Biography
Compton was born in Huntingdon. His parents were John Mackenzie and his wife, formerly Mrs Elizabeth Symonds, and he was the sixth of eleven children. Through both parents, Compton was related to members of the medical profession. After being educated at Huntingdon and at a boarding school at Little Baddow in Essex, Compton was apprenticed to his mother's brother, who was a cloth merchant in Aldermanbury, near London. Compton was unhappy with a life in trade and, desiring instead a life on the stage, ran away twice but was returned to his family each time. However, after running away for a third time in 1826, his family finally accepted his wish to become an actor. He took his grandmother's maiden name, Compton, as his stage name.
Read more about this topic: Henry Compton (actor)
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“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)