London
After just a few months in Edinburgh Macdonald travelled south to London, where, on 5 September 1787, Vimonda opened at George Colman’s theatre in the Haymarket, the principal characters played by Mr Bensley, Mr Aickin, Mr Kemble, Mr Johnson, Mr Bannister jun., Miss Woolery, and Mrs Kemble. A review the next day praised the acting. Another reviewer suggested that, whilst Vimonda had some of the faults of a first play, the playwright had promise.
With the composer William Shield he started work on an opera. To earn some money, Macdonald wrote for newspapers, mostly satirical pieces under the pseudonym Matthew Bramble (the name of a character in the novel Humphrey Clinker, by fellow Scot, Tobias Smollett). Financial worries forced the family to move from Brompton to ‘a mean residence’ in Kentish Town. Although by nature buoyant, amiable, and engaging, the pressure of his hardships overwhelmed Macdonald, and ‘having no powerful friends to patronise his abilities, and suffering under the infirmities of a weak constitution, he fell victim, at the age of three and thirty, to sickness, disappointment and misfortune.’ Andrew Macdonald died on 22 August 1790, leaving his wife and young child destitute.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Macdonald (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word london:
“I don’t care very much for literary shrines and haunts ... I knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle’s yard. And when I said, “Why throw a stone into Carlyle’s yard?” she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“Pancakes and fritters,
Say the bells of St. Peter’s.
Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells of Whitechapel.
Kettles and pans,
Say the bells of St. Ann’s.”
—Unknown. The Bells of London (l. 7–12)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)