HOLCROFT, THOMAS (1745-1809)

This article appears in Volume V13, Page 582 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HIG-HOR

HOLCROFT, THOMAS (1745-1809) , English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born on the loth of December 1745 (old style) in Orange Court, Leicester Fields, London. His father, besides having a shoemaker's shop, kept riding horses for hire; but having fallen into difficulties was reduced ultimately to the necessity of hawking pedlary. The son accompanied his parents in their tramps, and succeeded in procuring the situation of stable boy at Newmarket, where he spent his evenings chiefly in miscellaneous

reading

READING

and the study of music. Gradually he obtained a knowledge of French, German and Italian. At the end of his

term

TERM

of engagement as stable boy he returned to assist his father, who had again resumed his

trade

of shoemaker in London; but after marrying in 1765, he became a teacher in a small school in Liverpool. He failed in an attempt to set up a private school, and became prompter in a Dublin theatre. He acted in various strolling companies until 1778, when he produced The Crisis; or, Love and

Famine

FAMINE (Lat. fames, hunger)

, at Drury Lane. Duplicity followed in 1781. Two years later he went to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald. Here he attended the performances of Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro until he had memorized the whole. The

translation

TRANSLATION

of it, with the title The Follies of the Day, was produced at Drury Lane in 1784. The Road to Ruin, his most successful

melodrama

MELODRAMA (a coined word from Gr. µEXos, music, and Spaµa, action)

, was produced in 1792. A revival in 1873 ran for 118 nights.

Holcroft

died on the 23rd of

March

18og. He was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and on that account was, in 1794, indicted of high treason, but was discharged without a trial. Among his novels may be mentioned Alwyn(178o), an account, largely autobiographical, of a strolling comedian, and Hugh Trevor (1794-1797). He also was the author of Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the

Netherlands

NETHERLANDS

to Paris, of some volumes of verse and of translations from the French and German.
His Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.

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