Writes Cecil Roth: ‘The autobiography of that extraordinary self-recruited addition to the Jewish community, the 18th-century actress Beckey Wells (Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sumbel, Late Wells, of the Theatre-Royal, Drury-Lane, Covent-Garden, and Hay-market, written by herself; London, 1811) is in three volumes. It is therefore all the more remarkable that it eluded the attention of the superbly industrious antiquarians, historians, bibliographers, and collectors of the picaresque who laid the foundation of Anglo-Jewish historical study . . . whether because it is of great rarity, or because it hides its Jewish light under a theatrical bushel. . . . Since the present writer came across the work by chance, he can hardly claim any credit for himself.” 

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The curious story of “Beckey” (born Mary) Wells starts in humdrum enough fashion. In the 18th century, the English stage was not yet recruited from the nobility, and Mary Davies was the daughter of a carver and gilder who lived in Birmingham, helped Garrick dig up the root of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree at Stratford, and died appropriately in a madhouse. His widow set up a tavern which was much frequented by actors; and in consequence Beckey also went on the stage, making her first appearance as the Duke of York in Shakespeare’s Richard III. In about 1777, when she was only eighteen, she married a fellow actor named Wells, who had played Romeo to her Juliet and was determined to perpetuate the association in private life. Notwithstanding this auspicious beginning, he sent her back almost immediately to her mother with a note to say that she was too young and childish, consoling himself thereafter with her bridesmaid.

Undistracted by matrimony, Beckey now found a mild success in the theater. In 1781, she first appeared in London, where at one time she was considered (we have her own word for it) the most beautiful actress on the stage and earned what was then the exceptional salary of ten pounds a week. She became a favorite at the Haymarket, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden theaters. She replaced Mrs. Cargill as Macheath in the performance of the Beggar’s Opera in which all the male roles were played by women and the female by men; she made a considerable reputation in the leading part of Cowslip in O’Keefe’s very successful comedy, The Agreeable Surprise. “Cowslip” subsequently stuck to her as a nickname; she created a mild stir as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus; she played opposite Macklin and—no difficult task—quarreled with Mrs. Siddons; and she succeeded in being seduced by Edward Topham, a journalist, playwright, and fop (and in his spare moments officer in the Life Guards as well), in collaboration with whom she produced a number of daughters. In their correspondence, of which she preserved several specimens for posterity in her magnum opus, she called him “Whiskerandos,” and he called her, less pretentiously, “Pud.” The liaison was common knowledge, and is commemorated by Rowlandson in his caricature of Topham as “Captain Epilogue,” which shows “Cowslip” receding into the distance along a road marked “To the Wells.”

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At the beginning of 1787, Topham established a daily newspaper, The World and Fashionable Observer, which was for some time resplendently and somewhat vulgarly successful. The established English papers, goaded by this alert and vivacious rival, had to look to their methods, if only by copying his. It was this spirit of imitation, for example, which led to the addition of the name of The Times to the dreary journal that had hitherto been called The Universal Daily Register, this being accompanied by a revolutionary change in its contents. The World had set a new standard in personal denigration, which the older periodical henceforth did its best to surpass. The rivalry expressed itself in a furious journalistic polemic, columns of abuse being published in one issue after the other against Topham (“Edward Don Whiskerandos Tight-jacket All-legs Pullfrill Snuffle, Esquire,” as he was termed) and his favorite, Mrs. Wells. When, for example, during the trial of Warren Hastings the latter sat on her lavender bottle and broke it, the Times insisted that its contents were more sustaining than lavender; to which she retorted that in this case she would have taken better care of them! For Beckey had by now begun to assist her lover in his enterprise, thus becoming one of the earliest women journalists in the English-speaking world. It was by no means a nominal association; her position was universally recognized; and when in due course Pitt set about purchasing the sympathies of the press, she was to receive a large slice of Topham’s six hundred pounds. She took advantage of her position to introduce into the staff her brother-in-law, a certain Emanuel Samuel, her first recorded Jewish contact—a man who deserves at least a paragraph to himself.

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He was the son of a certain Samuel Samuel, a traveling jeweler and dealer in old coins, who had settled in Lincoln and apparently lost touch with his co-religionists (though he was to be buried in the Great Synagogue cemetery in London when he died in 1804, in his seventieth year). His son attracted the attention of a local squire, who sent him to be educated to the Charterhouse in London, which, except for an interval of exclusion from 1731 to 1761, was then a favorite educational institution among London Jews. In 1782, at the age of nineteen, he entered University College, Oxford, and in the following year became a demy of Magdalen: obviously, by now he had been baptized, since no professing Jews were at this time admitted to the University of Oxford, and with such a name he could hardly have slipped past unnoticed. On coming down from the university, he tried his hand at journalism, writing paragraphs for the Morning Post for a guinea a week. (He was not the first English Jew to follow this profession, if the Hebrew “with his chocolate cheek” of Goldsmith’s Haunch of Venison of 1771 really existed.) He became acquainted with Beckey’s sister, wooed her, and married her; and as a result Beckey secured him a position on the staff of the World at double his former salary—not a hopelessly bad income for those days. From the proprietor’s letters, he seems to have been that publication’s star (and perhaps only) reporter, covering the widely separated though not wholly dissimilar subjects of politics and pugilism. He had however exuberant tastes (there is extant [Hertford County Records, IV, p. 87] the record of a certificate issued to him in 1787 for killing game); and his journalistic career was brought to an abrupt end when he was thrown into Fleet Prison for debt. According to his sister-in-law, she took pity on his condition, backed his bills and discharged some of them, once borrowed money to get him out of Fleet Prison so that he could go and vote for Lord Hubbard at a Parliamentary election, paid for his training as a surgeon, defrayed his expenses while he was walking the hospitals, and in the end raised two hundred and forty pounds for his and his wife’s passage to India, where he proposed to set up practice. This sum was in addition, she is careful to point out, to what she gave him for his personal wardrobe—including hair powder, a box of which burst with sternutatory effect while the post chaise conveying the party to Gravesend passed a carriage-load of Cherokee chiefs then on a visit to England. Ultimately, he seems to have changed his profession once again, entering the East India Company’s law department at Madras and being at the time of his death in 1818 president of the Courts of Justice in the colony of Berbice, British Guiana—which was not perhaps so exalted a position as it sounds.

His change of profession did not presumably matter to Beckey Wells very much, one way or the other. But what did affect her, very seriously, was the fact that he did not repay the amounts she claimed to have lavished upon him. She considered that all her subsequent misfortunes—and they were many—were due to this; and in due course partially dedicated to him her autobiography:

Mr. Samuel—I could not omit your name in my Dedication, as to you, principally, this work owes its birth:—you have, in a great measure, been the occasion of the catalogue of miseries detailed in it—you brought POVERTY upon me, and of course, I lost the affection of Major Topham.

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Perhaps so, although in due course she gained the affection of a more picturesque character. But meanwhile, after being arrested for one debt, which was paid off by Major Topham’s representatives at the World, he nimbly being out of town at the time, she thought it best to leave the country. The time was hardly propitious for foreign travel. She arrived at Calais, and made arrangements for accommodation at a Benedictine nunnery; but almost immediately afterwards the building was destroyed by order of the National Assembly, and in March 1792 she returned to England to face her creditors, among whom Topham was now one of the most insistent. She obtained a fresh engagement at Covent Garden, where the king and queen saw her in the first performance of The Clandestine Marriage. But her creditors became troublesome once more and in 1793 she went over to France again—just in time for the Reign of Terror, in consequence of which she came back almost immediately. Topham had by now transferred his affections to another lady love, though Beckey on her part seems to have found a certain amount of consolation in a friend of his, Frederic Reynolds, another prolific but deservedly forgotten dramatist of the day.

The next stage of her life was, to say the least, varied. She had exciting encounters with certain other cast-off mistresses of Mr. Topham; she was diagnosed insane, put in a strait jacket, and had blisters applied to her legs in the amiable fashion of the time; she tried to escape her (and Mr. Samuel’s) creditors by temporary flight—on one occasion again to France, on another to Ireland; she was arrested on more than one occasion for debt; in King’s Bench Prison, she became interested in a charming Irish officer, who took her out with him when he was released, paying fifteen hundred pounds on her account “without a murmur.” She lived together with “that generous Hibernian,” as she calls him, until he went to join his regiment in the West Indies. Then she was once again arrested for debt (of course, one of Mr. Samuel’s debts) while attending a performance at the theater. This time she was committed to the Fleet. And here she encountered fate.

Her fate was named Sumbel: Joseph Haim Sumbel, in full, as appears from other sources. She pauses at this point to give a summary account of his life before this fateful encounter: and it will be as well for us to do the same.

He was a Jew, born in Morocco, being a son of the famous and fabulously wealthy Samuel Sumbal (the name is better spelled thus), nagid of Moroccan Jewry, for many years counsellor, interpreter, and minister of foreign affairs to the sultan, his ambassador to Denmark in 1751, and his representative in negotiations with foreign envoys. (The latter indeed valued his services so highly that he was for a long time on the pension list of the Spanish government.)¹ Such employment, in 18th-century Morocco, implied not only dignity and profit but also danger, and in 1780, after thirty years’ service, Sumbal père found himself thrown into prison on a charge of sending remittances abroad. Later on he managed to escape to Gibraltar, where he is said to have rendered important service during the great siege by organizing the supply of provisions from Mogador. His death not long after, in the autumn of 1782, was suspected to be due to poison, administered at the instigation of his ungrateful but clearly not oblivious former master.

The beneficiary of the old man’s financial dabblings and remittances abroad had been his eldest son, Joseph, whom he had sent to be brought up in France, where he had many useful friends and acquaintances, from the Duc de Praslin (formerly ambassador in Morocco) downwards. On his father’s death, he was followed to France by his two brothers, who apparently held that what he had received was not on his own account but for the family at large, and who demanded their own share in accordance with the Mosaic law of inheritance. To avoid them, Joseph went to Holland, and thence to England, being appointed in 1794 Moorish envoy at the Court of St. James’s—an office not infrequently discharged at this time by Jews. (Some of the sources, however, refer to him as merely secretary to the embassy.) His duties, though honorific, were not exacting. Nevertheless, he found himself fully occupied with non-diplomatic work, since one of his brothers pursued him with his claim. Notwithstanding the potentialities of diplomatic immunity, evasive action was clearly indicated.

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It is strange nowadays to think of a Jew retiring for solitude to the Jewish suburb of Willesden (London’s Bronx), but that is what Joseph now did, taking with him a glittering store of jewelry and five thousand pounds in East Indian bonds. The nights he spent in a barn, or in any other place where he could obtain shelter; during the days he wandered about the woods which then diversified the landscape, availing himself of the opportunity to hide his bonds in a hollow tree, so cunningly chosen that he was never able to find it again.

It was all highly curious, all the more so since, according to the papers, the Turkish ambassador had recently been robbed. So the villagers, with the assistance of the parish constable, tied Joseph up in a stable and sent to inform the authorities at the Whitehall. The Home Secretary was at this time the Duke of Portland, whose brother, Lord William Bentinck, had met Sumbel on the Continent and had entertained him in London, where he had been introduced to the. duke. On hearing the description of the curious person who had been arrested, the latter guessed that it might be the missing Sumbel, and interviewed him personally. But the other now took it into his head to refuse to speak, either in deference to some private vow or because he thought that this might benefit his case. For three months, accordingly, he maintained complete silence, making all essential communications only in writing. However, his secret was out, and he was now arrested for debt at his brother’s suit and ultimately, when he refused to plead or to utter a word (except to call the proprietor of the lock-up house “one damned rascal”), consigned to the Fleet Prison for contempt of court.

Beckey Wells saw him come in, with a train of Moorish servants, gorgeously appareled, for all the world like an Eastern potentate. His magnificence attracted her attention; her physical opulence attracted his; and it was not long before they became acquainted. When one of her admirers vaguely talked of paying off her debt, he was so reluctant to lose her that he proposed marriage: and, as a preliminary, she became converted in due form to Judaism, taking a ritual bath in the mikvah and adopting the name Leah. She apparently had some vague idea that the Mosaic law would make her remarriage legal if by some chance her first husband, Wells, were still alive. But she certainly made a lively pretense at conviction, to judge from the following letter, which appeared at this time in the Morning Post and Gazeteer:—

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Sir:—In your paper of Thursday last, it was said, “Mrs. Wells was always an odd genius, and her becoming a Jewess greatly gratifies her passion for eccentricity.”

In answer to this, I beg the favor to insert in your paper, that it is not any passion for eccentricity that has induced me to embrace the Israelitish religion—it is studying and examining, with great care and attention, the Old Testament, that has influenced my conduct. Excuse me for giving you the trouble, but I beg you will insert the following passage from that book:—

“Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all the languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of a Jew, saying, we will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”—Zachariah, chap. viii. verse 23.

By giving the above a place, you will much oblige,

Your humble servant,

Leah Sumbel
(late Mary Wells)

October 20, 1797.

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It had been a grand wedding by all accounts. It took place in the Fleet Prison, apparently in the early autumn of 1797, immediately before the Feast of Tabernacles. The bridegroom was richly dressed in white satin and wore a splendid turban with a white feather; his brother was similarly appareled, only in pink. A quorum of Jews (unkind gossip said they were old-clothesmen wearing their normal habiliments) was easily gathered for the ceremony. For the subsequent festivities, which continued throughout the week, four rooms were engaged and brilliantly illuminated, the lustre in the middle of the long gallery costing twenty-five pounds. All the genteel prisoners were invited to join the happy couple, the poor being provided for elsewhere. All told, the expenses came to some five hundred pounds. Clearly, a debtor’s prison had its compensations. Nevertheless, Beckey had experienced this long enough, and prevailed on her husband to settle up with his brother, at the cost of twenty thousand pounds, and regain his liberty.

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He now entered upon a brief spell of “fashionable” life. He took a house in Orchard Street, Portman Square, and not finding this sufficiently magnificent, then moved to 79 Pall Mall, next door to the Duke of Gloucester. He mixed in aristocratic circles; he displayed his wife at the theater; as Moorish representative, he represented the sultan, with a train of turbaned attendants bearing the Moroccan standard, when the king went to return thanks at St. Paul’s. (Later on, in a fit of economy, he dismissed them, and they found their exotic liveries extremely useful when they set up as rhubarb peddlers about the London streets—a characteristic Jewish occupation at this time.)

But he was Moroccan not only by birth, but also by taste, especially in his attitude to women, which savored more of the harem than of Pall Mall. So, at least, Beckey alleged; though it must be admitted that her previous history, even as recorded by herself, certainly justified a certain degree of marital suspicion and precaution. He took her with him to the theater but, greatly to her disappointment, showed himself highly suspicious when she looked anywhere but on the stage, and sometimes handled her roughly when they returned. He did not allow her to have any money in her pocket, for fear she would run away. He gave her magnificent diamonds and jewelry to wear on state days and bonfire nights, but they were taken from her as soon as she got home and locked up in a strong box. In fact, albeit worth according to report some half a million pounds sterling, he was in some ways (in the opinion of his wife, accustomed to spend whatever she could get into her hands) extraordinarily mean, whatever curious manifestations of Oriental luxury were combined with this parsimony.

There were other complications as well, mainly due, it appears, to his outbursts of temper, from which she was not the only sufferer. Not long after their marriage, for example, he perpetrated a violent assault on some apparently innocuous individual, as a result of which the bridal couple were compelled to leave Pall Mall and live for a time in hiding, as lodgers in a humble cottage somewhere in Middlesex. Thence, he took her to visit her (and Topham’s) children in Yorkshire. Much to her chagrin they traveled in a one-horse chaise without any servants; though every night at the inn he unpacked his trunks and sat cross-legged in all the colorful magnificence of his Moorish garb.

After a time he found the inconvenience of his incognito too great, returned to town, settled with the person he had assaulted, and began to journey again, though in the same fashion as before. However, they quarreled violently on the way (Beckey goes into much petty detail) and she continued the trip alone. On her way home she rejoined her tyrant and had a succession of uninspiring quarrels with him until they got back to London, where he spitefully introduced her as his wife to a lady to whom he had recently proposed marriage.

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At this stage, Sumbel had the idea of returning to Morocco and filling the same position under the new sultan, whom he had known as a boy, that his father had held under the former ruler. He accordingly laid out a large sum of money in presents to smooth his path, including twenty thousand pounds’ worth of brass cannon; and he held rehearsals for the purpose, in Oriental garb, in his mansion in Pall Mall. Since Beckey was not anxious to accompany him, on one occasion he did his best to trepan her on a ship lying in the Thames, but the captain let out what was intended, and she got ashore in time. Later on, she thought that he wanted to shoot her, escaped from the house, and had him brought before the magistrates at Bow Street, who bound him over to keep the peace.

They now separated for good, notwithstanding the charming billets doux which he sent her from time to time:—

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My dear,

If you are libre, come to see me, and prove me that you are, and what you are, and you can return to Gild-Hall immediately, to satisfy your curiosity, or to have complasance or politnesse for others.—“Come only to tell me that.”

I am your friend for ever ever.

Dear Madam,
Yours truly,
J. Sumbel

Freydy, at most 3 ocklok.

Mrs. Wells.

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Or, in a more affectionate mood:—

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My dear,

Pray don’t tortree my heart: come as quike as you can, and prove me that you have the true love for me. I will prove you that mine is constant, and will do for you everything to make you happy. Come, my dear angel! come kisse your faithful and loving friend and husband,

J. Sumbel

I have many thing to tell you.

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These and others like them (which she piously preserved, and subsequently published) were of no effect; and Sumbel decided that he had made a mistake. So did Beckey. Notwithstanding the eloquent protestations of religious conviction which she had made so recently, she now lost no opportunity to demonstrate her distaste for Judaism, if only to annoy her husband.

He on his side advertised in the newspapers that she was not his wife, and that he would not pay any debts she might contract: his reason being, according to the press, “first, that the ceremony was not a legal Jewish marriage; secondly, that Mrs. Wells was not capable of becoming a Jewess, without which no marriage could take place; and thirdly that she has broken the sabbath and the holy feast, by running away from Mr. Sumbel in a post-chaise, and eating forbidden fruit—namely, pork griskin and rabbits.” She rejoins with a counter-advertisement begging leave only to observe “that, having been unfortunately married to the said Joseph Sumbel, from his wicked and inhuman treatment, I have been obliged to swear the peace against him, and am proceeding to obtain a divorce and maintenance”: which was followed up by a note published on Boxing Day 1798 wherein she “presents her best compliments to the Editor, begs leave to inform him she set off in a post-chaise from Stamford, with her mother and youngest child as her life was in danger at that time from Mr. Sumbel’s violence of temper. Mr. and Mrs. Sumbel had ten witnesses to their marriage, and Mrs. Sumbel went through every ceremony to make her a Jewess—was at the bath before witnesses, &c. Mr. Sumbel himself eats pork, which shocked Mrs. Sumbel very much.”

He had however more direct means of annoyance. When his landlord at Pall Mall sued him for rent, he pleaded that the house had been taken in Beckey’s name, and that he was no longer responsible for her debts. A suit began in the King’s Bench, in the course of which his counsel. Thomas Erskine, pleaded that he was not a Jew but a Moslem, and that accordingly the marriage in the Fleet Prison had no validity. The following is an excerpt from the record of the proceedings:

Mr. Erskine here observed, that his learned friend had misrepresented his client, when he said he was a Jew, for that he was a Mahometan.

Mr. Garrow begged pardon. He hoped Mr. S. would pardon the mistake. He was naturally led to suppose he was a Jew, from some very serious feuds that Mr. and Mrs. S. had had about eating pork; and he observed that one of the items in the plaintiff’s bill was for a pot de chambre which Mr. S. had thrown at Beckey’s head. . . .

Mr. Erskine, on the part of the defendant, said he had the authority of the Duke of Portland . . . for saying, that the defendant was a man of rank and dignity in his own country. He was late envoy and secretary of state of the Emperor of Morocco, and son of his prime-minister. . . . There was not the least pretence to say there was a marriage between him and Mrs. Wells.

Lord Kenyon [Chief Justice] said he should certainly take them to be husband and wife. They lived there together, she went by his name, and she probably obtained credit under the idea of being his wife, and that he was liable to pay her debts. If what was impossible could be done, this gentleman was certainly in the hands of a counsel who would achieve impossibilities.

Mr. Sumbel rose and began to speak; the first sentence of which was, that ‘he had never been married to this woman.’

Lord Kenyon said, ‘So much the worse—you have been so much the more wicked. This case is as clear as the sun.’

The verdict was accordingly for the plaintiff. It was no large sum that was in dispute—only twenty-six pounds. But Mr. Sumbel was determined not to pay and, somewhat disingenuously procuring a passport from his friend the Duke of Portland, managed to leave the country.

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This was the end of the Jewish interlude of Beckey’s life. She continued to call herself Mrs. Sumbel, and under that name returned to the stage and published her memoirs in 1811. But she was done with Judaism for good, and that work contains some highly unpleasant animadversions upon it. “I am now once more received into the bosom of Christianity as a repentant sinner,” she wrote, “fully confident, as such, that the Almighty will pardon my transgressions.” Nevertheless she did not approve of sectarianism. “As religion is now my greatest comfort, I go to the different places of worship of God,” she writes; once in fact being edified by a Negro preacher who, as she tells us, summed up his teaching in the immortal phrase (surely, its first appearance in literature?): “Softly, softly, brethren, and you’ll catch a monkey.”

In other respects, her subsequent career was of a piece with the earlier stages—interspersed with imprisonment for debt, evanescent love affairs, and quarrels with her brother-in-law, Emanuel Samuel, who had now returned temporarily to England and at one time made her a small allowance. At intervals she again set out for remote parts of the country in search of her children, who, egged on by their father, Mr. Topham, refused to know her, though one of them at least filially followed her example in matters of morality. During the course of one of these trips, according to her own account, she actually started to walk back to London from Portobello, arriving in Newcastle (whence she took a boat) in only four and a half days—a really remarkable feat whether of pedestrianism or imagination.

Her stage life had been ruined by her irregularities, and she was now best known for her impersonations of more successful fellow actresses, which she gave in fashionable houses. But she scandalized public opinion by continuing to perform even in Lent, in consequence of which the Bishop of London thought it his duty to intervene.

In 1811, she published her memoirs—now one of the rarest works of theatrical autobiography—probably in the hope of raising a little money from blackmail as well as from sales (she gave lengthy details about various persons who had failed to subscribe for copies of the work). In it, she described interminably all her long sequence of quarrels with her lover, her husband, her brother-in-law, and in the end even her children, all of whom had in her opinion treated her shamefully. The work was introduced by a commendatory preface, written by an anonymous friend, and concluded with a personal letter from Elisabeth Villa Real Gooch, another borderline character of Anglo-Jewish history—the daughter of the beautiful Catherine Villareal, the heroine of a famous breach of promise suit of the early part of the 18th century, and herself author of a curious autobiography.

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As for her former husband, when he left England, he took up his residence in Altona (Hamburg) where he built a street that was called after him. Disappointed with his experience of matrimony, he now went in for fishing, but not being very fond of the open air, carried out his pastime in a tank which he had built in his house. Here he would sit happily for days on end angling, afterwards punishing any recalcitrant fishes by having the water let out and clubbing them. A Joseph Haim Sumbel died at Altona in November 1804, and is buried in the local Portuguese Jewish cemetery—certainly the same person. Until very recently, there existed in this place a Klaus, or Talmudical school, founded in the middle of the 19th century by one Abraham Sumbal, “son of a Moroccan minister.” Clearly, he was the product of Joseph Haim Sumbel’s matrimonial involutions, either anterior or posterior to his marriage with Beckey Wells.

How she ended her days we do not know. She is referred to in 1826 as dead, but nothing or virtually nothing is known of her life for about fifteen years before this. Apparently she took to drink in the end, and thus completed her mental ruin; and it is likely enough that she died in a madhouse, for which she obviously had not inconsiderable personal as well as hereditary qualification. In this respect at least, Sumbel and she were not ill assorted.

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¹ There is little about Samuel Sumbal in the current works of reference, and even in the monographs on North African Jewry. But he is mentioned by Moses Mendelssohn as the then prime minister of the Emperor of Morocco in a footnote in his Rettung der Juden, and there are adequate materials for reconstructing his biography in Sefarad, IX, pp. 428-9; Hebrew Union College Annual, VIII-IX, p. 485; B. Meakin, The Moors; and the standard works on Franco-Moroccan relations in the 18th century. His brother, Meir Sumbal, interpreter to the French consulate, was also a figure of importance.