He may have been a Sephardic Jew,[4] though other accounts list him as having been born in Dantzig as a Prussian nobleman or as a Polish colonel, who was a cousin of King Stanisław Leszczyński.

[6] D. P. began having financial problems in 1794,[5] but he sent his eldest child, Henrietta, abroad to study at the Kensington House Academy in 1796, under the care of his London merchant, Charles McGarel.

[17] She had little contact with her family until 1810, when her grandmother, Dorothy Thomas, arrived with her two youngest children; over a dozen of her Coxall, Garraway, Robertson, and Fullerton cousins; and some of her own siblings from Demerara to enroll them in school.

[18][20] Simon very probably secured a dowry from her grandmother to facilitate her marriage to Susanna's son Augustus John James Sala on 22 June 1812.

She also took voice and dance lessons with Diomiro Tramezzani and James Harvey D'Egville, privately performing at musical evenings for elite guests,[14] when she was not giving birth or tending to the needs of her thirteen children.

Sala's review in The Literary Gazette noted her stage fright and several missteps, describing her voice as a sweet mezzo soprano which brought "great feeling and delicacy" to her performance.

[1] Following the custom and habit of the elite clients she sought to instruct, Sala moved the family between Brighton and London, as the social season dictated.

[32] She performed semi-annual benefits, with the intent of attracting students from the aristocratic audiences[33] and many of the actors and singers who participated in the events waved their usual fees.

[37] Throughout the 1836 and 1837 season, she was the main actress at the St James's Theatre,[1] performing in Dickens' plays, The Strange Gentleman, as Julia Dobbs and in Is She His Wife?,[25] as Mrs. Limbury[38] earning acclaim for the roles.

[40] She returned to England in 1841 and appeared with her children in The Yellow Rose and her son Charles' adaptation of Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, in Dover, though neither were successful.

[41] To earn the fare back to London, she organized two masked balls to entertain her grandmother, Dorothy Thomas, who was in Britain, visiting family.

Living in a rundown boardinghouse and having failed to attract students, for the 1842 season Sala performed at the Princess's Theatre on Oxford Street.

[42] Her youngest child, George, was "a literary luminary in his day",[50] but his memoirs, and in particular his autobiographical novels, fabricate his history and reveal both the bitterness he held against his mother and his own racism, caused by trying to be accepted as white in an era in which race mattered significantly.