Here are a number of photos and illustrations of Fanny and Stella which are included in the book.
29th April 1870: An excited crowd looks on as Ernest Boulton and
Frederick Park in full drag leave Bow Street Magistrates’ Court
the morning after their arrest at the Strand Theatre.
‘And such a stock of togs was there.’
The police raid Fanny and Stella’s secret dressing-rooms in
Wakefield Street and confiscate their entire drag wardrobe.
Stella Boulton, ‘the most wonderful impersonator of female character ever
before the public’ with ‘the most perfect soprano voice’,
photographed in Scarborough in October, 1868.
‘Rose of the Garden, blushing and gay’
The captivating Stella Boulton dressed as a man.
Dressed in silk and suitably padded, bewigged and with a very
generous application of paint, Fanny made a handsome woman.
Fanny (left) – ‘a gabbling, good-natured, prattling, gossiping, charming
young man’, photographed with an unknown gentleman
in Chelmsford in 1868.
Fanny, with her ‘sterner features’, had a natural bent for playing
domineering duchesses and dowagers of a certain age.
A love triangle: Fanny (standing) and Stella (front) with
Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton.
Stella and Fanny dressed in character in the sort of drawing-room
entertainment they toured to small country houses and market-town assembly rooms.
Stella and Charles Pavitt on tour in Essex in 1869.
The shocking case of ‘The Female Personators’ was
front-page news all over the country.
The Comical Countess.
Carlotta Gibbings.
Stella, now blonde, in New York circa 1875, in a portrait by the
celebrity photographer Napoleon Sarony.
Stella as a shepherdess of the golden age, circa 1880.
Sisters. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder. Sisters for better or for worse:
Stella rests her head on her beloved Fanny’s breast.
