How a brief, legally invalid 1853 marriage connected an Essex tailor’s daughter to one of Charles Dickens’s earliest stage adapters — and, through remarriage, to two generations of pioneering women journalists.
In March 1853, at St Pancras Church in London, 22-year-old Mary Ann Darby married Edward Stirling Lambert, a prolific playwright and theatre manager. What she may not have realised at the time — or only discovered later — was that the marriage was bigamous. Edward’s first wife, the actress Mary Ann Hehl (known on stage as Fanny Clifton or Mrs Stirling), was still very much alive. Their 1832 marriage had never been dissolved.
This single, legally void union sits at the heart of a remarkable family thread that stretches from respectable Essex tradespeople, through the chaotic world of mid-Victorian minor theatres and Dickens adaptations, to the pioneering female journalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Darby Family’s Roots in Essex
The story begins with a hatter, William Darby, who built a thriving business on the High Street in Chelmsford — in a building that still stands today. On 16 June 1795, he married Sarah Drake, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Maldon, a busy trading port on the Blackwater estuary a few miles east of Chelmsford.
William was a pillar of local society: a church warden and long-standing member of the Good Fellowship Freemasons’ Lodge. The couple had ten children, the youngest born in the same year as William’s untimely death in 1810. Sarah’s father had died in 1805, leaving a substantial bequest that helped the family weather the difficult years that followed.
Among their children, eldest daughter Sarah married East India Company sea captain William Ticehurst (the subject of a future blog post). Another daughter, Elizabeth, married schoolmaster Thomas Ward of Olney — a story I’ve explored in a previous post. But it is the youngest son, Rowland Wimburn Darby, who carries this particular thread forward.
Rowland met his future wife, Mary Ann Lovell, during visits to his sister and brother-in-law in Olney while serving his tailoring apprenticeship. The couple married on 21 January 1830 at St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, London. By 1832, Rowland was trading as a tailor at 13a Red Lion Square, Holborn, where the family lived with their four young children at the time of the 1841 census. By 1851 they had moved to St Luke’s, Chelsea, where Rowland continued working until his death in 1854.
Rowland and Mary Ann’s daughter Mary Ann Darby appears in the 1851 census, aged 21 and working as a dressmaker, still living in her father’s household. Two years later she married Edward Stirling Lambert. How they met remains unknown — perhaps she was swept up by his theatrical charm at a performance at the Adelphi Theatre. Whatever the spark, the romance moved quickly, and the proposal was accepted. The marriage itself, however, proved short-lived.
Edward Stirling Lambert (1809–1894): Playwright, Adapter, and Theatre Manager
Edward Stirling Lambert — professionally known as Edward Stirling — was one of the most prolific dramatists of the 1830s–1860s. Born in Thame, Oxfordshire, he started as a bank clerk before embracing the stage. He wrote or adapted nearly 200 plays, burlettas, farces, and melodramas, often rushing unauthorised versions of popular novels onto the boards within days or weeks of publication.
He is particularly remembered for his rapid stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s works. A striking survival is the playbill for his version of A Christmas Carol, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Adelphi, on 11 March 1844 — only weeks after Dickens’s novella had completed its serial run and appeared in book form in December 1843.
The bill boldly claims it is “The Only Dramatic Version sanctioned by C. Dickens, Esq.” and credits “Dramatized and Produced by Mr. Edward Stirling.” Its language captures the exuberant theatrical style of the era: “roars of laughter,” “extraordinary effects,” and “completely successful.” It vividly illustrates how quickly Dickens’s stories were transformed into crowd-pleasing entertainments for London’s minor patent theatres.
Stirling later managed several venues, including a stint at Drury Lane, and in 1881 published the two-volume memoir Old Drury Lane: Fifty Years’ Recollections of Author, Actor, and Manager — a colourful insider’s account of Victorian theatrical life.
Edward’s Complicated Personal Life: Bigamy, Aliases, and Theatrical Households
Edward’s private life was every bit as irregular as his professional output was prolific. His 1832 marriage to actress Mary Ann Hehl ended in separation around 1838 but was never legally dissolved. Divorce was virtually inaccessible to most people at the time, so Edward formed subsequent relationships that were socially accepted in theatrical circles even though they were technically bigamous. Census returns also suggest he was increasingly drawn to progressively younger women as he aged.
One such partnership was with a young actress or “professional” performer named Charlotte (very likely Charlotte Lacey, born c.1825). In the 1851 census, Edward is recorded at 13 Sherbourne Street, Marylebone, living with “wife” Charlotte (aged 26, occupation “Professional”) and their ten-year-old daughter.
The daughter’s 1844 baptism at St Pancras is particularly telling: she is named Charlotte Elizabeth Stirling Lambert Lacey, with the father listed as “Edward Lacey” and the mother simply as “Charlotte.” Using the mother’s presumed surname as an alias was a common workaround to present the household as conventionally respectable.
The Journalistic Turn: From Theatrical Illegitimacy to Fleet Street
This daughter, Charlotte Lambert Lacy, married Joseph Alfred Humphry in Kensington in 1860. She died before 1881, possibly from complications following the birth of her second daughter in 1868. Joseph later remarried in 1881 to Charlotte Eliza Graham, who would become the celebrated journalist and etiquette writer known as “Madge” (C. E. Humphry).
Joseph and his first wife Charlotte Lambert Lacy had two daughters: Charlotte Ann (b. 1861) and Catherine Georgina (b. 1868). The younger girl appears as a granddaughter in Edward Stirling Lambert’s own 1871 and 1881 census households in Kensington.
Joseph’s second marriage produced Helen Pearl Humphry (born 1882, baptised at All Saints, St John’s Wood). Helen followed directly in her mother “Madge”’s footsteps, becoming a journalist from the age of 17. She later married editor George Jeffry Adam, reported from Paris during the First World War, and published the wartime memoir Paris Sees It Through. Mother and daughter represent a remarkable late-Victorian/Edwardian success story of professional women writers — an unexpected legacy that flowed, via remarriage, from Edward Stirling’s theatrical family circle.
Reflections
This family thread captures so much of Victorian England: rigid marriage laws that were sometimes circumvented through morally ambiguous arrangements; the vibrant, often chaotic world of the minor theatres where Dickens’s stories were dramatised almost overnight; and the gradual opening of new professional paths for women.
What began with an Essex hatter and a Bloomsbury tailor’s daughter ended, through coincidence and remarriage, in the pages of newspapers and etiquette manuals read across the British Empire. Family history research like this reminds us that the most fascinating stories are often hidden in census returns, parish registers, and faded playbills.