Frederick Balsir Chatterton and the Critics

Frederick Balsir Chatterton (1834–86) was the lessee of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, from 1866 to 1879. He was the last person in charge of Drury Lane to take seriously its claim to be the National Theatre. He was also, not coincidentally, the last to be bankrupted by it. He enjoyed great success for a number of years but is now remembered, if he is remembered at all, for his famous aphorism that “Shakespeare spelt ruin and Byron bankruptcy” (The Times, 24 August 1869, 10).

Chatterton came from a musical family.¹ His two uncles, Frederick and John Balsir Chatterton, were the two most famous British harpists of the time, and the harp might be said to have run in the family. His own father, Edward, had refused to go down the harp route, and embarked on a career in the front-of-house of various London theatres, to the disapproval of his father and brothers. As if to make amends for letting his family down, Edward insisted that his own son should become a maestro of the harp, but growing up backstage at Sadler’s Wells inspired a love of theatre in young Frederick Balsir Chatterton that caused him to resist the call of the harp and pursue a career in theatre. He became involved with the vigorous amateur dramatic scene that flourished in Victorian London where several fully-equipped theatres could be hired by enthusiastic amateurs eager to showcase their talents, and where the amateur impresario could cover his costs by selling the parts in his production. When Chatterton found that he could more than pay the rent by selling parts, which meant that the box office takings were pure profit, he decided to become a manager. He was not an actor-manager like Charles Kean and Henry Irving, nor a playwright-manager like the Colmans, father and son, and his partner Edmund Falconer: he was a manager pure and simple. He wanted to put on shows, not to write them or be in them.

Edward Chatterton eventually realised that resisting his strong-willed son was futile, and he got him a job in the front-of-house for the 1855–56 season at Drury Lane where he (Edward) had been the box office manager since 1853. Following this, Chatterton was hired as Acting Manager of the Lyceum when Charles Dillon took the lease in September 1856. Here he met an Irish actor and aspiring playwright called Edmund O’ Rourke who was using the stage name of Edmund Falconer and whose play The Cagot enjoyed a moderate success in Dillon’s 1856–57 season.² Falconer’s next play, Extremes, was in rehearsal when Dillon’s management collapsed in bankruptcy in March 1858, so he and Chatterton took over the lease of the Lyceum and presented it themselves. They struggled financially and Chatterton was glad to bail out when Falconer found other backers.

Chatterton became lessee of the St James’s Theatre for the 1859–60 season. At 25 he was the youngest lessee in London, and he was heavily dependent on the support of his father who gave up his job at Drury Lane and took over the St James’s box office. Chatterton then took over the Theatre Royal, Rochester, for the 1860–61 season, but this proved disastrous, leaving Chatterton so broke when his management collapsed in January 1861 that he had to walk back to London.³

Towards the end of 1861 Falconer and Chatterton decided to take on the Lyceum again to stage Falconer’s play Woman or Love Against the World. This was followed by Peep o’ Day, also by Falconer, which opened on 9 November 1861 and became the first play in London to have an unbroken run of more than a year. When it closed in December 1863 it had generated profits of £16,000 which Falconer used to take over the lease of Drury Lane from E. T. Smith, who was anxious to get out before the clause in his lease requiring redecoration was enforced (Stirling 1:267). The lease was in Falconer’s name and...