Peg—her full first name, which nobody dreamed of using, was Margaret—was the daughter of an Irish bricklayer who had one point in common with certain modernists in that he was rabidly opposed to all doctors.
And the medical guild had in due time its revenge on the sacrilegious brick artist. For once, when Woffington fell ill, he fiercely refused to have a physician summoned. And he rapidly grew better. As her husband was convalescing, Mrs. Woffington sought to make assurance doubly certain by calling in a doctor. The pill juggler looked at the invalid and pronounced him out of danger. Next day Woffington died.
Peg was just learning to walk at the time of her lamented father's tilt with the cult of Æsculapius. She and her baby sister, Mary, at once set about helping to earn their own living, by toddling on either side of their mother when the widow hawked watercress through the streets, and shrilly piping in duet the virtues of her wares.
To Dublin, when Peg was seven, came one Madame Violante, with a troupe of tumblers and rope dancers. Peg was apprenticed to Madame Violante. But her term of service as a baby acrobat was short. Her employer had better use for her.
It was Madame Violante who originated the ever-since-popular custom of producing famous plays and operas, with child actors filling all the roles. Her "Liliputian Troupe" scored a big success in Dublin and the provinces. Much of this success was due to Peg, who almost invariably was cast for old-woman parts, and who "doubled in the brass" by doing quaint little step dances between the acts.
It was cruelly hard work for a growing child; nor was the early eighteenth-century theater the very best sort of nursery and moral training school for little girls. But apart from other and less creditable lessons acquired, she learned stage presence and practically every art and trick of the profession.
From the "Liliputian Troupe," Peg graduated into the more lucrative and equally moral pursuit of theater orange vender. In slack seasons, when no cargo of oranges chanced to have landed recently from the Americas, she acted, off and on; playing, at twelve, mature roles in provincial theater comedies, and exhibiting a rollicking humor that carried her audiences by assaut. At seventeen, she was playing—at seven dollars and fifty cents a week—Ophelia and other exacting parts.
Incidentally, on both sides of the footlight candles—as actress and as orange girl in the pit—she had long since made herself the toast of the Dublin beaux. She was pretty—though not strikingly so. She had a ready, and occasionally flaying, Irish wit. She had, too, the magic, if still undeveloped, fascination of the super-woman. As to her morals—they were the morals of any and every other girl of her environment and upbringing. She was quite as good as she knew how to be. There was not a grain of real vice in her whole cosmos.
But there was a blazing ambition; an ambition that was cramped and choked in the miserable, makeshift provincial playhouses. She burned to be a famous actress. There was no chance for her in Ireland. So she came to London.
It was a case of burning her bridges behind her. For she carried a worn purse that held seventeen shillings. And the not-overnew dress she wore was her sole wardrobe. These were her tangible assets. On this capital and on genius and pluck and ambition and good looks and the charm that was daily growing more and more irresistible, Peg relied to keep her going.