SD1124. Charles Dickens to Thomas Noon Talfourd
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 365 (in part).
At your chambers
Friday Morning (the day before)
[22 May 1840] [1]
My Dear Talfourd.
Macready called on me this morning and begged me to come straightway to you, and urge upon you the propriety of abusing Moxon to the utmost extent of your powers, and impressing upon him a due sense of the gross and unwarrantable violation of your confidence, of which he has been guilty.
Not content with telling Tom Hill, Wordsworth, Browning, [a] and Heaven knows who besides, this traitorous publisher told (yesterday) Knowles, [b] who straightway repairs to the Box office of the Theatre and takes a place for Saturday “to see his friend Talfourd’s play”. “Mr. Talfourd’s play!” cries the box-keeper [c] “You don’t say it’s Mr. Talfourd’s! Why, it has been kept the closest secret here, and nobody had the least idea of the Author’s name!” Knowles replies “oh yes, he knows it from the publisher who is his publisher too”, and in case the man should keep the secret, dashes round to Webster, [d] and there blurts it out again. It ran of course like wildfire through the Theatre, and by last night was generally known to the company.
I really cannot tell you how disgusted I am with the envy and ill-nature of Knowles, who must have known of course that you would not have concealed your name but for some sufficient reason. I am equally disgusted with the coarse and vulgar babbling of Moxon, who I think has behaved must culpably and improperly. The last-named person you can take to account for his conduct—and I hope you will. [e]
Macready is still very anxious (as no doubt you will be also) that every effort should be made to prevent the spreading of this disclosure and keep it quiet; the chances in our favor being strengthened by the shortness of the time that will yet intervene before the play is presented. He is also exceedingly anxious for you to state in your preface the exact circumstances under …
Text: The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. M. House, G. Storey, et al. (Oxford, 1965–2002), 2, 70–72.
1. See Dickens, 2, 70.
a. Whom CD had perhaps met for the first time in Macready’s dressing-room 26 June 37 (Diaries, I, 401).
b. James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862; DNB), dramatist and actor; son of a first cousin of Sheridan. After acting in Ireland, and running a school first in Belfast and afterwards in Glasgow, made his reputation as a dramatist with four five-act plays—the tragedy Virginius (1820), William Tell (1825), and the comedies The Hunchback (1832) and The Love Chase (1837). Virginius and William Tell, with Macready triumphing in the title roles, had raised hopes of a renaissance of the “legitimate drama”; and in Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age, 1844, Knowles is described as “at the head of the acted Dramatists of the age”—though mainly because he personified the age in his “truly domestic feeling” and through his “stage influence as an actor”. He continued acting until 1843, and wrote eight more plays 1837–43—several of them produced by Mme Vestris at Covent Garden 1839–41. He and Macready had been scarcely on speaking terms since Jan 39, each accusing the other of ingratitude; but Virginius remained in Macready’s repertory throughout his career. CD had acquired The Hunchback in 1832; and Knowles gave him Love, 1839, inscribed “from his admiring friend, J. S. Knowles” (Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse, 1935, pp. 69 and 92).
c. MS reads “box-box-keeper”.
d. Benjamin Nottingham Webster (1797–1882; DNB), actor and dramatist; lessee of the Haymarket since 1837. He played MacIan in Glencoe. For his relations with Macready, see To Macready, 2 Dec 41, fn.
e. Macready recorded in his diary for 22 May both his own call on CD in the morning and a return call by CD “to tell me that Talfourd would write to Moxon immediately about the breach of confidence in regard to his play” (Diaries, II, 61).
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