Watts Phillips (16 November 1825 – 2 December 1874) was an English illustrator, novelist and playwright, known for his play The Dead Heart, which served as a model for Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
She described him as a "bright and buoyant character", "a really brilliant, energetic man, who had many gifts and accomplishments, with a cheerful, undaunted spirit, which to the last helped him to encounter trials, and a vein of humour which was as much at the service of his friends as it was to that of the public."
Acting did not pay well and, at the urging of his father, Phillips trained to be an illustrator under George Cruikshank, who remained a friend for the rest of his life.
Phillips separated from his wife a few years later on the grounds that she "made my life a misery on account of her ungovernable and most wicked temper."
He lived "a gay Boulevard life" immersed in the French literary, artistic and theatre world, becoming friends with Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and others.
He suffered from chronic indigestion, headaches and pains of all kinds, sometimes being confined to bed for weeks at a time and forced to relinquish lucrative assignments.
While critically acclaimed, Joseph Chavigny and The Poor Strollers were not popular with the audience who were used to the farces and melodramas performed at the Adelphi and did not take to Phillips' terse, epigrammatic dialogue.
When a dramatisation of A Tale of Two Cities was mounted at the Lyceum by Madame Celeste in January 1860, Phillips' friend, Mr. Coleman, wrote, "society divided itself into two factions – the Celestites and Dickensites, the Websterites and Phillipsites.
Phillips, who was unaware at the time that Dickens was familiar with his play, was devastated by the situation, writing to Webster that he found it "very heartbreaking."
Circumstances turned against him – in the form of illness or bankruptcy of managers, unavailability of actors or theatres, unfounded charges that he took his plots from French originals, the public taste for 'sensation' drama – and he began to experience disappointments.