised and its libretto turned into a piece of spectacular drama under the title Azael, the prodigal (19 February 1851). He himself played the title-role, alongside two other non-singers, Vandenhoff and Miss Vining. However, some of Auber’s music was kept, rearranged, as dance music for principal ballerina Victorine Legrain, and as incidental music. The incidental music included some vocals, and they were delivered by the experienced lead tenor, John Rafter and Eliza Nelson, who had been on the theatre’s preceding bill playing a little operetta, and by Julia Bleaden. 

Azael was a spectacular success, and during its run it went through a number of supporting comedies. Thus it was, that Julia found herself promoted from backing singer to appearing as Bianca to the Petruchio of Anderson and the Katharine of Mrs Nisbett in what had once been Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. But though Azael did well, Mr Anderson didn’t stay too long at the Lane.

 

Julia next surfaces in rather different surroundings: at the Southwark Literary Institute (2 February 1852) providing the vocal illustrations to a lecture on Modern Parody and Burlesque, delivered by a gentleman named P Henry Hatch. P Henry had over the past few years tried his hands at playwriting (Sunshine and Shade, Dearest Anna Maria, The Mantrap), song-writing (the vastly successful ‘O charming May’ ‘O cheerful spring’), and now he was having a shot at lecturing. It seemed to go all right. And Julia was described as ‘a young lady of considerable vocal ability’.

 

Three days later Miss Julia Bleaden mounted her own concert. Daddy had no trouble finding her a venue: the concert was held at the London Tavern. And he didn’t splash out on an orchestra. But the line up of singers was remarkable: Misses Louisa and Susan Pyne, Miss Poole, Mr Swift, George Perren, Henri Corri et al. F Osborne Williams conducted from the piano in the place of Glover. In spite of the ‘merciless pelting of a pitiless storm’, there was a good audience (‘mostly ladies’). Julia herself sang ‘O luce di quest’ anima’, Lee’s ‘Listen to the nightingale’, ‘La ci darem’ with Corri as her Don Giovanni, and joined Miss Poole in the favourite duet ‘The Fairies’ Dance’ which was ‘so remarkably well sung as to require repetition’. ‘The lady possesses a clear and flexible soprano of great promise’ reported The Musical World.

 

Opera, spectacle, comedy, lecture, concert – Julia Bleaden had begun her career in eclectic fashion, and it would continue that way. Her next engagement was for Sadler’s Wells. Priscilla Horton had turned impresario to mount a season of opera, with that popular pair of vocalists Louisa Pyne and William Harrison as its stars. Rebecca Isaacs, Henry Whitworth, Manvers and Oliver Summers supported, along with the young Julia Bleaden. The repertoire included Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Daughter of the Regiment, La Sonnambula, The Crown Diamonds, The Mountain Sylph, MaritanaThe Enchantress, Der Freischütz and such afterpieces as Midas, and Miss Horton starred in a version of Le Duc de Letorières (The Chameleon). Julia would play parts in many of these operas in the coming years, but lacking playbills I know only, in this season, that she was Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo and Lazarillo in Maritana.

 

In 1853 (23 July) she made another appearance at Sadler’s Wells, on a benefit programme, and she kept up the eclectic manner of her performances: she sang in the concert part of the programme, and then performed a petite comedietta entitled Popping the question by W Harries Tilbury from the Haymarket Theatre. In 1853 (15 September), too, she returned to the lecture hall. The Williams family, Thomas (lecturer), Bessie (vocals) and Frederick Osborne Williams (piano) had been touring an entertainment on English Music and Musicians, in which Thomas revealed his Notes of a musical tour with Mdlle Jenny Lind. This time he was just doing Vocal music, and Julia was brought in to help Miss Williams out with the ‘numerous vocal illustrations’, as they travelled from the Camberwell Institution to Oxford, Brighton, Deptford, Poplar, Islington, Dalston, Wellingborough, and dates beyond. By which time it had become a lecture on The Music of Germany. However, before, even, her engagement with the Williamses was done, Julia had been engaged for another like piece. 

P Henry Hatch Esq (sic), a gentleman who had indulged in Entertainments and playwriting (Rebecca Isaacs’ musical The Man Trap) for some half-dozen years, had got himself together a diorama of Ireland: ‘14 panoramic views of Dublin, Wicklow, Cork and Kilkenny with twelve comic portfolio sketches and new ballads composed especially by Samuel Lover and J G Callcott’ which he called The Irish Tourist’s Ticket. Dioramas of Ireland had not yet flooded the market, and when this one was produced at the Hanover Square Rooms (24 October), it was much appreciated. In some quarters, The Morning Post (whose critic was surely Howard Glover!) Mr Hatch was found tiresome, and only the views and ‘Miss Bleaden’s songs assist materially in preventing the half-suffocated audience from rushing incontinently into the square for more of atmosphere and less of apoplexy’. The Times groaned that ‘this was the age of Illustration’ – ie of one-man shows and ‘entertainments’ on Charles Mathews and Henry Russell lines, rather than theatrical productions – but granted that this was ‘one of the most agreeable and instructive entertainments of the day’.  ‘Mr Hatch’s manner is remarkably good and the whole effect is much enhanced by the singing of Miss Julia Bleaden and the pleasant little songs with which it is interspersed’. The pleasant little songs, indeed, went to those thousands of pianos to which Lover’s vast output always went and Julia was able to boast that pieces such ‘The Jaunting Car’, ‘The Ship is parting from the shore or, Why did you leave me’, ‘How to ask and have’, ‘The Favourable Answer’ and the cavatina ‘The Sprites of the wind’ had indeed being written ‘especially for’ her.

Alas, when the sheet music was published it was Mr Hatch who got the billing: ‘composed especially for Mr Hatch’s entertainment’. P Henry’s show, however, was so well appreciated that he decided not to take it to the villages of the home provinces, and instead he moved it into the Salle Robin in Piccadilly (on the site of what is now left of the London Pavilion). The show did not remain static. New songs were introduced, and when the eastern question became the burning issue of the minute, Hatch had some scenes on the Golden Horn and Constantinople painted and his tour of Ireland took a sally forth to Turkey! 

Bandwagon-jumping started instantly. E L Hime came up with an entire entertainment on The Songs and Sayings of Samuel Lover, C H Kenney set up a whole diorama of Constantinople (and then got sick and couldn’t do it). But Hatch and Julia (‘Samuel Lover’s ballads are rendered with judicious taste and much feeling by Miss Julia Bleaden’) ran serenely on and, on 21 January 1854, they celebrated their 100th performance. But Dr Kahn had a contract to bring his ‘Museum of anatomy’ to the Salle Robin, so The Irish Tourist’s Ticket had to go. It zoomed off down to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (‘Miss Julia Bleaden has assisted … rendering the entertainment one of unusual interest’), as Hatch went on to announce lectures on Brother JonathanA Night with Dickens, The Philosophy of ‘Punch’. Alas, he didn’t turn up for a date at Chelmsford, and I never hear of him ever again. Oh, yes I do. Philip Henry Hatch, woollen warehouseman, dealer and chapman, 95 Wood-Street, City, was declared bankrupt the following week. Philip Henry Hatch, Melbourne 1864 …

 

Julia, however, was quickly back in business. She appeared at the Brighton Theatre, alongside Henry Manley, as Georgette in the old musical comedy ‘Twas I – originated by Vestris and a particular favourite of the star of the Brighton season, Rebecca Isaacs. During the week Miss Isaacs also played The Barber of Seville and The Daughter of the Regiment (one night she did both and the mad scene from Lucia in between them) with manager Henry Farren, and I imagine again Julia took some supporting roles. She also came back down to appear, that season, along with the Weisses and Herbert Bond as one of the vocalists in Nye Chart’s Benefit.

 

Back in town, she fulfilled a number of concert engagements (Perren’s, Howard Glover’s, Misses Mascall’s &c) and saw her name appear on the covers of a number of songs by Langton Williams, the prolific composer of ballads and parlour music (‘A Song to the Flowers’, ‘Music on the Sea’, ‘You’ll Soon Forget Kathleen’ ‘Dermot’s Farewell’  ‘I Love a May morning’ ‘Sunny Memories’ ‘The Music of my native land’ &c), before joining another opera company. This one was again at Drury Lane. It was announced for 18 nights and opened with Maritana with Hermine Rudersdorff in the title-role and Galer and Dussek heading the support. Of which Julia may have been one. But not for long. The season collapsed after three under-prepared nights and the singers went off to Swansea and Plymouth where they apparently did Sonnambula, Lucia and The Bohemian Girl as well. Julia’s name is listed, behind Julia Harland as prima donna. Did she play Lisa, Alice and the Gipsy Queen?

Back in London, after this fairly hapless venture, Julia moved into one of the few areas of vocal entertainment that she had yet to tackle. She appeared for Hullah, at St Martin’s Hall, alongside the Sims Reeveses, in oratorio. As second soprano, of course, for Mrs Reeves was the star of the affair. And she was adjudged by the Athenaeum ‘a neat and well-prepared second soprano’. They did Judas Maccabaeus (15 November with Augustus Braham, Weiss) and a memorable performance of The Messiah (20 December) which saw the debuts of Bessie Palmer and Lewis Thomas, two of the coming greats of British oratorio singing. She was labelled – behind the large notices reserved, as ever, for the Reeveses, and not surprisingly for the two, brilliant new performers -- ‘a competent and agreeable second soprano’. On 17 January she was second soprano to Marian Enderssohn in the St Martin’s Hall premiere performance of Mrs Mouncey Bartholomew’s The Nativity.

 

In 1855, amid the usual run of concerts, Julia took up several more substantial jobs. She visited the chief London home of the illustrated lecture, the Royal Polytechnic Institute (1 March) to do the illustrations to a lecture on astronomy. These ‘illustrations’ took the form of large chunks of The Creation of which Julia delivered the soprano music alongside Montem Smith (tenor) and Henry Buckland (bass.) In May she got back on to the stage, at the Strand Theatre, where the manager, for the nonce, was Rebecca Isaacs. ‘Her first appearance here’ took place on 7 May and she got to play Polly Peachum to the Macheath of Brookhouse Bowler in The Beggar’s Opera. But she didn’t stay. One week later she opened at the Lyceum Theatre.

Anna Thillon was saying one of her ‘Farewells’ with a season of her inevitable The Crown Diamonds. The advertisements bill Leffler, Bowler, Mr T Williams, Miranda, Drayton and Julia Bleaden. Which, if it were so, means that she played the appreciable second role of Diana to the memorable Caterina of Thillon. Alas, Anna ‘sprained her ankle’ after eight performances, so it was back to the concert engagements, including a visit to Bradford, a return to St Martin’s Hall (19 December 1855) for another Messiah, doing second this time to Clara Novello, and an Elijah at Leicester with the Weisses. 

 

The Leicester connection had actually been announced a few weeks earlier, the brothers Nicholson – Henry (flute) and Alfred (oboe) – Leicester-men both and also two of the outstanding wind players of the era -- had joined with Henry Lazarus, the star clarinettist, top trumpeter Thomas Harper, and several other movable players to create a wind ensemble called the Anemoic Union. The vocalist for the Union’s tour of concerts was to be Julia Bleaden. And on a date which curiously seems unrecorded, Julia Bleaden would become the second Mrs Alfred Nicholson. Presumably after Alfred had ceased being married to Mrs Ellen Nicholson.

 

Once the Anemoic Union’s first little tour was done, she carried on with the mixture as before. A visit to Cambridge with harpist Chatterton, appearances at the vast concerts of George Case (‘The Cuckoo’) and Howard Glover, another Creation, on home ground at the City of London Singing Association (as first soprano this time), Langton Williams’s concert of the year, and another opera season. This one was mounted by Howard Glover at Sadler’s Wells (19 May 1856) and the Reeveses were the stars, with Rebecca Isaacs as second. Once again, the two-week season billed and reviewed little more than the stars. We know that Julia did her Polly Peachum again, and that’s all. 

 

Much of the rest of the year was spent in the provinces, notably as featured vocalist in a tour by Alfred Mellon’s Orchestral Union and ‘the blind Sardinian minstrel, Picco’. I have spotted her guesting at Louth, Gloucester, Boston and several times in Birmingham before, in February 1857 she returned to town for an engagement at the Royal Colosseum, Regents Park. The Colosseum was offering something of the same mixture of entertainment as the Polytechnic, and they had picked up the Polytech’s old lecturer, Dr Bachhoffner. Julia, Montem Smith and Buckland came back to illustrate his astronomy lecture with some more Creation, and Julia stayed on to do the vocals in some of the Colosseum’s concerts alongside two other sopranos. Susanna Cole selected vast operatic scenas as her contribution, Clari Fraser RAM selected slightly less vast. Julia stuck mostly to her Lover and Langton Williams. For the meanwhile. For the Colosseum engagement turned into seven months’ stint. The astronomical doctor was replaced by George Buckland with his The Halls and Mansions of the English Nobility (matinees) andOld English Patriotic Songs (evenings) and Julia delivered ‘The Minstrel Boy’, Henrion’s ‘Sweet Love Arise’, ‘Bid me discourse’, ‘Tell me my heart’, Williams’s ‘The Falconer’s Son’, ‘I’ll be no submissive wife’, Handel’s ‘Caro vieni’ and the like. And then, almost as if to prove that she could, she suddenly came out with ‘O luce di quest’anima’ and the grand scena from Der Freischütz. In between times, she also appeared in other concerts, and I notice her at St Martin’s Hall in Howard Glovers so-called Educational Concerts for the People delivering ‘Deh vieni’, and Spohr’s ‘The Bird and the Maiden’ with oboe obbligato by Alfred Nicholson.

 

Julia Bleaden had been part of a variety of Entertainments since her first experience with P Henry Hatch, half a dozen years earlier, but now she found the one that would last her for as long as she cared to stay in the business. It was called Operatic Sketches, it was advertised as a ‘musical, pictorial, anecdotic lecture-entertainment’, and it had just one lecturer-performer-singer: Julia Bleaden. But it was, nevertheless, a three-handed entertainment. Julia went on the road with Alfred Nicholson (‘principal oboe of the London Philharmonic Society and member of the Italian Opera and Sacred Harmonic Society orchestras’) and Henry Nicholson (‘solo flautist to the Duke of Rutland’). And, presumably, an accompanist. Operatic Sketches seems to have had its first performance at Leicester on 30 November 1857, before setting off to Market Harborough, Claybrook, Welford, Burton on Trent and a long series of dots on the map, of larger or smaller proportions. On October 5 1858, I notice they visited Calne, Wiltshire.

I’ve been hard put to find out exactly of what the entertainment was composed. Julia spoke, presumably in character, changed costume, sang extracts from The Bohemian Girland La Fille du régiment, Henry did a flute fantasia on Scotch songs and Alfred ‘fully maintained his reputation as one of the best oboe players of the day’.

Julia kept on performing until 1867, and a part of every year – sometimes larger sometimes smaller – was devoted to touring the family entertainment. Latterly it was varied a bit, and when I finally see it out at Southampton’s Polytechnic Institute (2 October 1867), in the company of Henry and Charles Salaman, it is ‘a ballad entertainment’. And 1,700 people came to hear her. 

 

During those years, she continued to sing in London and provincial concerts. In 1861 Alfred Mellon hired her yet again for his Covent Garden promenade concert series and she appeared on the Covent Garden stage in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with Georgina Weiss and Mr Swift, and in concert with Swift and Carlotta Patti. She was regularly seen at the concerts given by Langton Williams (Macfarren’s ‘Ah why do we love?’, ‘The Falconer’s Son’ etc), and by Howard Glover, at whose 1864 festival she performed a Mercadante piece to which Alfred supplied the oboe obbligato. I have spotted her at the Hackney Manor Rooms delivering Macfarren’s ‘Ah, why do we love?’ and her old favourite, Müller’s ‘The Cuckoo’, in 1865-6 she is at Newcastle, Oxford, Leeds, Halifax etc with Henry in Mackney’s Entertainment. And I see that, on 13 April 1866, she took her entertainment to the London Tavern. 

 

The Bleadens were gone, now, from the Tavern and from Lothbury. Father John, widowed and remarried, had retired to Eagle Cottage in Epsom, where he died on 18 August 1865 at the age of 82 leaving ‘less than 1,500L’ to his young(er) widow and the two children of his seventies, one of whom, William Henry Bleaden (1855-1909) would go on to be the famously obstreperous vicar of St Mary’s, Paddington.

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Julia and Alfred had moved back to Leicester, to 34 Pocklington’s Walk. And then, in 1868, Alfred suffered a stroke. He died two years later, in Leicester, on 29 August 1870 at the age of 49. The widowed Julia apparently returned to London and to the house at 34 Alfred Place, Finsbury, which had long been Edith’s boarding house and the home of such of the Bleaden girls as were not married. In the 1871 census, Edith, Mary and Julia are there. She did not, as far as I know, work any more, either as a singer or even as a singing teacher, which she had done in the 1860s. If she did, she didn’t advertise. 

 

She went back on the stage, though, one more time. On 19 June 1872. The occasion was a Benefit at the Vaudeville Theatre for the house’s musical director: Arthur Wellborn Nicholson (1842-1882), her brother-in-law. For the occasion a little operetta with music by the beneficiary was mounted. It was called Love Birds and, at age fifty, Julia played the ingénue, Cicely Sweetapple, alongside tenor Henry Nordblom and comic George Honey.

 

Edith Bleaden died in 1891. Julia seemingly would be the last survivor among the Bleadens of Lothbury. In the 1901 census she can be seen living in Albert Bridge Road, Battersea with Mary. She died there four years later.

She had had interesting career as a performer. Never a star, but a fine, competent all-round performer capable of playing comedy, drama, musical comedy or opera at the best theatres, of singing Langton Williams and Samuel Lover ballads to great effect, The Creation to equally good purpose and a Der Freischütz scena or a piece of Mercadante when the occasion demanded. She had played many second roles in the busy part of her multicoloured career, but she had played them to and alongside Louisa Pyne, Carlotta Patti, Clara Novello, Charlotte Reeves and Anna Thillon, and when she had finally become the centre of affairs, as the soloist in her own family show, she had proven worthy of it. 1,700 spectators in the Southampton Polytechnic for a singer and two wind players? Not bad. Especially at knocking fifty.

 

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