La Belle Oceana

Meet dancer, actress and acrobat Oceana Italia Judah, the "Circus Star" cover girl of the March 15, 1885 edition of the New York Clipper - which was the predecessor of Variety.

She was the aunt of the Worrell Sisters, famous late-Victorian vaudeville performers, and the daughter of actress Sophia Judah who performed in California theaters during the Gold Rush. Oceana's other sister Ione was "a great spiritualistic medium," according to Thomas Alston Brown, writing in 1903 (when I track down Ione, I will write about her, as well as about the Worrell Sisters).

Oceana was born about 1835 and made her debut at age 11 in 1846, at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. Her New York debut was in 1863 at the New Bowery Theater.

She was also known as "La Belle Oceana" and appears to have branched out into acrobatics by the 1880s. A writer in Judy, Or the London Serio-Comic Journal magazine raved about her in 1884:

...all the pick of circus talent in the world, including OCEANA, a lady of surpassing beauty, engaged to appear on the slack wire. This great artiste, has, I learn, on the authority of a society journal, been the talk of all Europe.

He then quotes the "society journal":

...Artists have painted her hands, sculptors have modelled her feet, everyone has raved of her beauty, and finally SARAH BERNHARDT, it is said, intends in Theodora to juggle golden balls 'like Oceana.'

The society journal goes on to mention that the "late Czar" admired her greatly (he saw her in St Petersburg) and that the Shah of Persia, catching her show in Paris, was so impressed that he gave her the Order of the Sun.

But back in her native America, some critics were not quite as laudatory. A writer for Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes saw her in Paris and was distinctly underwhelmed. He wrote:

Madame Oceana, we fear, must have been disappointed at our coldness and lack of appreciation for her charms.

I look forward to writing more about Oceana and her mother and sisters in future posts.

The photograph of Oceana (circa 1865) is from Picture History, and the engraving is from the March 15, 1884 New York Clipper.

Tomorrow starts a week of All Hallows' Eve history and mystery in the Dime Museum, with the story of the Ghost of Melrose Hall...

SOURCES

Brown, Thomas Alston. A History of the New York Stage From the First Performance In 1732 to 1901 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1903), p. 4.

"Our Van," Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, Baily Bros., vol. 43 (Sept. 1884-Mar. 1885), p. 375.

"The Only Jones," Judy, Or the London Serio-comic Journal, Dec. 31, 1884, p. 314.

Sherman, Robert Lowery. Actors and Actresses (1951), p. 293.