Two Account Books for Covent Garden Theatre, 1757-58

The first Covent Garden theatre opened in December 1732. It was built by the theatre manager and harlequin John Rich (1692-1761) who, for the previous eighteen years, had run the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The British Library has a collection of six account books for the early years of Covent Garden's existence, before the theatre was sold to new owners in 1767 after Rich's death. The volumes are for isolated years, and one covers the 1757-58 season (British Library: Egerton MS 2270). It has also long been known that there is a 'copy' of this volume in the library at Aberystwyth University. As far as I am aware, nobody has ever compared the two versions, and examination shows there are many subtle differences. In this article, therefore, I shall examine these differences and, for the sake of clarity and conciseness, I shall henceforth refer to the two documents as Aber for the Aberystwyth version, and BLib for the one in the British Library. Before considering why Aber was compiled, and for whom, I shall describe the major differences between the two books.

Both books record the income on the left hand page, and expenditure on the right. It is in the method of recording the expenditure that the majority of the differences can be found. Unlike Aber, the expenditure in BLib is not simply a record of the money paid out, but a mixture of bills paid, together with allocated, or predicted, expenditure on other regular items. Thus we find that, in BLib, a fixed amount (£4 4s) is put aside each day for candles, whereas Aber simply records the actual payments to the tallow chandlers when they are made – £34 11s 6d to Mr Pattinson, tallow chandler, on 22 October 1757,

Plate 1.

Covent Garden expenditure, 1757, Oct 22-25 (Aberystwyth).

for example (see Plate 1). Naturally this payment does not appear in BLib, as it was drawn from the money already allocated for the purpose. This means that the figures in BLib were not accurate and had to be adjusted at the end of the season, to compensate for what the items actually cost. On 12 June, for example, £37 14s 11d was credited to the accounts "being an Over Charge in the stoppage Account for Candles and Lamps".

This practice of allocating money for a specific purpose was used for other items of regular expenditure in BLib. A nightly fixed payment of £2 10s was put aside for 'scenemen'. Aber shows that they were actually paid weekly, and the amount varied from week to week according to the work actually done. This is shown by the entry on 22 October 1757 (Plate 1) when Mr Finny, presumably the senior member of the crew, drew £15 4s "for carpenters to 8th inst."; and £13 17s "for Do. to 15th inst. "(carpenters and scenemen appear to be synonymous in this context). Finny must then have distributed the money amongst the men. These entries also show that the crew had not yet been paid for the current week ending 22 October. Once again, an adjustment was made in BLib at the end of the season to give the correct figure for this department, and an overcharge of £4 2s was credited to the accounts on 15 July 1758.

The allocation of money for different purposes indicates that the theatre's treasurer must have kept another secondary ledger recording the money put into each allocation, and the money taken out. This ledger is no longer in existence, but Plate 1 shows that candle money, for example, was entered under "posting" (i.e. category) 65. The scenemen's pay was given posting number 64–which was also the number given to the Band of Music. A look at other numbers shows that this was regular practice, with each number applying to two different categories. The system was used for actors' pay as well as departmental expenditure, and BLib shows that two actors shared the same posting number. I imagine this means...