Herman Charles Merivale

His friends in literary and dramatic circles included William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan, Edmund Yates, Charles Dickens and others.

[2] For John Hollingshead he produced a burlesque, The Lady of Lyons Married and Settled, performed at the Gaiety Theatre (1878), and Called There and Back (1884).

In writing The Don, and other works, Merivale was assisted by his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Pittman, whom he married in London on 13 May 1878.

[4][5] In 1879 he went to Australia on the advice of his physician, and then returned with his health recovered, only to discover that the power of attorney he had left with a defaulting solicitor had cost him his entire fortune.

He died suddenly of heart failure on 14 January 1906 at 69 Woodstock Road, Acton, Middlesex,[7] and was buried in his father's grave in Brompton Cemetery.