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His line is genteel comedy — his father's coal and potato. He does Alfred Highflier in the last piece, and very well he'll do it — at the price.
Fred Barnard
1876
Vignette 14 cm x 10.6 cm.
Sketches by Boz
Three-quarter-page illustration for "Scenes," Ch. 11, in Dickens's Sketches by Boz, the thirteenth volume of the Household Edition
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
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A quarter before eight — there will be a full house to-night — six parties in the boxes, already; four little boys and a woman in the pit; and two fiddles and a flute in the orchestra, who have got through five overtures since seven o'clock (the hour fixed for the commencement of the performances), and have just begun the sixth. There will be plenty of it, though, when it does begin, for there is enough in the bill to last six hours at least.
That gentleman in the white hat and checked shirt, brown coat and brass buttons, lounging behind the stage-box on the O. P. side, is Mr. Horatio St. Julien, alias Jem Larkins. His line is genteel comedy — his father’s, coal and potato. He does Alfred Highflier in the last piece, and very well he'll do it — at the price. The party of gentlemen in the opposite box, to whom he has just nodded, are friends and supporters of Mr. Beverley (otherwise Loggins), the Macbeth of the night. You observe their attempts to appear easy and gentlemanly, each member of the party, with his feet cocked upon the cushion in front of the box! They let them do these things here, upon the same humane principle which permits poor people's children to knock double knocks at the door of an empty house — because they can't do it anywhere else. The two stout men in the centre box, with an opera-glass ostentatiously placed before them, are friends of the proprietor — opulent country managers, as he confidentially informs every individual among the crew behind the curtain — opulent country managers looking out for recruits; a representation which Mr. Nathan, the dresser, who is in the manager’s interest, and has just arrived with the costumes, offers to confirm upon oath if required — corroborative evidence, however, is quite unnecessary, for the gulls believe it at once. — "Private Theatres," p. 58.
Until 1875 theatres were the chief form of entertainment for Londoners of all social classes, and Dickens as a young man knew the theatres of The City (central London) extremely well, even agreeing (in the months prior to his bursting on the literary scene as "Boz") to an audition which he was fortuitously compelled to cancel because of a head cold. That was in March 1832, when the twenty-year-old law clerk, hoping to begin a career on the stage, had written to George Bartley, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre.
The article entitled "Private Theatres" originally appeared as "Sketches of London No. 19" in The Evening Chronicle on 11 August 1835, under the pseudonym "Boz," which Dickens had been using in that journal since August 1834.
Satirical account of the foolishly vain and incompetent amateurs who pay to act major roles in small neighbourhood theatres in London; takes the reader behind the scenes before a performance of Macbeth in such a theatre. — The Dickens Index, p. 207.
Fred Barnard's large-scale wood-engraving for the thirteenth volume of the Household Edition, Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People shows the illustrator's interest in studying minor Dickens characters, and in fact does not relate to the amateur performance of the Shakespeare tragedy which George Cruikshank graphed in his copper engraving Private Theatres, but rather to the popular comic role of Alfred Highflier in one of the sentimental comedies and domestic farces churned out by hack dramatist Thomas Morton (1764-1838) as fillers in an evening's playbill, A Roland for an Oliver (a farce in two acts, 1819). Later, on his first American tour in May 1842, as Barnard was probably aware from reading The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, Dickens would enact the role himself in an amateur production staged by the ladies and members of the British garrison at the Queen's Theatre (Montreal). The farce had been produced by a professional company at Covent Garden in May 1838, so that its significance for Dickens was not merely sentimental but topical when took the role of the leading comedian in the play. The article may well be based on Dickens's recollections of nights out at the theatre (this one near the south side of Waterloo Bridge) with a fellow theatre-loving law-clerk at Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, named Potter, who had actually paid to act in a cheap theatre on Catherine Street, near the Strand. Macbeth in Caledonian costume had become popular after William Macready's mounting a Drury Lane production in 1827 with considerable attention to appropriate costuming.
Although the vogue for private theatres in London lasted about twenty years (1770-1790), such minor theatres continued to operate well into the nineteenth century, and Dickens opened his own private stage (reconfiguring his children's nursery at great expense) in for his amateur production of the melodrama The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House in January 1857.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. "Private Theatres," Chapter 13 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1836; rpt., 1890. Pp. 88-92.
Dickens, Charles."Private Theatres," Chapter 13 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. vol. 13, p. 56-59.
Dickens, Charles. "Private Theatres," Chapter 13 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-Day People. Ed. J. A. Hammerton. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 1, p. 112-118.
Dickens, Charles, and Fred Barnard. The Dickens Souvenir Book. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912.
Hartnoll, Phyllis. The Oxford Concise Companion to the Theatre. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1972.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
Last modified 10 April 2017