Author: Serle, Thomas James
Biography:
SERLE, Thomas James (1798-1889; newspaper obituaries)
He was born on 29 Oct. 1798 in Gracechurch Street, London, to a well-to-do tradesman. Early sources state that he was educated for the bar. He turned instead to playwrighting and acting, his stage debut occurring at Liverpool in 1816. After several years on provincial stages—assisted in his early career by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s (q.v.) friend the radical MP Peter Moore—in 1824-25 he toured Europe where he gained the patronage of a famous French actor, François-Joseph Talma. Returning to England, he joined the Covent Garden troupe for the 1825 through 1829 seasons and in the 1838-39 season was the theater’s manager. He was actor-manager of the English Company in Paris for the 1844-45 season. As a playwright (he wrote over a dozen plays), he was moderately successful. Starting in the 1840s, he occasionally gave public lectures in London on Shakespeare. Through his many artistic, political, and charitable activities, he made the acquaintance of authors Edward Lytton Bulwer, Robert Browning (qq.v.), and Charles Dickens; actors and theatre managers Benjamin Webster, William Macready, and Douglas Jerrold; the painter John Bryant Lane; the philosopher George Henry Lewes; and the radical MP William Johnson Fox. He was especially close to Jerrold, who was a witness at his wedding and who named his son Thomas Serle. In 1832, the two men co-founded the Dramatic Authors Society. Under the pen name “Caustic,” beginning in 1838, from his Notting Hill residence, for thirty years he attacked public notables and criticized government policy in the high-circulation, radical newspaper Weekly Dispatch. Commencing in 1856, for thirteen years he was the Weekly Dispatch’s editor. On 3 Sep. 1836 at St Anne, Soho, he married opera singer Cecilia Novello (1812-1890). She was a daughter of an established London music publisher, Vincent Novello. Her sister Mary was a Shakespeare scholar and her sister Clara one of the century’s great sopranos. James and Cecilia had three children, each of whom remained single, Mary (1839-1862), a singing teacher, Emma (1846-1877), a soprano, and Lydia (1848-1926), a teacher of music and languages. Colburn published Serle’s two novels, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans (1841) and The Players; or, the Stage of Life (1847). He died at Novello Cottage, Worthing, on 18 Mar. 1889. (ancestry.com 14 July 2024; Examiner, 22 Sep. 1839; M. C. Clarke, Recollections of Writers [1878]; Western Daily Press, 28 June 1890) JC
Other Names:
- T. J. Serle