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Author: Herbert, Thomas

Biography:

HERBERT, Thomas (fl 1817-26)

His origins are obscure, and although he spent most of his life in Sussex he may not have been born there. He became a butcher in Brighton with government contracts as a supplier of meat. He boasted of making the best sausages outside Germany. Two marriages are recorded for Thomas Herbert at St. Nicholas, Brighton, the first to Sarah Eade on 10 Nov. 1807 and the second to Ann Warren on 18 Jul. 1810. But he fell on hard times—it is not clear why—and struggled to feed his large family. In 1817 he turned to writing and sold his publications along with meat pies at his shop. He was described many years later by people who had known him as short, fat, and blind in one eye (Erredge). Perhaps surprisingly, under the circumstances, he adopted a merry tone in all but one of his works. He published two plays in Brighton (Too Much the Way of the World, 1817, and Hydrophobia, 1820) but they were never performed; also a serious moral tract in prose, A Brief Sketch of Human Life (1819), in which he thanks the local nobility and gentry for their willingness to pay higher prices than usual for his works in order to help out the family. His last known work, A Nostrum for Theatrical Insipidity, was published in London with his address given as 8, Great Newport St. (near Leicester Square). The first-person speaker in that poem declares himself a countryman with a “procreative” wife, who had turned to writing for the stage after the birth of their tenth child, but who has failed to interest the London managers in any of the six plays he took to them, and counsels other aspirants to wait until good taste has returned to the theatrical scene. Herbert does not appear to have published again and may have died in London not long after. (ancestry.com 4 Apr. 2022; findmypast.com 5 Apr. 2022; Henry C. Porter, History of the Theatres of Brighton [1886] 42; John Ackerson Erredge, History of Brighthelmston [1862] 52)

 

Books written (1):