The novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins began writing a melodrama called The Storm at the Lighthouse in September of 1854, finishing it in May of the following year.
His friend and mentor Charles Dickens staged the play at his own home, Tavistock House, on June 18, 1855, printing up playbills for a private performance that probably had no more than 25 people in the audience.
Collins himself acted in the play, as did Mark Lemon and Augustus Egg. Dickens played the role of the head light-keeper, Aaron, acting under the stage name of Mr. Crummles, a character of his own creation from Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens also roped his daughter and his sister-in-law into acting.
Taking place on a remote island in 1748, the play opens with two keepers of a lighthouse, Martin and Jacob, discussing the fact that storms have kept a provision boat from delivering food. They are thus in the process of dying from starvation. Martin, we learn, is engaged to Jacob’s daughter, Phoebe, though both are now despairing of the marriage ever taking place. Even more distraught is Martin’s father, Aaron, who laments his own uneasy conscience.
Years ago, a wealthy woman took shelter in Aaron’s home, but his servant Benjamin stabbed the woman. Rather than turning Benjamin in to the law, Aaron helped hide her body in a cave. The woman, he later learned, was so kind to everyone that she was known simply as The Lady Grace. Though her death is deemed an accident, Aaron can’t forgive himself for the role he played in her murder. Thinking his own death is near, he unburdens his conscience by telling the story of her demise to his son.
Miraculously, a boat then arrives, carrying not only provisions, but Martin’s beloved Phoebe. She feeds broth to the men to bring back their strength, but just as they are recuperating, a ship appears coming in from the sea, and clearly in distress. As the ship is wrecked, Phoebe reads out the name painted on its stern. To Aaron’s horror, the name of the ship is “The Lady Grace.” The curtain then falls, ending Act I.
In the second act, we learn that a female passenger was one of the people saved from The Lady Grace. Phoebe, sensing that something is wrong with Martin, decides that this mysterious woman might be able to uncover the secret that her beloved refuses to share with her. Aaron, however, now that he no longer fears death by starvation, denies the story he told Martin previously. Just then, the mysterious passenger appears… The Lady Grace!
It turns out that Lady Grace had not been murdered after all, but survived Benjamin’s attack and was rescued by sailors from the cave where the two men had stashed her limp body. She forgives Aaron, and Martin—relieved of the burden of his father’s secret guilt—goes off to marry Phoebe.
The play gave a chance for Dickens’s trusted sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, to appear as the all-forgiving Lady Grace. His daughter Mamie played Phoebe, while Collins (who was considerably younger than Dickens) played Martin.
It seems fitting that Dickens, who was haunted by his own past working in a blacking factory, should have played Aaron. His acting was reportedly top notch.
