James Albery

On leaving school he entered an architect's office and started to write plays.

His farce A Pretty Piece of Chiselling was given its first production by the Ingoldsby Club in 1864.

After some failures, his adaptation, Dr Davy, was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London (1866).

Albery was the author of a large number of other plays and adaptations, including Coquettes (1870); Pickwick, a four-act drama based on Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1871); The Pink Dominos (1877), a farce that ran for an extremely successful 555 performances and was one of a series of adaptations from the French which he made for the Criterion Theatre, where his wife, the actress and theatrical manager Mary Moore (who after his death became Lady Wyndham (1861–1931)), played the leading parts; Jingle (a farcical version of Pickwick), produced at the Lyceum in 1878;[1] and Oriana (with music by Frederic Clay).

His one-act operetta, The Spectre Knight, with music by Alfred Cellier, ran as a companion piece to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer and then H.M.S.