Edmund Simpson

In 1828, when playing lead role in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, one of his legs was broken by an accident to the stage machinery, and he was crippled for life.

As a comedian, Simpson was studious and painstaking, and in his delineations intelligent and respectable, but there was ever attached to his representations a hardness of manner that interfered with his popularity.

The scenery of this noted resort was made up of flats and drops of the simplest construction, the properties were cheap, worn, and few in number, the costumes flimsy and tinselled, and the auditorium, before the rising of the curtain, usually filled with the stifling leakage of gas.

This third tier was an assembling-place for the dissolute of both sexes; one half the gallery was patronized by boys, servants, and sailors, and the remainder was devoted to the accommodation of Negroes.

As Frances Trollope has truly pictured, it was not an uncommon thing to see men rise on the front rows of the dress-circle in their shirt-sleeves, and between the acts turn their backs to the audience, while their better-halves sat munching apples and peeling oranges.