1 - Creative Responses

Summary

Two individuals in London responded in creative ways to Aldridge's appearance at Covent Garden. One was William Makepeace Thackeray, who at age twenty-one had returned to London in November 1832 after having spent “four months, mainly in Paris, reading contemporary French and German literature, attending operas and plays, visiting print galleries, patronizing fine restaurants, and gambling.” During his youth at Charterhouse School in London, he had developed a “propensity to make comic drawings, often in the spirit of George Cruikshank,” and these he circulated “for the gratification of his friends.” Thackeray attended Cambridge University, at which point he also began to publish comic verse and whimsical prose pieces in student magazines. During summer holidays in France and Germany, he continued to sketch interesting people he encountered, including actors and actresses onstage. In January 1833 he took a job with a bill-discounting firm in London, but he preferred to keep up his literary activities, so in May that year he purchased London's National Standard and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, a weekly newspaper that he edited and filled with his own writings and drawings until it collapsed nine months later.

Before taking on the challenge of full-time editing, however, Thackeray had gone to Covent Garden Theatre to see Aldridge perform. His friend Frederick J. Goldsmith, then “a boy of fourteen or fifteen,” recalled nearly sixty years later what happened afterward. Goldsmith looked upon Thackeray as

a sort of good genius whose presence shed brightness over my out-of-school existence. He would sketch for me the very figures I delighted to contemplate, take me to the places I delighted to be taken to, and make himself the pleasantest of companions, although the difference of age was just a sufficient cause, in the estimation of most men, to bring about a directly opposite result. As an instance of his artistic tastes and capabilities, I remember walking with him one day when his thoughts were almost wholly engaged on the so-called “African Roscius”—a Mr. Ida [sic] Aldridge, whom he had seen on the previous night in “Othello.” He led me into a lithographer's (in or near Cornhill), drew from recollection the somewhat singular, but truthful figure with which his brain was haunted, and had, at once, several copies struck off for sale.