Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Biography: Some Problems and Principles, with Examples from the Life of Andrew Ducrow

Abstract

As every historian of the period is aware, the nineteenth-century English theatre offers a seemingly inexhaustible mine for research. So many actors, managers, playwrights, designers, critics, theatres—major, minor, and provincial—were active during the century that no one could possibly be expected to keep track of all of them, let alone know them all in any depth. To a large extent this cause for perpetual rejoicing by doctoral students and their grateful supervisors is due to the awesome amount of theatrical reportage during the century—some 550 periodicals alone covering the performing arts, according to the latest edition of Stratman, not to mention all the newspapers and other publications that regularly devoted columns to theatrical matters. Then, too, the period abounds in memoirs and biographies; there is an astonishing amount of iconographic material; while the great collections of ephemera and theatricalia at such places as the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Harvard have preserved for us an immense treasure trove of playbills, prints, diatribes against hated rivals, illicit love letters, locks of hair, even the shoemaker's lasts for the boots of a reigning star—items invaluable to prospectors after theatrical truth. Add to this the data that can be found in archives, and what it all comes to is a staggering mass of information.