As an upholsterer’s apprentice Tom vexed his master’s soul and injured all his materials. The lad was barely eighteen when he made his plunge into the drama. Only the other day, we looked with interest on the front of the old Eastbourne Theatre, in the centre of the village, away from the modern sea-town. It has still, or had a little while ago, a dramatic-looking exterior. Richland, one of the managing partners of the house, had a nephew, a handsome lad of fourteen years of age, who printed the bills, did general business, and was called ‘Little Jerrold.’ When little Jerrold got to York as a manager, he put a fine handle to his name, and was thenceforth known for some time as Mr. Fitz-Jerrold. Tom Dibdin proposed to come out at the Eastbourne Theatre as Norval. Jerrold, on preparing the play-bill, asked him in what name Tom intended to appear. Dibdin replied, ‘My name is Norval!’ ‘I know it is,’ said Jerrold, ‘on the Grampian hills, but what is it in Sussex?’ The name adopted was Merchant. After all, instead of ‘journeying with this intent,’ and playing Norval, Dibdin ‘gilded his humble name’ by playing Valentine, in one of his father’s numerous musical pieces, and singing ‘Poor Jack,’ to the delight of the Eastbourne audience. The handsome Jerrold above alluded to was the father of Douglas Jerrold, whom John Kemble, as Rolla, once carried on his shoulder as Cora’s child, and who ended his career too early, leaving behind him a reputation for wit second to none.
The most amusing portion of Tom Dibdin’s reminiscences are the illustrations of social as well as dramatic life with which it abounds.
Tom belonged to one of those Beef Steak Clubs (this one was theatrical) which seem never to have had the dish on the table from which the name was supposed to be derived. One of their intellectual sports consisted in a member naming an actor, and then calling on another member for a quotation which should be applicable to the actor named. In this way some one named Incledon, whose talk was a bubbling talk, interlarded with ‘my boy,’ and ‘my dear boy,’ as is the traditionary manner with familiar players still. Incledon being named, Const, the magistrate, being called upon, instantly quoted the line ‘Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing.’ Nothing could be apter. Then another member, naming George Frederick Cooke, called on Irish Johnstone for the illustration, and Jack, without hesitation, enunciated ‘Load o’ whisky,’ giving this appropriate turn to the name of an operatic drama then in vogue—‘Lodoiska.’ Emery was once called upon in connection with his own name; but he was tired and embarrassed, and at length he stammered forth, apologetically, ‘Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me!’ unconscious that he had fulfilled all conditions, and had illustrated himself in a line from Shakespeare.
These intellectual exercises were not confined to the ‘Beef Steaks.’ There was in Tom Dibdin’s days a certain ‘Ad Libitum Club,’ where the intellect was as much exercised as the more sensual appetites were liberally gratified by supper and punch. At these jovial meetings, some one happening to name an individual in course of conversation, would be met by a cry of ‘Skull!’ which implied that the member was to consider the individual dead, if he were not so already; at all events, he was to furnish on the instant that individual’s rhymed epitaph. Tom Dibdin once chanced to refer to Isaac Read, the scholar and antiquary. The cry of ‘Skull’ was immediately raised, and Tom as instantaneously replied to it as follows:—
Reader! by these four lines take heed,
And mend your life, for my sake!
For you must die, like Isaac Read,
Though you read till your eyes ache.
On another occasion Tom, without thinking of the consequences, made some allusion to the materials for writing his own life. He was, in one breath, pronounced to be dead, and with the cry of ‘Skull!’ he was challenged to recite his own epitaph. It was furnished in the lively style that follows:—