Author: Ball, Edward
Biography:
BALL, Edward, later FITZBALL (1793-1873: ODNB)
The son of Nathan Ball, a prosperous farmer, and his wife Mary Marker, he was baptised in Burwell, Cambridgeshire, on 20 Mar. 1793. His mother’s surname at birth was Fitz; she had married the Rev. Ben Brundish Marker in 1779 and was left well-provided for by his death in 1781. Edward Ball was educated at the Albertus Parr Academy in Newmarket but he left school on the death of his father in 1805 when it was revealed that the family fortunes had been seriously depleted by Nathan Ball’s gambling. In 1809-12 he apprenticed with a printer in Norwich where, on 15 Aug. 1815, he married Adelaide Alexandrine Dupuis (d 1850) at St. Mary in the Marsh. They had one daughter, Louisa. Ball began publishing verse and writing for the theatre in Norwich. A melodrama, The Ruffian Boy (1819), was based on a tale by Amelia Opie (q.v.) and she encouraged him to move to London. At about this time he changed his surname to Fitzball, perhaps to avoid confusion with the novelist Edward Ball. In London he wrote prolifically for several theatres—the Surrey, Drury Lane, the Adelphi, Covent Garden, and Sadler’s Wells—and his dramatic adaptations of novels by Walter Scott (q.v.) and James Fenimore Cooper were particularly successful. He also wrote songs, burlettas, and operas. On 4 June 1840 he applied to the RLF for assistance, citing the failure of the Drury Lane theatre as a cause of financial distress; he was awarded £40 and a further £30 in 1849. He published an autobiography, Thirty-Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life, in 1859. In the 1860s he retired to Chatham where he died on 27 Oct. 1873. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Jan. 2023; Edward Fitzball, Thirty-Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life [1859]; ODNB 3 Jan. 2023; RLF file 1000) SR