Adeline Cottrell

A carte-de-visite portrait of Miss Adeline Cottrell (1841-1866), who appeared in various productions at the Royal Olympic Theatre between 1859 and 1862. By 1863 she was appearing at the St James’s Theatre but she died, aged only 25, a few years later.

The following obituary appeared in the Sporting Life (6 June 1866): 'Miss Adeline Cottrell, who was for some years a most valued member of the Olympic and St James's Theatres, died very suddenly on the 21st ult. In addition to considerable talent as a dramatic artiste, she possessed an excellent voice, which had been most carefully cultivated, and her growing proficiency as a vocalist had latterly led her to transfer her services from the dramatic to the operatic stage. At Her Majesty's Theatre and the Crystal Palace concerts she will be well remembered by many as Mdlle Edi, the name she assumed when commencing her operatic career. The part of Lisa, in "La Somnambula," was the last for which she was cast, that opera being in course of rehearsal when the hand of death so suddenly let fall the curtain, that for her shall never rise again. Miss Cottrell was married to Mr John Haines, a member of the orchestra, and was twenty-five at the time of her death.'

The record of her marriage in 1860 reveals that her real name was Adeline Martha Clark. According to the 1851 census, her father John Clark was a clerk in the office of the Art Journal, the most important Victorian magazine on art. Adeline appears on the 1861 census living with her mother-in-law Mary Haines and her one-month-old son John Thomas Haines in Lambeth. Born on 13 March 1861, John Thomas Augustus Haines was baptised, aged 7, at St Michael Cornhill on 12 March 1869. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford and was subsequently a 'tutor in Classics' (1891), an 'MA Oxon' (1893), a 'private tutor' (1911) and a 'civil servant' (1929).

Photographed in the spring of 1860 by Camille Silvy of London.