Douglas William Jerrold
[3] The peace of 1815 ruined Jerrold's father;[4] on 1 January 1816 he took his family to London, where Douglas began work as a printer's apprentice, and in 1819 he became a compositor in the printing office of the Sunday Monitor.
Several short papers and copies of verses by him had already appeared in the sixpenny magazines, and a criticism of the opera Der Freischütz was admired by the editor, who requested further contributions.
Other plays followed, and in 1825 he was employed for a few pounds weekly to produce dramas and farces to order for George Bolwell Davidge of the Coburg Theatre.
Black-Eyed Susan consisted of various extreme stereotypes representing the forces of good, evil, the innocent and the corrupt, the poor and the rich, woven into a serious plot with comic sub-plots to keep the audience entertained.
The other patent houses also threw their doors open to him (the Adelphi had already done so), and in 1836 Jerrold became the manager of the Strand Theatre with W. J. Hammond, his brother-in-law.
[3] Jerrold acted in the 1851 production of Not So Bad As We Seem, a play written by Edward Bulwer, starring many notable Victorians (including Charles Dickens) and attended by Queen Victoria.
[3] Douglas Jerrold died at his house, Kilburn Priory, in London on 8 June 1857 and was buried at West Norwood Cemetery, where Charles Dickens was a pall-bearer.
His features were strongly marked and expressive, from the thin humorous lips to the keen blue eyes, gleaming from beneath the shaggy eyebrows.
In politics Jerrold was a Liberal, and he gave eager sympathy to Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini and Louis Blanc.
In social politics especially he took an eager part; he never tired of declaiming against the horrors of war, the luxury of bishops, or the iniquity of capital punishment.
His skill in construction and his mastery of epigram and brilliant dialogue are well exemplified in his comedy, Time Works Wonders (Haymarket, 26 April 1845).
1870), author of children's stories published in various periodicals and of Gladys in Grammarland, an imitation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.
