Francis Plowden’s comment on In the Name of St Patrick may have aroused your curiosity. I have persuaded him to turn Guest Blogger and tell an extraordinary tale.
Christopher and I share a great great grandfather, Captain George Bryan (1770- 1843), the MP for Kilkenny in Parliament in the 1840s. However, while he is descended from George’s wife, it seems that, according to an earlier generation of the Bellew family, I am descended from Bryan’s mistress, a Dublin based actress called Eliza Walstein. Bryan acknowledged his illegitimate daughter but it is less clear who really was her mother.
Miss Walstein was well known to be Bryan’s long- standing mistress but she disappears from the public record in about 1821. There is no record of her until January 1833 when a prostitute called Eliza Walstein died in a squalid London apartment she shared with an Irish woman. The dead woman was said to be a former actress who, in the 1820s, had been known to walk the streets around Jermyn St and the Haymarket. Latterly, she could be found near the Coburg Theatre and Waterloo Bridge, where, for a glass or two of gin, she would recite extracts from Shakespeare. Because no one claimed her body it was sent to St Thomas’s Hospital for dissection where, to great astonishment, “she” turned out to be a man. The parish authorities applied to the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, who directed a coroner’s jury to be convened. The body was viewed by the jurors and in some papers the findings were reported in detail – others were more reticent, on grounds of delicacy.
He/she was reported to have had an effeminate appearance, with long, glossy, light brown hair and an adolescent’s beard, which looked as if it had been plucked with tweezers. In addition, “the penis was six and a quarter inches long and the testicles of the usual size, the rectum was unusually large and a halfpenny might be dropped into it” leaving “not the slightest doubt in the minds of the jury… as to the horrible practices of the deceased”. Witnesses, including her pregnant companion, declared that they had known the deceased for years, had lived with her and even slept in the same bed, but they had had no suspicion that she was a man. The jury concluded that she had “died by the visitation of God” and that, in the light of the propensities in which the deceased had indulged, “some means may be adopted in the disposal of the body as will mark the ignominy of the crime”.
The Dublin actress had had a successful career on the Irish Stage and one, less successful, season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. While there are many newspaper references to Miss Walstein’s performances in the period up to 1821, there is virtually no trace of her after the Dublin theatre closed that year and no record of her death. In biographical notes about her she is said to have died the same year as the London prostitute and, in several theatre books, it is stated that when she died it was discovered she was a man. These 12 years were certainly long enough for her to have fallen into the gutter, if Bryan had abandoned her, as he may well have done.
Can the London prostitute and the well-known Irish based actress really have been the same person? Was it possible for someone to conceal their true identity from both their fellow performers and their admirers for so long? And, if so, how can he/she have been my great grandmother?
As the biographer Claire Tomalin said to me, not exactly accurately, on one rather public occasion, it is rather unusual to have a male prostitute as a great grandmother.
Mr Francis Plowden, April 2020
Given the extraordinary story of Eliza Walstein, your readers might be interested to see the picture of her held in the British Museum’s collections. It is a print by John Alais, after a painting by Moses Haughton Jr., published by John Bell in 1815.
https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3482696&page=1&partId=1&peoA=5175-2-60&people=5175
Other pictures of her are held in public collections. Some include the name Lavinia Edwards after her stage name.
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/101469/eliza-walstein-lavinia-edwards-about-1790-1833-actress
Lavinia Edwards, the transgender (not “male”) prostitute and Eliza Walstein are not one and the same person : Just do your math !
Lavinia Edwards, who also went by the name “miss Walstein”, had an estimated age of 24 when she died of tuberculosis, in januari 1833.
Eliza walstein, the actress who was mostly known as “Miss Walstein”, is something of a mystery. None one knows, so far, her date of birth. She began her career round 1800 and at that time, she was probably 14 or 15yo. She had an acting career up until, as far as I know, 1820 then completely vanished out of sight. She would have then been about 35 yo. In januari 1833, she was most likely about 45 y.o if she was still alive. I doubt very much that the two medical doctors who examined Lavinia Edwards (AKA “Miss Walstein”) would have mistaken a 24 y.o. Male and a 44 y.o male.
Rest assured, Christopher. You are NOT the descendent of a transgender prostitute 😉
I wish you told me, or your readers, more about the alleged affair between Eliza Walstein and Captain Bryan.
Your curiosity will be satisfied when Francis Plowden publishes his family history. It is nearing completion.
Claire is almost certainly correct in thinking that the “Miss Walstein” who turned out to be a man and the Dublin based actress of the same name were two different people. I had concluded the same thing myself, although there are plenty of theatrical and other histories which think differently. The actress is rather mysterious in that I have not found much about her origins and nothing at all after her last performances in Dublin in 1820, apart from a reference to her presence in Paris in 1822 and an address in Dublin’s Mount St in 1823. It was suggested to me that she might have joined a convent, perhaps in France,as a guest rather than as a nun.Any additional information welcome !