DICKENS (Charles).
Original poster for the production of Not So Bad As We Seem, with Mr. Nightingale's Diary, at the Assembly Rooms, Newcastle.
DICKENS (Charles).
Original poster for the production of Not So Bad As We Seem, with Mr. Nightingale's Diary, at the Assembly Rooms, Newcastle.
This Newcastle appearance was the twentieth performance of this production, in which the three act comedy by Edward Bulwer-Lytton Not So Bad As We Seem was paired with Dickens’ (and Mark Lemon’s) own one-act play Mr. Nightingale’s Diary (being performed for the nineteenth time). The evening was to be capped by a “comic scene (from the French)” performed by Dickens and Lemon entitled Two O’Clock in the Morning.
A quintessentially Dickensian production, it was directed by him under the name of “The Amateur Company of the Guild of Literature and Art”, a charitable organisation founded by Dickens himself and his close friend Bulwer-Lytton “To encourage life assurance and other Provident habits among Authors and Artists; to render such assistance to both as shall never compromise their independence; and to found a new Institution where honourable rest from arduous labour shall still be associated with the discharge of congenial duties.”
The production was not only the first time Dickens and Wilkie Collins met, who of course went on to form a deep friendship, but also may have influenced Bleak House, which he was working on at the time. The first performance was at Dickens’ home at Devonshire Terrace on the 1 August 1851, before the Queen and Prince Albert.
With old horizontal folds present, but not offensively so.
