Mrs Charles Young

A carte-de-visite portrait of the actress Mrs Charles Young, who was married to the less successful actor Charles Young.

In 1862 Mrs Young petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s infidelity and cruelty. According to a report on the case in the St Neots Chronicle and Advertiser (17 May 1862):

‘Mrs Charles Young was a lady well known in the theatrical world, and her husband, the respondent, was also upon the stage. She married him at a very early age in Tasmania, and they lived together, at first in Australia, and afterwards in England, until January, 1860. He was frequently guilty of cruelty, and in Jan. 1860, Mrs Young discovered that he had formed an adulterous intimacy with a ballet girl named Soward, at the St James’s Theatre, where he was then acting. On the evening of the 30th of January she followed him to Raymond’s-buildings, where this young woman was living with her aunt, who had charge of some chambers there. Upon his return home they had a quarrel, and he made a brutal assault upon her. She then left him, and had since lived with her mother. He had lived for some months with Soward, who passed as his wife, at lodgings in Pimlico, and he was now in Australia.’

On examination, Mrs Young stated that: ‘I became acquainted with the respondent in 1844, when I was 14 years old. I was then dancing at the Victoria Theatre in Hobart Town. A few months afterwards we were married at Launceston. We went to Melbourne, and then to Hobart Town, where we kept an hotel. A child was born in November, 1846. He treated me very well for about twelve months after the marriage.’ Mrs Young then catalogued for the court the abuse she had subsequently suffered. Her evidence ‘was corroborated by her mother, Mrs Thompson, by Mrs Edwin Young, and by person from the various lodgings she had occupied with her husband in London. It was also proved that from September, 1860, Mr Young had lived in lodgings at Pimlico with a woman who passed as his wife, and who had given birth to a child there.’ The judge ‘pronounced a decree nisi for the dissolution of the marriage with costs.’

The following year on 21 February 1863 at St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square Mrs Young married the American actor Hermann Vezin, ‘a gentleman whose artistic impersonations, and excellent qualities in social life, have deservedly rendered him, both professionally and privately, a general favourite’ (The Era, 1 March 1863). According to the Civil Registration Index, Mrs Young’s first names were Jane Elizabeth. According to the 1871 census, she was born at Warrington in Lancashire, though in 1901 she said she was born at Bath in Somerset.

Mrs Jane Elizabeth Vezin ‘of 16 Darmouth Park-road Highgate-road Middlesex’ died on 17 April 1902 ‘at Beresford-house Norfolk-road Margate’ leaving an estate valued at £3329.

Photographed by the Southwell Brothers of London.