William Edward Love

Mr. Love as "Mr. Tranquilus Calm" in "The London Season," from a daguerreotype by Mayall. Photo: Rick Thiot, via Find A Grave.

London, February 8, 1856. A performer walks out for the three hundredth night running, in the same hall, doing the same impossible thing he'd been doing for thirty years: standing alone on a stage and filling it with other people. No partner. No painted wooden face on his knee. Just his own throat, doing the work of a dozen actors at once.^[1] That performer was William Edward Love, and by the time he was done, somebody had counted 2,406 London performances against his name.^[2] Pull up a chair. This one goes back further than almost anybody else in this archive.

A kid who could sound like anything

He was born in London on February 6, 1806, the son of a City merchant, and sent off to school at Harlow and then Nelson House Academy in Wimbledon.^[3] None of that schooling is what mattered. What mattered is that at twelve years old, sitting in class, the kid started imitating the noise of machinery. Then instruments. Then birds, animals, insects, anything that made a sound worth stealing.^[2][3] He spent his early twenties around London journalism, a day job with words in it, while the real talent kept building on the side.^[3] In 1826 he finally put it on a stage for a benefit performance called "The False Alarm." It went well enough that he never really stopped.^[3]

The Polyphonist takes the road

Here's the word he chose for himself, and it tells you everything: polyphonist. Many voices, one man.^[4] He toured England and France in 1827, and by 1828 he was on stage at the Fishamble Street Theatre in Dublin.^[3] In 1829 he introduced "The Peregrinations of a Polyphonist," in 1830 it was "Love in a Labyrinth" up in Scotland, and by 1833 he'd worked his way to an Oxford debut with a program called "Ignes Fatui."^[5][3] His first real London stand came in 1834 at the City of London Assembly Rooms, and by 1836 he was booked into St James's Theatre.^[3]

Now here's the part that separates Love from nearly every performer in this archive. He came up in the shadow of two giants, Charles Mathews and Alexandre Vattemare, and Ventriloquist Central's own history of the art places him squarely in their wake, performing "following the pattern set by Mathews & Vattemare."^[14] Everybody expected the next act to keep pushing what those two had started: bigger casts of characters, more props, more costume changes. Love did the opposite. According to the scholar Stephen Connor's analysis of the period, Love spurned, even scorned, the use of figures and properties altogether.^[6] No dummy. No puppet. The Dublin Morning Register tried to describe what was left once you take those crutches away, and they landed on a phrase I love: "phenomena...in the philosophy of sound."^[6][4] That's a fancy way of saying the man made you believe in people who weren't there, using nothing but air. What he actually did with that gift was recreate whole rooms out of thin air: a voice climbing out of a locked box, another one coming from behind a door, one more dropping down from a roof or drifting up a street, all in the same ten minutes.^[15] One of his routines survives in full, instructions and all, thanks to Project Gutenberg: "The Suffocated Victim," a bit built around an imaginary man trapped inside a cupboard, hollering to get out.^[15]

An American crossing

Love brought the act across the Atlantic from 1837 into 1839, playing New York's Vauxhall Gardens, the Park Theatre, and the American Museum before heading south.^[7] From August 1839 through January 1840 he was the principal attraction at the Philadelphia Museum, where the bill promised his imitations of animals, birds, and musical instruments to a city that had never seen anything like it.^[8] The Dictionary of National Biography stretches that American run out to 1840 and adds stops in the West Indies and South America before he sailed home.^[9] Either way, this was not a man who stayed in one country, or one hemisphere, once he'd found an audience.

The performer inside the performance

What did the act actually sound like? A period reviewer, quoted on Steven Connor's history of ventriloquism, tried to get it down on paper after catching Love at the Strand in 1843. In one evening the man produced an infant "puling in its mother's arms," then an infant laughing, then a merry old man and a cross old man, then "a blustering boatswain and a solemn Quaker," then a pair of lovers working through a whole conversation.^[10] The reviewer's verdict was that the performance amounted to "so numerous a dramatic corps, so perfect in their respective parts, so diversified in character," that the audience could barely believe one throat had produced the lot.^[10] Those are characters every bit as real as any dummy a later vent ever carved, built out of nothing but timing and breath, and gone the second the curtain came down.

He kept renaming the show as he went, because a working performer never lets the poster go stale: "Love in All Shapes," "Love's Labour Lost," "Love's Lucubrations," "A Voyage to Hamburg," "Love's Mirror," "Dinner at Five Precisely."^[5] One 1846 advertisement billed him under "Ventrilogism Extraordinary," opening with what it called a "Historical and Philosophical Lecture on the Occult Powers of the Human Voice" before he ever got to the entertainment proper.^[11] The man understood showmanship as well as he understood sound.

The memoirs

George Smith's "Memoirs and Anecdotes of Mr. Love the Polyphonist," an abridged edition of the 1831 original. Some of its anecdotes are considered publicity dressed up as biography, so treat the stories inside with a little salt, separate from the dated performance record.

Photo via Invaluable auction record

The playbill

A Mechanics' Institute broadside billing "Trip to Hamburgh" and "Dinner at Five Precisely" on the same card, exactly the kind of double-header program Love ran night after night on the road.

Photo via Potter & Potter Auctions

Three hundred nights running

By 1854 Love had his own room, the Upper Hall on Regent Street, running a show he called "The London Season."^[9] On February 8, 1856, he marked his three hundredth consecutive night there at the Regent Gallery, and by the reckoning on his own memorial, his London performances by then totaled 2,406.^[9][2] That is a career measured in a ledger, night after night after night, not in a handful of famous engagements. Whoever kept that count for him was keeping the truest record of what this job actually is: showing up, again, and doing the work.

It ended the way a lot of these stories end. In 1858 he suffered a permanent paralysis that took the act away from him for good, and the trade did what it has always done for one of its own: a benefit was organized for him at Sadler's Wells.^[9] He died on March 16, 1867, at 33 Arundel Street off the Strand in London,^[9] and the family buried him under a headstone that carries his name to this day alongside his wife Eliza and the rest of the Loves, as the surviving grave photograph shows.^[12]

What's left of him

An 1855 portrait of Love survives at high resolution, now held by the Wellcome Collection and licensed for anyone to use. The British Museum separately holds several prints of him, including work by the engraver Charles Baugniet.^[13] And in October 2023, a copy of his memoirs, pulled from the collection of the ventriloquism historian Edwin Dawes, crossed the block at Potter & Potter. It carried an estimate of $250 to $500. It sold for $1,200.^[6] Somebody in that room wanted the paper record of a man who worked without a single prop badly enough to pay it, more than a century and a half after he stopped performing.

The Love family grave. Photo: contributor "R," via Find A Grave.

Every other performer in this collection I've told you about built a partner. A dummy, a figure, something carved that sat on a knee and took half the bows. William Edward Love worked the harder version of this trade. He stood up there alone, with nothing to hand the joke off to, and made a whole cast of people appear out of thin air anyway. No wood, no partner, nobody else to split the bow with. Just one man's voice, carrying an entire cast by itself, for three decades and 2,406 nights, until his own body finally called the show.

Two thousand four hundred and six nights in London, and not a single wooden face on his knee to catch the blame when a line went flat. Some of us built whole careers on having somebody else to blink at. Mr. Love just had his own throat and the nerve to trust it.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy