His play, Our American Cousin, was playing at Ford's Theatre when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. A rare boldly signed content autograph letter about playwright Tom Taylor, written by playwright F. C. Burnand, who was Tom Taylor's successor as Editor of Punch and part of the Gilbert and Sullivan circle. Dimensions seven by four and a half inches. Light wear otherwise fine. See Burnand, Tom Taylor, and the Booth family's extraordinary biographies below.
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From Wikipedia:
Tom Taylor (19 October 1817 – 12 July 1880) was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.
In addition to these vocations, Taylor began a theatre career and became best known as a playwright, with up to 100 plays staged during his career. Many were adaptations of French plays, but these and his original works cover a range from farce to melodrama. Most fell into neglect after Taylor's death, but Our American Cousin (1858), which achieved great success in the 19th century, remains famous as the piece that was being performed in the presence of Abraham Lincoln when he was assassinated in 1865.
Life and career
Early years
Taylor was born into a newly wealthy family at Bishopwearmouth, a suburb of Sunderland, in north-east England. He was the second son of Thomas Taylor (1769–1843) and his wife, Maria Josephina, née Arnold (1784–1858).[1] His father had begun as a labourer on a small farm in Cumberland and had risen to become co-owner of a flourishing brewery in Durham.[1] After attending the Grange School in Sunderland, and studying for two sessions at the University of Glasgow, Taylor became a student of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1837, was elected to a scholarship in 1838, and graduated with a BA in both classics and mathematics.[2][3] He was elected a fellow of the college in 1842 and received his MA degree the following year.[1]
Taylor left Cambridge in late 1844 and moved to London, where for the next two years he pursued three careers simultaneously. He was professor of English language and literature at University College, London, while at the same time studying to become a barrister, and beginning his life's work as a writer.[4] Taylor was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in November 1846. He resigned his university post, and practised on the northern legal circuit until he was appointed assistant secretary of the Board of Health in 1850.[5] On the reconstruction of the board in 1854 he was made secretary, and on its abolition in 1858 his services were transferred to a department of the Home Office, retiring on a pension in 1876.[4]
Writer
Taylor owed his fame and most of his income not to his academic, legal or government work, but to his writing. Soon after moving to London, he obtained remunerative work as a leader writer for the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News.[4] He was also art critic for The Times and The Graphic for many years.[4] He edited the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon (1853), the Autobiography and Correspondence of C. R. Leslie, R.A. (1860) and Pen Sketches from a Vanished Hand, selected from papers of Mortimer Collins, and wrote Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1865).[1] With his first contribution to Punch, on 19 October 1844, Taylor began a thirty-six year association with the magazine, which ended only with his death. During the 1840s he wrote on average three columns a month; in the 1850s and 1860s this output doubled. His biographer Craig Howes writes that Taylor's articles were generally humorous commentary or comic verses on politics, civic news, and the manners of the day.[1] In 1874 he succeeded Charles William Shirley Brooks as editor.[1]
Taylor also established himself as a playwright and eventually produced about 100 plays.[6] Between 1844 and 1846, the Lyceum Theatre staged at least seven of his plays, including extravanzas written with Albert Smith or Charles Kenney, and his first major success, the 1846 farce To Parents and Guardians. The Morning Post said of that piece, "The writing is admirable throughout – neat, natural and epigrammatic".[7] It was as a dramatist that Taylor made the most impression – his biographer in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) wrote that in writing plays Taylor found his true vocation. In thirty-five years he wrote more than seventy plays for the principal London theatres.[4]
A substantial portion of Taylor's prolific output consisted of adaptations from the French or collaborations with other playwrights, notably Charles Reade. Some of his plots were adapted from the novels of Charles Dickens or others. Many of Taylor's plays were extremely popular, such as Masks and Faces, an extravaganza written in collaboration with Reade, produced at the Haymarket Theatre in November 1852. It was followed by the almost equally successful To Oblige Benson (Olympic Theatre, 1854), an adaptation from a French vaudeville. Others mentioned by the DNB are Plot and Passion (1853), Still Waters Run Deep (1855) and The Ticket-of-Leave Man (based on Le Retour de Melun by Édouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus), a melodrama produced at the Olympic in 1863.[4] Taylor also wrote a series of historical dramas (many in blank verse), including The Fool’s Revenge (1869), an adaption of Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse (also adapted by Verdi as Rigoletto), 'Twixt Axe and Crown (1870), Jeanne d'arc (1871), Lady Clancarty (1874) and Anne Boleyn (1875). The last of these, produced at the Haymarket in 1875, was Taylor's penultimate piece and only complete failure.[1] In 1871 Taylor supplied the words to Arthur Sullivan's dramatic cantata, On Shore and Sea.[8]
Like his colleague W. S. Gilbert, Taylor believed that plays should be readable as well as actable; he followed Gilbert in having copies of his plays printed for public sale. Both authors did so at some risk, because it made matters easy for American pirates of their works in the days before international copyright protection. Taylor wrote, "I have no wish to screen myself from literary criticism behind the plea that my plays were meant to be acted. It seems to me that every drama submitted to the judgment of audiences should be prepared to encounter that of readers".[9]
Many of Taylor's plays were extremely popular,[6] and several survived into the 20th century, although most are largely forgotten today. His Our American Cousin (1858) is now remembered chiefly as the play Abraham Lincoln was attending when he was assassinated, but it was revived many times during the 19th century with great success. It became celebrated as a vehicle for the popular comic actor Edward Sothern, and after his death, his sons, Lytton and E. H. Sothern, took over the part in revivals.[10]
Personal life
Howes records that Taylor was described as "of middle height, bearded [with] a pugilistic jaw and eyes which glittered like steel". Known for his remarkable energy, he was a keen swimmer and rower, who rose daily at five or six and wrote for three hours before taking an hour's brisk walk from his house in Wandsworth to his Whitehall office.[1]
Some, like Ellen Terry, praised Taylor's kindness and generosity; others, including F. C. Burnand, found him obstinate and unforgiving.[1] Terry wrote of Taylor in her memoirs:
Terry's frequent stage partner, Henry Irving said that Taylor was an exception to the general rule that it was helpful, even though not essential, for a dramatist to be an actor to understand the techniques of stagecraft: "There is no dramatic author who more thoroughly understands his business".[12]
In 1855 Taylor married the composer, musician and artist Laura Wilson Barker (1819–1905).[13] She contributed music to at least one of his plays, an overture and entr'acte to Joan of Arc (1871),[14] and harmonisations to his translation Ballads and Songs of Brittany (1865).[15] There were two children: the artist John Wycliffe Taylor (1859–1925) and Laura Lucy Arnold Taylor (1863–1940).[16] Taylor and his family lived at 84 Lavender Sweep, Battersea, where they held Sunday musical soirees.[17] Celebrities who attended included Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Henry Irving, Charles Reade, Alfred Tennyson, Ellen Terry and William Makepeace Thackeray.[18]
Taylor died suddenly at his home in 1880 at the age of 62 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery.[1] After his death, his widow retired to Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, where she died on 22 May 1905.Sir Francis Cowley Burnand (29 November 1836 – 21 April 1917), usually known as F. C. Burnand, was an English comic writer and prolific playwright, best known today as the librettist of Arthur Sullivan's opera Cox and Box.
The son of a prosperous family, he was educated at Eton and Cambridge and was expected to follow a conventional career in the law or in the church, but he concluded that his vocation was the theatre. From his schooldays he had written comic plays, and from 1860 until the end of the 19th century, he produced a series of more than 200 Victorian burlesques, farces, pantomimes and other stage works. His early successes included the burlesques Ixion, or the Man at the Wheel (1863) and The Latest Edition of Black-Eyed Susan; or, the Little Bill that Was Taken Up (1866). Also in 1866, he adapted the popular farce Box and Cox as a comic opera, Cox and Box, with music by Sullivan. The piece became a popular favourite and was later frequently used by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as a curtain raiser; it remains regularly performed today.
By the 1870s, Burnand was generating a prodigious output of plays as well as comic pieces and illustrations for the humour magazine Punch. Among his 55-stage works during the decade was another frequently revived hit, Betsy (1879). For Punch, among other things, he wrote the popular column "Happy Thoughts", in which the narrator recorded the difficulties and distractions of everyday life. Also admired were his burlesques of other writers' works. Burnand was a contributor to Punch for 45 years and its editor from 1880 until 1906 and is credited with adding much to the popularity and prosperity of the magazine. His editorship of the original publication of The Diary of a Nobody by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith was a high point of his tenure in 1888–89. Many of his articles were collected and published in book form. His stage successes in the 1890s included his English-language versions of two Edmond Audran operettas, titled La Cigale and Miss Decima (both in 1891). His last works included collaborations on pantomimes of Cinderella (1905) and Aladdin (1909).
Known generally for his genial wit and good humour, Burnand was nevertheless intensely envious of his contemporary W. S. Gilbert but was unable to emulate his rival's success as a comic opera librettist. In other forms of theatre Burnand was outstandingly successful, with his works receiving London runs of up to 550 performances and extensive tours in the British provinces and the US. He published several humorous books and memoirs and was knighted in 1902 for his work on Punch.
The Booth family was an English American theatrical family of the 19th century. Its most famous and well known members were Edwin Booth, one of the leading actors of his day, and John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
The patriarch was Junius Brutus Booth, a London-born lawyer's son who eventually became an actor after he attended a production of Othello at the Covent Garden theatre. The prospects of fame, fortune, and freedom were very appealing to young Booth, and he displayed remarkable talent from an early age, deciding on a career in the theatre by the age of 17. He performed roles in several small theaters throughout England, and joined a tour of the Low Countries in 1814, returning the following year to make his London debut.
Booth abandoned his wife and their young son in 1821 and ran off to the United States with Mary Ann Holmes, a London flower girl. They settled on some 150 acres in Harford County near Baltimore and started a family; they had 10 children, six of whom survived to adulthood.[1][2]
Junius Sr. and Edwin toured in California during the Gold Rush.[citation needed] Edwin bought an interest in the Winter Garden Theatre at 667 Broadway in New York City together with his brother-in-law John Sleeper Clarke. The brothers John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Brutus, Jr. performed there in the play Julius Caesar at a benefit in 1864, the only time they were seen together on a stage, playing Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius, respectively.
- Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852) brought his mistress Mary Ann Holmes, who bore him 10 children, to the United States.
- He also wrote many letters in fits of drunken anger and madness to President Andrew Jackson threatening assassination. He requested that two prisoners who had been sentenced to death for piracy, named De Ruiz and De Soto, be pardoned, else: "I will cut your throat whilst you are sleeping." This letter would later be recanted by Junius, stating, "May god preserve General Jackson and this happy republic."[4]
- Junius Brutus Booth Jr. (1821–1883) was married to Agnes Booth. Junius Jr. never achieved the same fame as his brothers, but his third wife Agnes was popular.
- Their son Sydney Barton Booth (1877–1937) was an actor well into the era of modern film [5]
- Edwin Thomas Booth (1833–1893) came to be the foremost American Shakespearean actor of his day. He founded The Players, a New York City actors' club which continues to the present day.
- Edwin's grandson Edwin Booth Grossman was a painter of some note.
- Asia Frigga Booth (1835–1888) married John Sleeper Clarke, an actor/comedian who was briefly imprisoned in the aftermath of the assassination. They then emigrated to Britain, where he became a successful theatre manager.
- John Wilkes Booth (1838–1865) was a popular young star in less serious fare than his brothers.
- A Confederate sympathizer during the American Civil War, during a play attended by Abraham Lincoln, Booth took advantage of his access to the theatre to invade the President's box and assassinate the President. He was killed 12 days later by Union soldier Boston Corbett.
Toole was born in London, the younger son of James Toole and his wife, Elizabeth. His father was a messenger for the East India Company and for some years an usher at the Old Bailey, who for many years in the 1840s acted as toastmaster in the City of London.[1][2]
He was educated at the City of London School from 1841–45, and started work as a clerk in a wine merchant's office. In 1854, Toole married Susan Hale (née Caslake), a widow five years older than he. They had a son, Frank Lawrence, and a daughter, Florence Mabel, but both children died in their 20s.[3]
Early career
Toole began his acting career by training as an amateur with the City Histrionic Club, beginning in 1850 and by performing in other amateur theatricals and in comic sketches. He earned good notices, particularly as Jacob Earwig in Boots at the Swan, and soon met Charles Dickens, who had heard of him and came to see him act.[4] His last amateur role was as Simmons in The Spitalfields Weaver by Thomas Haynes Bayly[5] at the Haymarket Theatre. Encouraged by Dickens, he made his professional stage debut in 1852 at the Queen's Theatre in Dublin, under the management of Charles Dillon, and by 1853 became the principal "low comedian" at the Theatre Royale in Edinburgh. His older brother, Francis, acted as his manager throughout his early career.[2] During the next two years, he performed widely in Ireland and Scotland, gaining a reputation for sunny extemporaneous comedy, humorous expressions and a uniquely comic voice, freedom with his texts, and an engaging rapport with audiences.[1]
In 1854,[6] Toole made his first professional appearance in London at the St. James's Theatre, acting as Samuel Pepys in The King's Rival, by Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, and Weazel in My Friend the Major by Charles Selby.[4] There he also played in Boots at the Swan and Honours before Titles.[7] He returned to the provinces, but by 1856 was engaged in London at the Lyceum Theatre, including as Hilarion Fanfaronade in Belphegor, in which Marie Wilton made her first London appearance.[8] Thereafter, he frequently performed with Wilton.[4] In 1857, having had a great success in London as Paul Pry in John Poole's farce of that name, he made his first of many successful provincial summer tours and often repeated the character thereafter. During this first tour, he met and acted together with Henry Irving, and the two remained close friends over their long careers. In 1858, he scored a notable hit creating the role of Tom Cranky in John Hollingshead's farce The Birthplace of Podgers.[1]
Peak Years
In 1858, at the suggestion of Dickens,[4] Toole joined Benjamin Webster's company at the Adelphi Theatre and established his popularity as a farceur, creating, among other parts, Joe Spriggins in Ici on parle français by T. H. Williams,[9] Augustus de Rosherville in The Willow Copse by Boucicault,[10] in Birthplace of Podgers, Tom Dibbles in Good for Nothing by J. B. Buckstone, and in Bengal Tiger.[7] He remained at the Adelphi as principal low comedian for nine years, frequently partnering with Paul Bedford, whose sedate comic style complemented his own contrasting energetic style.[1] His most successful roles there included Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol (1859), the title role in Asmodeus in 1859,[11] Peter Familias in The Census by William Brough (among many pieces by Brough),[12] Milwood in George de Barnwell by H. J. Byron (1862),[13] Caleb Plummer in Dot (1862), by Dion Boucicault,[8] Pitcher in The Area Belle (1864),[14] and Prudent in The Fast Family by B. Webster, Jr.[15] His other great successes there were as Mr. Tetterby in an adaptation of Dickens' The Haunted Man and of a frightened servant in Boucicault's The Phantom.[7] He played a season in 1867 with the impressive new company at Queen's Theatre that included Irving, Henrietta Hodson, Lionel Brough and Charles Wyndham, where he appeared in such works a H. J. Byron's Dearer Than Life, as Michael Garner, and W. S. Gilbert's La Vivandière, as Sergeant Sulpizio. Frederick Waddy wrote of Toole in 1873 that as Harry Coke in Off the Line, "Mr. Toole makes one of those perfect pictures of everyday life of the lower class in which he has so often proved himself a consummate artist. But in low comedy and broad farce it would be difficult to find an actor of equal merit.... As Paul Pry he keeps his audience in a roar whenever he is on the stage".[7]
Toole was then engaged in 1868 at the Gaiety Theatre by Hollingshead, appearing in many pieces there including Thespis (1871), the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, and as John Lockwood, in a drama called Wait and Hope.[7] In 1872–74, among other successes, he portrayed Tom Larkin in Good News by H. J. Byron,[16] the Irishman Brulgruddery in John Bull by George Colman the Younger; Bob Acres in The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, together with Charles James Mathews and Samuel Phelps; the title role in a Robert Reece burlesque called Don Giovanni in Venice; another title role in Guy Fawkes by H. J. Byron, and created the role of the barrister Hammond Coote in Wig and Gown by James Albery.[1][17] Toole's fame was at its height in 1874, when he went on tour to America, but he failed to reproduce there the success he had found in England. He remained based mostly at the Gaiety until the end of 1877, when he moved to the Globe Theatre under his own management for two years.[18]
In 1878, Toole created the role of Charles Liquorpond in A Fool and his Money by H. J. Byron. Liquorpond was a retired footman unexpectedly overtaken by wealth, and Toole's affectedly superior pronunciation, particularly of his own name, was a tremendous success. In his prime, Toole achieved wide popularity as a comic actor, being noted for his comic delivery of words, but he did not confine himself exclusively to comedy. He also excelled in domestic melodramas (adaptations by Dion Boucicault and others of Charles Dickens and similar writers), playing "tender-hearted victims of fate", where he was famously able to combine humour and pathos. The Times said of his performance in Dearer than Life by Henry James Byron:
Later years
In 1879, Toole realised a lifelong ambition by taking over the management of the Folly Theatre in London. This triumph was offset by the death of his son in the same year, after a football injury.[3] He renamed the theatre "Toole's Theatre" in 1881, becoming the first actor to have a West End theatre named after him.[1] He was often away in the British provinces, but he produced a number of plays in London:
- H. J. Byron's A Fool and His Money (1879)[20]
- Arthur Wing Pinero's Hester's Mystery (1880)
- Byron's Upper Crust (1880) and Auntie (1882)[21][22]
- A. W. Pinero's Girls and Boys: a Nursery Tale (1882) starring Toole as Solomon Prothero[23]
- F. C. Burnand's Stage Dora; or, Who Killed Cock Robin (1883), a burlesque of Sardou's Fédora, starring Toole
- Burnand's Paw Claudian (1884), a burlesque of the 1883 costume (Byzantine) drama 'Claudian' by Henry Herman and W. G. Wills
- Pinero's Girls and Boys (1885)
- Mr. Guffin's Elopement and The Great Tay-Kin, both with words by Arthur Law and music by George Grossmith, starring Toole (1885)[24][25]
- A revival of Billee Taylor (1886)
- The Butler, by Herman Charles Merivale, starring Toole (1886)
- Pepita, an operetta by Charles Lecocq (1888)
- The Don, by Merivale, starring Toole (1888).[26]
- The Bungalow, by Fred Horner (1890)[27]
- J. M. Barrie's Ibsen's Ghost, or, Toole up to Date, a one-act satire on London productions of Ibsen, including Hedda Gabler, starring Irene Vanbrugh and Toole (1891)
- Barrie's Walker, London, a highly successful farce, directed by Toole (1892)[28]
Toole began to be troubled by gout in 1886. After his daughter died in 1888, followed by his wife in 1889, Toole was disconsolate, and his health deteriorated further.[1] By this time, his acting was unfashionable: he began to be seen as the last of the line of old-fashioned low comic actors who had been popular earlier in the century, including Buckstone, John Liston and Edward Richard Wright.[1] Nevertheless, he toured Australia and New Zealand in 1890.[4] He published his reminiscences in 1888, and his stage appearances gradually became fewer. The gout left him sometimes unable to walk, and after an 1893 illness during Thoroughbred by Ralph Lumley, he retired from the London stage, although he made occasional appearances in the provinces until about 1896. His theatre was demolished in 1895 for an extension of Charing Cross Hospital, and he dissolved his theatre company after an 1896 tour.
The critic Clement Scott called Toole "one of the kindest and most genial men who ever drew breath. ... No one acted with more spirit or enjoyed so thoroughly the mere pleasure of acting."[8] His genial and sympathetic nature was conspicuous off the stage as well as on it, and he was known as a great practical joker.[1]
Ultimately he retired to Brighton, where after a long struggle with Bright's disease and a degenerative spinal illness, he died in 1906 at the age of 76. He is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London, next to his wife and children. Toole was a good businessman and left a considerable fortune of over £81,000, out of which he made a number of bequests to charity, to needy actors and to his friends.