About five years ago the enthusiastic Doctor—who, being a foreigner, has a perfect right to regenerate the British drama, as well as the British Constitution—burst forth in the Times, and at once placed himself at the head of that glorious minority which, owing to the iniquitous “ring” formed by a clique of authors, managers, and critics, cannot get its plays, marvellously good as they are, produced; and thus not only they, but the great British public are sufferers under a system which Vellère & Co. will yet expose or perish in the attempt. The first advertisement of the regenerator appeared on October 2, 1869. It ran thus:—
TO the PATRONS of the LEGITIMATE DRAMA and to the
PLAY-GOING PUBLIC in GENERAL.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—As a general outcry arose some considerable time ago that there was a great dearth of good, original English dramas, and as the recent so-called original productions of English dramatists have failed to stifle it—because they have either traduced English society or have been simply adaptations from the French respecting a state of society which cannot exist here, and in both cases have proved unpalatable to the English, and, therefore, unsuccessful—I, who am a writer in more than one language, resolved to produce a drama on purely English topics, and I was guided by the dictum of your immortal poet, Byron, that “Truth is stranger than fiction,” because all fictitious situations prove less “sensational” (pardon me the vernacular), as produced by those dramatists, with all the powerful accessories and machinery of the stage, than the simplest police report from the daily papers. It took me more than a year of my half-holidays to write the drama “Stern Realities,” and in about five months I wrote the play “Trust.” Now, I have been trying for the last eighteen months to have one of these pieces accepted, but all my endeavours have been in vain. The excuse was, that I am not known (a