William Edward Sheridan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where in his late teens he clerked for several years at Benjamin Loring & Co., a stationery store on State Street.

He made his stage debut at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum on March 15, 1858, as Robin in Thomas Morton's five-act comedy, Town and Country.

He enlisted in the spring of 1861 at Cincinnati with the Sixth Ohio Infantry and rose to the rank of captain before a sniper’s bullet fractured a forearm during the Battle of Resaca, Georgia.

The role he was most identified with over his career was as Joseph Fioretti, a part he played numerous times in Leonard Grover's farce melodrama, Our Boarding House.

On the night of August 30, 1872, she was one of the estimated seventy souls[11] lost when the passenger steamer Metis sank off the coast of Watch Hill, Rhode Island after colliding with the schooner Nettie Cushing.

Some time after Sheridan's death, Davenport fell into a grim poverty that was fueled by what would prove to be a fatal drug addiction, a fate suffered earlier by her sister, actress Etta Waters.

[2][3][13] That October, Sheridan's widow along with a group of friends and admirers dedicated a modest monument at Sydney's Waverley Cemetery to commemorate the actor's life.