Lord Chumley

The idea of the play is that Lord Chumley is in love with Eleanor Butterworth, Jessie Deane (Maude Adams) is in love with Hugh Butterworth who is the brother of Eleanor LeSage, a crook.

Hugh is given some money which was collected for the widow of a killed officer. He hands over only part of the money, though, and Lord Chumley goes to live in cheap quarters so he can pay the balance. The widow turns out to be his landlady. It also turns out that Hugh was drugged by LesSage who made off with the missing money.

Maude Adams played the role of Jessie Deane.

“Maude received little public recognition for her work in Lord Chumley, since she had missed the initial three-month run in New York, in addition to the Boston opening. ...The sentimental character Jessie, nicknamed “Little Red Riding Hood,' allowed Maude to exercise only to a limited extent her developing skills in both comedy and pathos while she served as the sweet and charming confidante to the heroine.” (Maude Adams, an American Idol: True Womanhood Triumphant in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Theatre, doctoral thesis, 1984, Eileen Karen Kuehnl)

=====Hear the Distant Applause! Six Great Ladies of the American Theatre by Marguerite Vance, 1963=====

Here again was blighting discouragement, but with wisdom beyond her years she was learning from each obstacle. Sensibly, she admitted to herself that she had been straining at parts far too old for her, that she had an apprenticeship to serve before she could hope for stardom. As though her prudence had won her an award, she learned of a part calling for a young girl in E.H. Sothern production of Lord Chumley in Boston. She and her mother left for Boston immediately.

Mr. Sothern took his profession very seriously, so seriously that members of his cast, though devoted to him personally, stood in awe at his insistence upon perfection in every actor's work, regardless of the minute size of the part. He was not even thirty, this man of great talent, yet he had the wisdom and depth of observation of a man twice his age.

At the moment-it was the last week of the Boston engagement-he was looking for someone to replace Dora Leslie in the part of Jessie Deane. It was a small part, but a good one, and as Mr. Sothern interview the applicants he thought again and again of the thin girl, one of the first to apply, with the delicate high cheekbones and the gray-green eyes wide spaced in a piquant little face. She assured him with disarming candor that she could do justice to the part if only he would let her try. Her name, she said, was Adams-Miss Maude Adams.

Something about her wistful earnestness appealed to Sothern, and he asked her to return to his office and read for him. There was a quality here, an inner childlike radiance, unclouded and guileless, which he found most attractive.

At the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston on November 19, 1888, Miss Adams played her first really significant role in Lord Chumley. As she was a replacement, no notice was taken of her by the press. But weeks later, when the company was on tour, the Peoria JournalL burst into print with the following: "Maude Adams is as pretty a soubrette as one can see in an afternoon promenade-a sweet and tender blossom on the dramatic tree." To both Maude and her mother it was an accolade Hear the Distant Applause! Six Great Ladies of the American Theatre by Marguerite Vance, 1963.

=====The Bishop of Broadway: the Life & Work of David Belasco by Craig Timberlake; Library Publishers, 1954=====

The successful playwrights retreated to Echo Lake and spent the spring of '88 tailoring a play to fit the popular comedian of the Lyceum. Lord Chumley was a patchwork of half a dozen plays and its chief character bore a decided resemblance to the elder Sothern's famous role of Lord Dundreary. Chumley was the "silly ass" type of English nobleman that delighted American audiences of the period, a shy, gentle, lisping young fellow whose bravery and loyalty belied his foolish exterior. The authors were horrified to discover that Sothern did not like the part and did not wish to appear in the play. For one thing, he feared invidious comparisons with his famous father. After watching Belasco stage a mimic rehearsal to demonstrate all the possibilities of the role, he reluctantly consented to undertake it and achieved a personal triumph when the play opened August 20. "A worthy son of a worthy father," wrote William Winter. "A thin and barren narrative," said the Herald critic, "but with Boucicault applauding from the boxes and Harrigan from the stalls, the comedians must have felt the honor of the approbation of the masters of their art." The Dramatic Mirror took cognizance of the impression prevailing in certain quarters that the play was not original. "Were it not that at least one of these gentlemen [Belasco] has on several occasions been charged with working over other people's products and putting them forth as his own, the idea would not receive even an instant's entertainment. After all it matters little one way or the other so far as the public is concerned, for 'Lord Chumley' is a capital piece, affording more entertainment to the square inch than anything we have latterly seen, and as it made a pronounced hit on its first representation at the Lyceum Theatre last Monday night, people will flock to see it without reference to its antecedents or its origin."

=====American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914 by Gerald Bordman; Oxford University Press, 1994=====

To capitalize on the celebrity of the elder Sothern's Lord Dundreary, de Mille and Belasco centered the new vehicle on another English lord, thereby also allowing for another voguish English setting. They called their play Lord Chumley ( 8-2088), Lyceum). Young Lord Cholmondeley ( Sothern) is a seeming ne'er-do-well. His best friend is Lieutenant Gerald Hugh Butterworth ( Frank Carlyle), who is known simply as Hugh, and his great love is Hugh's sister, Eleanor ( Belle Archer), who haughtily disdains his love. What Chumley and Hugh's family do not know is that Hugh is an inveterate gambler and, to pay his debts, has stolen money his regiment collected for a fellow officer's widow. The evidence of the crime has fallen into the hands of Gasper Le Sage ( Herbert Archer), who holds it over Hugh so that Hugh will promote Gasper's courtship of Eleanor. When Hugh goes off to fight the Zulu insurgency, Chumley discovers the situation. He contrives to reimburse the widow, even though it means he must live in relatively spartan rooms, and he eventually manages to cow a burglar who discloses that Gasper is an escaped convict. With this information he sets matters aright and wins Eleanor's affections.