See Francis Phippen, Authentic Memoirs of Edmund Kean (1814); B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), The Life of Edmund Kean (1835); F. W. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean (1869); J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean (1888); Edward Stirling, Old Drury Lane (1887).
His son, Charles John Kean (1811-1868), was born at Waterford, Ireland, on the 18th of January 1811. After preparatory education at Worplesdon and at Greenford, near Harrow, he was sent to Eton College, where he remained three years. In 1827 he was offered a cadetship in the East India Company’s service, which he was prepared to accept if his father would settle an income of £400 on his mother. The elder Kean refused to do this, and his son determined to become an actor. He made his first appearance at Drury Lane on the 1st of October 1827 as Norval in Home’s Douglas, but his continued failure to achieve popularity led him to leave London in the spring of 1828 for the provinces. At Glasgow, on the 1st of October in this year, father and son acted together in Arnold Payne’s Brutus, the elder Kean in the title-part and his son as Titus. After a visit to America in 1830, where he was received with much favour, he appeared in 1833 at Covent Garden as Sir Edmund Mortimer in Colman’s The Iron Chest, but his success was not pronounced enough to encourage him to remain in London, especially as he had already won a high position in the provinces. In January 1838, however, he returned to Drury Lane, and played Hamlet with a success which gave him a place among the principal tragedians of his time. He was married to the actress Ellen Tree (1805-1880) on the 29th of January 1842, and paid a second visit to America with her from 1845 to 1847. Returning to England, he entered on a successful engagement at the Haymarket, and in 1850, with Robert Keeley, became lessee of the Princess Theatre. The most noteworthy feature of his management was a series of gorgeous Shakespearian revivals. Charles Kean was not a great tragic actor. He did all that could be done by the persevering cultivation of his powers, and in many ways manifested the possession of high intelligence and refined taste, but his defects of person and voice made it impossible for him to give a representation at all adequate of the varying and subtle emotions of pure tragedy. But in melodramatic parts such as the king in Boucicault’s adaptation of Casimir Delavigne’s Louis XI., and Louis and Fabian dei Franchi in Boucicault’s adaptation of Dumas’s The Corsican Brothers, his success was complete. From his “tour round the world” Kean returned in 1866 in broken health, and died in London on the 22nd of January 1868.
See The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, by John William Cole (1859).
[1] This date is apparently settled by a letter from Kean in 1829, to Dr Gibson (see Rothesay Express for the 28th of June 1893, where the letter is printed and vouched for), inviting him to dinner on the 17th of March to celebrate Kean’s birthday; various other dates have been given in books of reference, the 4th of November having been formerly accepted by this Encyclopaedia.
KEANE, JOHN JOSEPH (1839- ), American Roman Catholic archbishop, was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, Ireland, on the 12th of September 1839. His family settled in America when he was seven years old. He was educated at Saint Charles’s College, Ellicott City, Maryland, and at Saint Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, and in 1866 was ordained a priest and made curate of St Patrick’s, Washington, D.C. On the 25th of August 1878 he was consecrated Bishop of Richmond, to succeed James Gibbons, and he had established the Confraternity of the Holy Ghost in that diocese, and founded schools and churches for negroes before his appointment as rector of the Catholic University, Washington, D.C., in 1886, and his appointment in 1888 to the see of Ajasso. He did much to upbuild the Catholic University, but his democratic and liberal policy made him enemies at Rome, whence there came in 1896 a request for his resignation of the rectorate, and where he spent the years 1897-1900 as canon of St John Lateran, assistant bishop at the pontifical throne, and counsellor to the Propaganda. In 1900 he was consecrated archbishop of Dubuque, Iowa. He took a prominent part in the Catholic Young Men’s National Union and in the Total Abstinence Union of North America; and was in general charge of the Catholic delegation to the World’s Parliament of Religions held at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. He lectured widely on temperance, education and American institutions, and in 1890 was Dudleian lecturer at Harvard University.
A selection from his writings and addresses was edited by Maurice Francis Egan under the title Onward and Upward: A Year Book (Baltimore, 1902).
KEARNEY, a city and the county-seat of Buffalo county, Nebraska, U.S.A., about 130 m. W. of Lincoln. Pop. (1890), 8074; (1900), 5634 (650 foreign-born); (1910), 6202. It is on the main overland line of the Union Pacific, and on a branch of the Burlington & Missouri River railroad. The city is situated in the broad, flat bottom-lands a short distance N. of the Platte River. Lake Kearney, in the city, has an area of 40 acres. The surrounding region is rich farming land, devoted especially to the growing of alfalfa and Indian corn. At Kearney are a State Industrial School for boys, a State Normal School, the Kearney Military Academy, and a Carnegie library. Good water-power is provided by a canal from the Platte River about 17 m. above Kearney, and the city’s manufactures include foundry and machine-shop products, flour and bricks. Kearney Junction, as Kearney was called from 1872 to 1875, was settled a year before the two railways actually formed their junction here, where the city was planned. Kearney became a town in 1873, a city of the second class and the county seat in 1874, and a city of the first class in 1901. It is to be distinguished from an older and once famous prairie city, popularly known as “Dobey Town” (i.e. Adobe), founded in the early ’fifties on the edge of the reservation of old Fort Kearney (removed in 1848 from Nebraska City), in Kearney county, on the S. shore of the Platte about 6 m. S.E. of the present Kearney; here in 1861 the post office of Kearney City was established. In the days of the prairie freighting caravans Dobey Town was one of the most important towns between Independence, Missouri, and the Pacific coast, and it had a rough, wild, picturesque history; but it lost its immense freighting interests after the Union Pacific had been extended through it in 1866. The site of Dobey Town, together with the Fort, was abandoned in 1871. Fort Kearney and the city too were named in honour of General Stephen W. Kearny, and the name was at first correctly spelt without a second “e.”