drama and the wonderful music to
which it was set, that he noted down his
impressions of the performance, and afterwards
dropped what he had written, anonymously,
into the editor's box. The next
morning, his own article was handed to him
to set up in type for the forthcoming number
of the Sunday Monitor. After this first
encouragement, he began to use his pen frequently
in the minor periodicals of the time;
still sticking to the printer's work, however,
and still living at home with his family.
The success of his little farce at Sadler's
Wells led to his writing three more pieces
for that theatre. They all succeeded; and
the managers of some of the other minor
theatres began to look after the new man.
Just at this time, when his career as dramatist
and journalist was beginning to open before
him, his father died. After that loss, the
next important event in his life was his
marriage. In the year eighteen hundred and
twenty-four, when he was twenty-one years
of age, he married his "first love," Miss
Mary Swann, the daughter of a gentleman
who held an appointment in the Post Office.
He and his bride settled, with his mother
and sister and a kind old friend of his boyish
days, in Holborn; and here—devoting his
days to the newspapers, and his evenings to
the drama—the newly-married man started
as author by profession, and met the world
and its cares bravely at the point of the pen.

The struggle at starting was a hard one.
His principal permanent source of income
was a small weekly salary, paid to him as
dramatist to the establishment, by one
Davidge, manager of the Coburg (now the
Victoria) Theatre. This man appears to
have treated Jerrold, whose dramas brought
both money and reputation to his theatre,
with an utter want of common consideration
and common gratitude. He worked his poor
author pitilessly; and it is, on that account,
highly satisfactory to know that he over-reached
himself in the end, by quarrelling
with his dramatist, at the very time when
Jerrold had a theatrical fortune (so far as
managers' interests were concerned) lying in
his desk, in the shape of Black-Eyed Susan.
With that renowned play (the most popular
of all nautical dramas) in his hand, Douglas
left the Coburg to seek employment at the
Surrey Theatre— then under the management
of the drunken and dignified Mr. Elliston.
This last tradesman in plays—who subsequently
showed himself to be as meanly unfeeling
as the other tradesman at the Coburg—
bid rather higher for Jerrold's services, and
estimated the sole monopoly of the fancy,
invention, and humour of a man who had
already proved himself to be a popular,
money-bringing dramatist, at the magnificent
rate of five pounds a week. The bargain
was struck; and Jerrold's first play produced
at the Surrey Theatre was Black-Eyed
Susan.

He had achieved many enviable dramatic
successes before this time. He had written
domestic dramas—such as Fifteen Years of
A Drunkard's Life, and Ambrose Gwinett,
the popularity of which is still well remembered
by play-goers of the old generation.
But the reception of Black-Eyed Susan
eclipsed all previous successes of his or of
any other dramatist's in that line. Mr.
T. P. Cooke, who, as the French say,
"created" the part of William, not only
found half London flocking into the Borough
to see him; but was actually called upon,
after acting in the play, as a first piece, at
the Surrey Theatre, to drive off in his
sailor's dress, and act in it again on the same
night, as the last piece, at Covent Garden
Theatre. Its first "run" mounted to three
hundred nights: it afterwards drew money
into the empty treasury of Drury Lane: it
remains, to this day, a "stock-piece" on
which managers and actors know that they
can depend; and, strangest phenomenon of
all, it is impossible to see the play now, without
feeling that its great and well-deserved
dramatic success has been obtained with the
least possible amount of assistance from the
subtleties and refinements of dramatic art.
The piece is indebted for its hold on the
public sympathy solely to the simple force,
the irresistible directness, of its appeal to
some of the strongest affections in our nature.
It has succeeded, and it will succeed, not
because the dialogue is well or, as to some
passages of it, even naturally written; not
because the story is neatly told, for it is
(especially in the first act) full of faults in
construction; but solely because the situations
in which the characters are placed
appeal to the hearts of every husband and
every wife in the theatre. In this aspect of
it, and in this only, the play is a study to
any young writer; for it shows on what
amazingly simple foundations rest the main
conditions of the longest, the surest, and the
widest dramatic success.

It is sad, it is almost humiliating, to be
obliged to add, in reference to the early
history of Jerrold's first dramatic triumph,
that his share of the gains which Black-Eyed
Susan poured into the pockets of managers
on both sides of the water was just seventy
pounds. Mean-minded Mr. Elliston, whose
theatre the play had raised from a state of
something like bankruptcy to a condition of
prosperity which, in the Surrey annals, has
not since been paralleled, not only abstained
from presenting Jerrold with the smallest
fragment of anything in the shape of a token
of gratitude, but actually had the pitiless
insolence to say to him, after Black-Eyed
Susan had run its three hundred nights,
"My dear boy, why don't you get your friends
to present you with a bit of plate?"

The extraordinary success of Black-Eyed
Susan opened the doors of the great theatres
to Jerrold, as a matter of course. He made