John Doran (writer) - Works

Works

At the age of seventeen Doran wrote a melodrama Justice, or the Venetian Jew, which was on 8 April 1824 produced at the Surrey Theatre. Before leaving England Doran had begun writing on the London Literary Chronicle (absorbed in the Athenæum in 1828), and during his time abroad he became a regular contributor. A collection of his Parisian sketches and Paris letters appeared in 1828 under the title of Sketches and Reminiscences.

Doran began in 1830 to supply the Bath Journal with lyrical translations from the French, German, Latin, and Italian, two of his favourite authors being Béranger and Catullus. In 1835 he published the History of Reading.

In 1852 Doran published the memoir of Marie Thérèse Charlotte, Madame Royale, under the title of Filia Dolorosa. The first 115 pages had been written by Isabella Frances Romer, who died, leaving the fragment. In 1852 he also edited a new edition of Charles Anthon's text of the Anabasis of Xenophon. In 1853 he prefixed a life of Edward Young to a reissue of the Night Thoughts, rewritten in 1854 for Young's complete works.

At the same period Doran began a series of popular works. In 1854 he published Table Traits and Something on Them and Habits and Men, both rich in anecdotes. In 1855 he published in 2 vols. The Queens of the House of Hanover. In 1856 appeared Knights and their Days. In 1857 Doran published, in 2 vols. a historical compilation entitled ‘Monarchs retired from Business.’ In 1858 he published his History of Court Fools,, and edited the Bentley Ballads, which passed through several editions. In 1859 he produced New Pictures and Old Panels. Nearly at the same time he published for the first time from the original manuscripts, in 2 vols., The Last Journals of Horace Walpole.

In 1860 appeared Doran's Book of the Princes of Wales, and in 1861 his Memoir of Queen Adelaide. In 1860 Doran published his most elaborate work, Their Majesties' Servants, a history of the English stage, of which a new edition was issued in 1887, revised by Robert W. Lowe. Saints and Sinners, or in the Church and about it, appeared in 1868. In the same year he edited Henry Tuckerman's The Collector, a series of essays on books, newspapers, pictures, inns, authors, doctors, holidays, actors, and preachers. Immediately after the raising of the siege of Paris he brought out A Souvenir of the War of 1870–1.

In 1873 he published A Lady of the Last Century, on Elizabeth Montagu. Three years later he published, in 2 vols. Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence, 1740–86, based on the letters of Sir Horace Mann to Horace Walpole. Also in 2 vols. was London in the Jacobite Times(1877). Memories of our Great Towns, with Anecdotic Gleanings concerning their Worthies and their Oddities (1878) was a humorous volume. His final publication was produced as a serial contribution to Temple Bar, and published posthumously in 1885 as In and about Drury Lane, a kind of appendix to Their Majesties' Servants.