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Hunting down the dramatists



Of the 332 distinct author names attested on the title pages of Lacy’s Acting Editions, 30 remain stubbornly invisible elsewhere. In some cases there just isn’t enough information to identify them (the “Captain Arbuthnot” credited with the authorship of the burlesque L’Africaine; or, The Belle of Madagascar played at Covent Garden in October 1865 is a case in point) ; in others the name is just too common (“G. Smith” anyone?). But that still leaves 302 authors to investigate.

All of these works have been catalogued in some library somewhere however, which means (I naively supposed) that some cataloguer will have chosen a VIAF code for their authors. It seemed worthwhile therefore investing effort in trawling through the VIAF lists to pick out a code for each of my authors. No doubt ChatGPT could have done it quicker; in any case, at the end of the trawl, I had VIAF numbers for 300 of my authors – and only two mysteries. Firstly, George Marsh, author appropriately enough of “Lost and Found” and two other Lacy titles, who is listed as a member of the Dramatic Authors Society but is otherwise hitherto untraceable; secondly, George Roberts, who contributed seven titles under the stage name of “Robert Walters” including “Under the Rose” and “An Ample Apology”, but is listed only by the Era Almanac and in the ATCL database, described below.

Of the 300 authors anointed with a VIAF code , after a few days fighting with SPARQL (tx Stuart) I was able to endow 214 with a Wikidata identifier, which I had rather hoped would serve as the key to all manner of other useful things. It seems odd that over a quarter of the authors known to VIAF (86 of them to be precise) are otherwise unknown to Wikiworld, but there you are.

As might be expected, many of the authors (176 at the last count) have entries in Wikipedia. Some of these (but by no means all) provide links to other, perhaps more respectable, sources, notably the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its (wikisource-hosted) original and (paywall-protected) OUP versions. I was able to harvest links to ODNB entries for 144 of my authors via Wikidata; finding links to the Wikisource version was done by hand, which took a day or two. At the end of this part of the exercise, I had found ODNB biographies for 147 authors and DNB entries for 127. Unsurprisingly there were 22 authors with an entry in ODNB but not in DNB; less so, there was at least one case of a DNB author apparently purged from the ODNB, though present (admittedly as an appendage to the entry for his wife) in the original DNB. Where did you go wrong, Edward Stirling (1809-1894)?

I also checked all my author names against Boase’s Modern English Biography, which is a lot easier to search, and found 99 of them there. Interestingly, 30 of these were authors unknown both to ODNB and DNB.

The long-running theatrical newspaper The Era published in its annual Almanac volumes for 1868 and 1869 a set of short biographies of (then) living dramatic authors, ostensibly written by Edward Ledger. These brief notices provide an interesting contemporary perspective on 53 of my authors; 15 of them unknown to ODNB.

Impressively detailed exhaustive bibliographies and biographical notices for 27 of my authors are provided (behind a paywall) by Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography. In the absence of any such thing as an agreed canon of dramatic writers, it is difficult to see on what basis authors have been chosen for this particular collection. It cannot be anything to do with the number of titles they produced, since some of the most prolific of Lacy’s authors are conspicuously absent. Nor can it be related to the fame of the writer as witnessed by the number of other reference works mentioning them, since such well-known figures as Edmund Yates, Mark Lemon, G.H. Lewes, and even J.R. Planche are also missing.

I also sought traces of my authors in some less obvious quarters. The ATCL database (http://www.victorianresearch.org) is a wonderful resource documenting the production of the victorian novel, in the widest sense; 51 of my dramatists were not averse to churning out a few novels too, and hence feature in it; 6 of them are unknown to ODNB – indeed, one of them (Captain George Hatton Colomb) is listed by ATCL and nowhere else. ATCL also provides an interesting list of novelists who also wrote dramas; not all of these were Lacy authors, of course. It also indicates when the author concerned has a more detailed notice elsewhere.

Another wonderful resource, the Curran index (https://www.curranindex.org/) documents the wider world of Victorian journalism; it enabled me to determine that at least 66 of my dramatists also earned a living by contributing articles to periodicals indexed by Curran et al.

And finally, a footnote on the Dramatic Authors’ Society, which was “was the only organisation in the nineteenth century specifically devoted to the needs of dramatists. “ (Stephens) . Founded in 1834 after the Dramatic Authors Act became law, the DAS collected and redistributed fees on behalf of its members. All but two of its original 23 members were Lacy authors. During its fifty year life, the Society published lists of its members and their works with an indication of associated fees, for the use of provincial theatres. Putting together such lists as I have found, it seems that at least 91 of my authors are or were at some time DAS members.

The data thus far collected is feeding into a web page I am constructing: if you want to see its prototype version, check out the web site. And if you have information to fill my gaps, please get in touch by commenting on this page!