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  • Touchstone:A Forgotten Theatrical Newspaper
  • Robert Whelan (bio)

Frederick Balsir Chatterton was one of the most important theatre managers in London in the mid-Victorian period. At different times he was responsible for the management of the Lyceum, the St James's, the Adelphi and the Princess's, but he is chiefly remembered as the lessee of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, from 1866 to 1879. He had also been effectively in charge of Drury Lane from 1862 to 1866, where his title was acting manager and the lessee was his partner Edmund Falconer, since Falconer's alcoholism meant that he had very little to do with running the theatre.1

Chatterton was not an actor manager, like Charles Kean or Henry Irving, nor was he a playwright manager like the George Colmans, father and son: he was a manager pure and simple. He wanted to stage plays, not write or star in them. One of the characteristics of his managerial style was the extensive use of newspaper advertising to promote shows. All West End theatres inserted the details of that night's performance in the theatre listings of The Times and other papers, but The Times also ran classified advertisements above or beside the listings which managers could use to give additional details of their offerings. Chatterton realised that these classified advertisements could give his product the edge over that of his rivals and he used them to a greater extent than other managers.

Like other managers, Chatterton regarded dramatic criticism as essentially a free form of advertising. If newspapers published hostile reviews he would threaten to withdraw his advertising and try get the offending critic sacked. Although this would be regarded as completely inappropriate and counterproductive behaviour today, it was not unusual at the time. [End Page 100]

As editors became less willing to succumb to this bullying behaviour, the fightback on behalf of free and fair criticism was led by Clement Scott, who worked as dramatic critic on a number of papers and would take over from E. L. Blanchard (the author of the Drury Lane pantomimes for twenty-seven years) as chief dramatic critic of The Daily Telegraph in 1879. Chatterton became so frustrated by his inability to control reviews that he resorted to the somewhat desperate tactic of starting his own newspaper. It was called Touchstone or The New Era. Realising that a good review in Touchstone would be worthless if he were known to be its proprietor, Chatterton kept uncharacteristically quiet about this venture and never openly admitted that he was the proprietor, pretending that Edgar Ray, the editor, was the proprietor. Touchstone was so unsuccessful that it has virtually disappeared from the historical record and the only reference to it that I have been able to find occurred in Clement Scott's autobiography The Drama of Yesterday and Today:

Disappointed at his want of success with his Shakespeare ventures, F. B. Chatterton started a twopenny satirical paper, called Touchstone, which was edited by George Augustus Sala. The publication died an early, and, I think, a deserved death.

(Scott 1: 190-91)

Scott was writing his memoirs more than twenty years after the demise of Touchstone and more than a decade after Chatterton's death. He loathed Chatterton, who had tried to get him sacked from two jobs for writing unfavourable reviews (Scott 1: 477-8, 543-4; 2: 471), and was consistently unfair to Chatterton throughout his book. In fact, Touchstone was not a satirical paper (at least not while Chatterton owned it) and Sala was never the editor (although he did write some articles for it). But Scott was right on the main point: Touchstone was a short-lived failure.

The first issue announced that "our great National Institution and Teacher – the Drama – is awakening to the dawn of a NEW ERA, under which its position will be properly recognized, its mission understood, and its claims admitted" (7 Apr. 1877, 12). The capitalisation of "NEW ERA" makes it clear that Chatterton saw his publication as a direct rival to Edward Ledger's The Era which had been the recognised journal of the theatrical profession since 1838. It certainly covered the same ground...

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