Our image of the early nineteenth-century playwright is coloured by Dickens's ‘MrJohnson’ (alias Nicholas Nickleby), who in the space of twenty-four hours is expected to write a play designed ‘to bring out the whole strength of the company’, while contriving simultaneously ‘to introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs’ which the manager happens to have bought cheap at a sale the other day. Just the same as they do in London, says Mr Crummies, where ‘[t]hey look up some dresses and have a piece written to fit'em’.

While it is by no means the whole truth about a profession as diverse as that of the nineteenth-century dramatist, Dickens's fictional account had a secure basis in reality at the middle and lower reaches of the market in mid-century. Sam Wild, proprietor of one of the best-known portable theatres in the north of England, reckoned that ‘there were always to be found authors prepared at short notice to write a new piece, or to adapt an old one to meet the capabilities of an establishment’. No more was necessary than ‘to state what talent you had, your scenic resources, and the extent of your wardrobe, and they would get you a new piece out in a couple of days’.