After that experience Jefferson repaired to Philadelphia, and during the
next ten years, from 1846 to 1856, he wrought in that city and in New
York, Baltimore, Richmond, and other places, sometimes as a stock actor,
sometimes as a star, and sometimes as a manager. He encountered various
difficulties. He took a few serious steps and many comic ones. He was
brought into contact with some individuals that were eminent and with
some that were ludicrous. He crossed the Allegheny mountains in
mid-winter, from Wheeling to Cumberland, in a cold stage-coach, and
almost perished. He was a member of Burton's company at the Arch Street
theatre, Philadelphia, and was one of the chorus in that great actor's
revival of _Antigone_--which there is little doubt that the chorus
extinguished. He was the low comedian in Joseph Foster's amphitheatre,
where he sang _Captain Kidd_ to fill up the "carpenter scenes," and
where he sported amid the turbulent rhetorical billows of _Timour the
Tartar_ and _The Terror of the Road_. He acted in New York at the
Franklin theatre and also at the Chatham. He managed theatres in Macon
and Savannah, where he brought out the blithe Sir William Don; and one
of the sprightliest episodes of his memoir is the chapter in which he
describes that tall, elegant, nonchalant adventurer. Don was a
Scotchman, born in 1826, who made his first appearance in America in
November 1850 at the Broadway theatre, New York, and afterward drifted
aimlessly through the provincial theatres. Don was married in 1857 to
Miss Emily Sanders, and he died at Tasmania, March 19, 1862, and was
buried at Hobartstown. Jefferson saw the dawn of promise in the career
of Julia Dean,--when that beautiful girl was acting with him, in the
stock--and afterwards he saw the noonday splendour of her prosperity;
and he might have recalled, but that sad touches are excluded from his
biography, her mournful decline. In 1853 he was stage manager of the
Baltimore museum, for Henry C. Jarrett, and in 1854 he was manager of
the Richmond theatre, for John T. Ford. Among the players whom he met,
and who deeply influenced him, were James E. Murdoch, Henry Placide,
Edwin Forrest, Edwin Adams, and Agnes Robertson. But the actor who most
affected the youth of Joseph Jefferson, whose influence sank deepest
into his heart and has remained longest in his memory and upon his
style, was his half-brother, Charles Burke: and certainly, as a
serio-comic actor, it may be doubted whether Charles Burke ever was
surpassed. That comedian was born March 27, 1822, in Philadelphia, and
he died in New York, November 10, 1854. Jefferson's mother, Cornelia
Frances Thomas, born in New York, October 1, 1796, the daughter of
French parents, was married in her girlhood to the Irish comedian Thomas
Burke, who died in 1824; and she contracted her second marriage, with
Jefferson's father, in 1826. Jefferson writes at his best in the
description of scenery, in the analysis of character, and in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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