Author: Waldron, Francis Godolphin
Biography:
WALDRON, Francis Godolphin (1743-1818: ODNB)
Waldron was born at Liverpool on 22 Nov. 1743, the posthumous son of George Waldron (1712-1743). In the St Peter’s, Liverpool, baptismal record, his surname is corrupted as “Wallderan.” By his own assertion in GM (Apr. 1799, 286), his grandfather was George Waldron (1687-1728), the author of A History and Description of the Isle of Man (1726) and Compleat Works in Verse and Prose (1726, 1731), whose wife, Theodosia Clift, was a relative of Francis, Earl of Godolphin. He was, in the words of George Colman (q.v.), “an humble retainer to the stage.” A busy but secondary travelling actor in London and the provinces, he was, variously, a theatre manager, prompter, bookseller, editor, and playwright. His first recorded stage appearance was in Edinburgh in 1766. He also dabbled in bookselling, but his shop was bankrupt in 1787. A trustee of the Drury Lane Fund, he was also one of its beneficiaries, in 1806. He had many friends and associates in the theatre and among painters and draughtsman, including Charles Dibdin, David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, and Sir Joshua Reynolds (qq.v). He had no particular influence on eighteenth-century acting or stagecraft and as a playwright he left no lasting mark. His annotations to editions of Jonson and Shakespeare have however proved useful to scholars of eighteenth-century staging of Elizabethan plays. His interest in Jonson and Shakespeare brought him into contact with William Gifford (q.v.). In 1802, Lackington published his Origin of the English Stage and A Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry. A Collection includes his poem “The Holy Vengeance.” His Literary Museum [of] Scarce and Curious Tracts, Poetry, Biography, and Criticism (1792), particularly its preface, is notable in the history of bibliography and book collecting. He had at least six children by two actresses. He married in 1770 a woman whose name is unknown. From sometime after 1785 he lived common-law with his second partner, Sarah Harlowe (1765-1852), an actress of the Theatre Royale, Drury Lane. He died at his home in Orange Street, Red Lion Square, and was buried on 8 Feb. 1818 at St Giles in the Fields, Holborn. He was survived by Sarah and six of his children, one of whom he identified in his will as his foster son. (ODNB 31 May 2023; ancestry.com 31 May 2023; P. H. Highfill, et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors [1982], 7:111-12, 15:206-8) JC
Other Names:
- F. G. Waldron