Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809)

The novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft developed his love of performance in London spouting clubs before starting his theatrical career as a prompter in Dublin’s Capel-Street and Smock-Alley theatres through the intercession of the Irish actor Charles Macklin. Holcroft then spent much of the 1770s as a strolling player. Holcroft joined Bates’ company in about 1777 and walked with the composer William Shield from Durham to Stockton-on-Tees when he occupied himself by studying Lowth’s Grammar, and reading Pope’s Homer. It was perhaps natural for Holcroft to associate with a musician, as in his previous company managed by Booth in Cumberland, he had been responsible for the music and was, he recorded, “literally the sole accompaniment to all songs, &c. on his fiddle in the orchestra.”

Holcroft met the youthful Joseph Ritson upon his arrival in Stockton-on-Tees, where according to the editor of his memoirs William Hazlitt, Ritson became one of Holcroft’s “most intimate friends.” Hazlitt claimed that Ritson, who was then articled to a Stockton conveyancer, had inspired Holcroft to parody him as the humanitarian Handford in his first published novel Alwyn, the Gentleman Comedian (1780).

Ritson had been “induced” to become a vegetarian at the age of nineteen after reading Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. In Alwyn, Handford establishes an asylum for animals which leads to the development of a local industry in the maiming of cats, dogs and horses.