Thomas Holcroft

Thomas Holcroft , 1745-1809, English dramatist and novelist. Sometimes credited with having introduced melodrama to the London stage, he is the author of the sentimental play The Road to Ruin (1792). His novels include Alwyn (1780) and two inspired by the revolutionary ideas of his friend William Godwin, Anna St. Ives (1792) and Hugh Trevor (1794-97).

Bibliography: See his memoirs (1816).

Holcroft, Thomas (1745–1809), successively stable-boy, shoemaker, actor, and author. His varied and energetic life is described in his Memoirs (edited and completed by his friend Hazlitt), which contain early reminiscences of Foote and the aged Macklin, and later accounts of radical associates such as Godwin and Tooke. He was indicted for high treason in 1794, and spent eight weeks in Newgate before being discharged. He wrote a number of sentimental plays, of which the best-known was The Road to Ruin (1792): also several novels, including Anna St Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794), both of them influenced by Godwin's radical philosophy.

Holcroft, Thomas (1744–1809), English dramatist, usually credited with the introduction of melodrama to the English stage with his A Tale of Mystery (1802), an adaptation of Pixérécourt's Coelina; ou, L'Enfant de mystère (1800). He was already well known as the author of The Road to Ruin (1792), with its excellent roles of Goldfinch and Old Dornton, favourite parts with many elderly character actors in both London and in the USA. Holcroft, who was entirely self-taught, was a very good French scholar and had a phenomenal memory, a combination which enabled him, while in Paris, to learn by heart Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro from hearing it on stage a number of times, and to produce it in London in 1784 as The Follies of a Day. Among his other comedies the most successful was Love's Frailties (1794), based on a German original, Gemminger's Der deutsche Hausvater. He was also a friend of Charles Lamb and editor of The Theatrical Recorder, 1805–6.