Adah Isaacs Menken

Adah Isaacs Menken first astonished audiences in the role of Mazeppa in New York in the February of 1863. A year later she was delighting audience in California with her daring feats 'upon the fiery untamed steed,' and eventually, in October 1864, the production opened in London, where the audiences at Astley's proved no less appreciative of her charms than had her audiences in America. By this point, the British press had been whetting their readers appetites with a steady stream of reports for nearly a year.

On 7 February 1864, The Era reprinted the following article from The Sacramento Union:

'The Menken is a pretty, shapely Jewess, considerably more undressed than any actress yet tolerated on the American stage. Her costume in Mazeppa may be described as consisting of a flesh-fitting suit, with the little end of a dimity nothing fastened to her waist. She fences with a strong wrist and Bowery dexterity. She attitudinizes, sometimes extravagantly, sometimes with statuesque effect. She suffers herself to be strapped on a 'fiery untamed steed' - both bare-backed - and thus be carried up a mountain, over what appears to be as rough and perilous as the road to Washoe [a county in Nevada]. Again, she mounts the steed, in the fashion adopted by Lady Hester Stanhope and the ladies who crossed the isthmus in '49, and enters in a campaign against Poland, still with "nothing to wear," not even the additions of the Georgian costume - a shirt collar and a pair of spurs. Why not? A crowded audience, illuminated with ladies, applauded. Prudery is obsolete.'

Photographed by Charles Reutlinger of Paris.