Cawdell, J.
The miscellaneous poems of J. Cawdell, comedian: consisting of a variety of serious and comic prologues, epilogues, pastorals, songs, descriptions, and epigrams. Together with several sentimental pieces. To which is annexed an answer to a late libellous compilation, called the Stockton Jubilee.
Sunderland, James Graham for the author 1785.
Full Description
8vo. Engr frontis, 194pp. A printed description of the frontispiece pasted to front pastedown endpaper. A good copy in orig boards, the endpapers renewed for a previous owner.
First and only edition of this scarce volume which as well as being a principal source for the life and times of its author provides as its frontispiece a handsome engraving which is one of the few to portray the interior of an English provincial theatre of the eighteenth century (or is perhaps rather a stage set image of such a theatre interior). James Cawdell, who died in 1800, had an active career as a comic actor and theatre manager in the north-east of England, appearing at local theatres in Durham, North Shields, Sunderland, Scarborough and Whitby, and this volume provides the reader of today with a real glimpse of how a professional actor and theatre manager had (sometimes literally) to “sing for his supper” in late eighteenth-century England. The list of subscribers which concludes the volume gives the names of sixty-four “theatrical gentlemen and ladies”, as well as a long list of names “from Baldock and the neighbourhood” (one may guess that Cawdell had family ties there).