From the archive, 25 April 1890: Life and times of a long-forgotten dramatist

Watts Phillips, a 19th century English dramatist, never achieved the fame of his contemporaries, but lived the life of a great man of letters
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Watts Phillips English dramatist circa 1850
Watts Phillips, long-forgotten English dramatist and man of letters. Photograph: Hulton Archive

In a small book just issued of disjointed reminiscences of Watts Phillips, the author of "The Dead Heart," his friend Mr. John Coleman gives a sketch of a literary career that reads like one of the old stories of Grub-street.

Living just on the eve of the later golden age of playwrights, Phillips was in a state of actual want for the greater number of his days, and their premature close was hastened by an illness that left him too weak to write and too poor to live without writing.

A letter written a little before his death entreats a friend to keep Phillips's address secret from other friends whom he could not entertain, and throughout his life he was forced to eke out his income in a multitude of obscure journalistic walks.

At one time he was the colleague of Smith, "the most popular novelist in the world," and dictated imposing novels of high life and passion for the London Journal. At another, as Mr. Coleman has related before, he edited, illustrated, and wrote the bulk of a serio-comic weekly paper; and through all his adventures he continued to write letters of the true Bohemian flavour, as lively in their thought and slovenly in their expression as the familiar letters of Goldsmith or Sheridan.

Phillips was, of course, a very different man from either of the latter. He had certain moderate capacities for writing, but there was a touch of genius in his eye for the effect of a situation, and it was developed into a safe instinct by his early intimacy with Phelps and the Sadler's Wells stage.

Phillips saw his own strength, and wisely went to Paris to make his constructive skill still greater by the study and intimacy of Scribe and Dumas. The dramatic Alexander the Great was his chief model, and Phillips related with the glee of a stage manager Dumas' triumphant comparison between himself, the working dramatist, and poor Victor Hugo, who must needs put up with the fame of a poet.

His Parisian days, when it was his work to lend a hand now and then among the abundant assistants of Dumas' literary production, when also he met and believed in Gambetta during his playtime at the Café Bacine, were the best days that poor Phillips ever had.

Never was a man more unlucky in the day he was born. At the beginning of the century "The Dead Heart" would have fetched a great price, and a far greater if it were new to-day. But its author wrote at a time of reaction, the play only brought him three hundred pounds, and he was dead before the reaction was spent.

He was not a great man of letters, but he lived the life of one: he was always in straits and always full of gaiety, and one who had never seen his play might readily conclude from his letter that he was a remarkable man.

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