A graphic sketch by ‘Boz’ brings back to us the evening when Mr. Samuel Wilkins, the journeyman carpenter of small dimensions, accompanied his sweetheart, Miss Jemima Evans, to the Eagle. On their way from a distant suburb, they stopped at the Crown[59b] in Pentonville, to taste some excellent shrub in the little garden thereto attached, and finally arrived in the City Road. The Eagle garden was gravelled and planted, the refreshment-boxes were painted, and variegated lamps shed their light on the heads of the company. A Moorish band and military band were playing in the grounds; but the people were making for the concert-room, a place with an orchestra, ‘all paint, gilding, and plate glass.’ Here the audience were seated on elevated benches round the room, and ‘everybody’—and this is a touch of the later Dickens—‘was eating and drinking as comfortably as possible.’ Mr. Wilkins ordered rum-and-water with a lemon for himself and ‘sherry-wine’ for the lady, with some sweet caraway-seed biscuits. There was an overture on the organ and comic songs (let us add by the famous singers Henry Howell and Robert Glindon [60]), accompanied by the organ.
This must have been in 1835 or 1836, and Dickens would have been pleased at the all-embracing sympathies of the proprietor of the Eagle, who, a little later, organized so many charitable benefits. Thus, there was a benefit for the Blind Hebrew Brethren in the East, and a ball ‘for our friends of the Hebrew nation.’ On another night, a benefit ‘to relieve decayed Druids and their wives and orphans,’ and yet another night ‘for clothing the children of the needy.’
The coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838, like the previous coronation, gave a hint for new developments. The Eagle now, and for some years, took to itself the sub-title of the Coronation Pleasure-Grounds, and this year, or at the close of 1837, the place assumed nearly the form that it retained till its closing years. A covered promenade ran round the gardens; the great tavern at the corner of the City Road was erected, and a ball-room was completed. The Saloon was remodelled, with a pit—part of it railed off for smokers—and tiers of boxes. A new organ was set up by Parsons of Bloomsbury, and the old organ and self-acting piano were advertised for sale. The architectural genius of Rouse was doubtless at the bottom of these changes, but he gave the credit to the professionals, and announced that the whole was ‘planned by P. Punnett, Esq., and surveyed by R. Warton.’
The new Saloon was opened on January 1, 1838—for the Eagle was a winter as well as a summer resort [61a]—with a concert and an appropriate address by Moncrieff the dramatist. A programme of this year includes an overture by Weber, an air from Rossini, ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred,’ ‘All’s Well’ (duet), and ‘It’s all very well, Mr. Ferguson,’ one of several comic songs.
We approach the forties, when Rouse, like Phelps with Shakespeare at Sadler’s Wells, had the audacity to present a whole series of operas in the City Road. If these representations were not brilliant, they were praiseworthy efforts, and a revelation to East Central London. Rouse had a good band and chorus; an excellent tenor in Frazer from Covent Garden Theatre; C. Horn, the composer of ‘Cherry Ripe,’ Russell Grover, and various passable prima donnas. [61b] Among the operas announced in the bills of the forties we find the Barber of Seville, the Crown Diamonds, Don Giovanni, La Gazza Ladra, and Sonnambula. In these attempts to improve the musical taste of the neighbourhood, Rouse is reported to have lost £2,000 yearly, but as the tavern brought him in about £5,000 a year he could well afford the experiment.
At the Christmas of 1844, pantomime, which was to make the fame of the later Grecian theatre, found its place in the programme, and Richard Flexmore, a really agile, inventive, and humorous clown, made his appearance. A more remarkable actor, who joined the Grecian company about this time, and remained with it for five years, was Frederick Robson, who was given parts in the farces and vaudevilles. Robson’s great reputation dates from his performances at the Olympic from 1853 onwards, but at the Grecian he had already given an unmistakable taste of his quality. His famous song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’ was first heard at the Eagle. A man of strange physique, with a small body and a big head, he could do what he would with his audience—convulsing them with laughter by some outrageous drollery; thrilling them with ‘an electrical burst of passion or pathos, or holding them midway between terror and laughter as he performed some weirdly grotesque dance.’ [62a] In burlesque and extravaganza he displayed such passionate intensity that he seemed to give promise of a second Kean—yet a Kean he never became. A playgoer who saw him often has acutely suggested that ‘the very opportunity of exaggeration afforded by burlesque elicited the display of a quasi-tragic power which would have ceased if the condition of exaggeration were withdrawn.’ [62b]
March 1, 1851, was memorable at the Eagle as the last night of the proprietorship of old Thomas Rouse. He died at Boulogne a year later (September 26, 1852). During his twenty-seven years of management he had done much to deserve the title of ‘Bravo’ Rouse, with which his audiences were wont to hail him. For one thing, he was never bored by his own entertainments, but used to sit, night after night, in a box or other conspicuous place—a symbol of order, armed with a big stick, which one fancies he would have used if necessary.
His successor was Benjamin Oliver Conquest [63] (born 1805) a comic actor of ability, endowed with plenty of animal spirits, which had carried him from the part of a coach-builder or (according to others) of a bootmaker in real life to the stage part of a witch in Macbeth, and finally supported him through a twenty-eight weeks’ repetition at the Pavilion Theatre of a song, ‘Billy Barlow,’ which made a sensation something like ‘Jim Crow.’
He inaugurated the first night of his management at the Eagle, March 31, 1851, by the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with an opening address by E. L. Blanchard. On another night Blanchard’s burlesque, called Nobody in Town was produced with a part for Sam Cowell (1820–1866), the comic singer, famous for his clear articulation and finished style. The great feature of Conquest’s management was the production of ballets, only surpassed by those of Her Majesty’s Theatre. It happened that Mrs. Conquest, his wife, was a fine dancer and a singularly skilful teacher, who trained a long succession of pupils, including the graceful Kate Vaughan. The Miss Conquests, moreover, his daughters Amelia, Laura, and Isabella, formed in themselves a small troupe of capable dancers. In the gardens, too, the public dancing became more prominent, and a ‘monster platform’ was erected for the accommodation of 500 people. The masked ball was also occasionally tried, an experiment, as Vauxhall had shown, likely to be fraught with rowdyism, though the Eagle sternly refused admittance to clowns, harlequins, and pantaloons. One sensation of Conquest’s management was the ascent, in 1852, of Coxwell’s balloon, with the acrobats H. and E. Buislay suspended on a double trapeze from its car.