[1] His first London appearance was in 1818 at Covent Garden as Sir Peter Teazle (in Sheridan's The School for Scandal), a part with which his name was always associated: he was an instant popular and critical success.

Farren and his brother played important roles in training Savill's daughter, Helen Faucit, for her successful acting career.

Apart from an unsuccessful turn as Shylock, he attempted female roles such as Meg Merrilies in a dramatization of Scott's Guy Mannering.

Now nearly sixty, he succeeded in two notable old-men roles by Mark Lemon: the title characters in Grandfather Whitehead and Old Parr.

The former was the father of Nellie Farren, long famous for boy's parts in Gaiety musical burlesques, in the days of Edward Terry and Fred Leslie.

In the types of characters he favored, "crusty old bachelors, jealous old husbands, stormy fathers, worrying uncles, or ancient fops with ghastly pretensions to amiability" (as Lewes described them), he was among the most highly regarded actors of his time.

Macready remembered him as justly famous for "studious correctness", but described him as second to William Dowton and Joseph Munden in "the rich quality of humor.

[8] Writing in The Times in 1855, Henry Morley called Farren "one of the most finished actors by whom the stage has been adorned in the present century."