13 - Taking a Break

Summary

Ill and conscious that he was growing older, Aldridge decided to take steps to ensure that his two families would be provided for in case he happened to die in the next few years. He had been earning a great deal of money on his tours, and he wanted to find a good investment to safeguard the wealth he had accumulated. His wife, Margaret, and son Ira Daniel had been living at Wellington Lodge, 4 Wellington Road, in the Kentish Town area of London since 1859, and according to the Post Office London Directory for 1862, they were still there at least three years later. Meanwhile, Amanda Brandt, who had been living at 9 Park Road in Camden Town where her first child, Irene Luranah Pauline, was born in 1860, had moved to 13 Taunton Place in the Marylebone area by the time her second child, Frederick Olof Ira, was born a year and a half later. Aldridge had returned to London only briefly in the spring of 1861, so it is unlikely that he would have had sufficient leisure at that time to move Margaret and Ira Daniel to a new residence in a different part of London. Besides, the house he later chose for them was not yet ready for occupation before he left for Moscow on his sixth Continental tour. An article in a suburban paper had announced “Improvements in Upper Norwood,” a growing community near Crystal Palace in south London: “Some handsome private residences are springing up along Central-hill, towards Lower Norwood, and others are being completed in the Belvedere-road, while in the Hamlet-road five or more of tasteful elevation, and of much convenience for large families, are well nigh finished and ready for occupation this spring.” It was there, on Hamlet Road, an address suitable for a Shakespearean actor, that Aldridge elected to place his first family. This may have been an additional reason for cutting his latest Continental tour short. He wanted to get them settled there at Luranah Villa, the large house he named after his mother, before he left on another tour.