1. Thomas Holcroft was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet, novelist and translator.
17 Facts About Thomas Holcroft
1. 2.
Thomas Holcroft was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine to publish the first part of The Rights of Man.
3.
Thomas Holcroft's father had a shoemaker's shop and kept riding horses for hire, but he fell into difficulties and was reduced to hawking as a pedlar.
4.
Thomas Holcroft obtained work as a stable boy at Newmarket, at the stables of Hon.
5.
Thomas Holcroft gradually obtained a knowledge of French, German and Italian.
6.
Thomas Holcroft went on to act in various strolling companies until 1778, when he produced the play The Crisis; or, Love and Famine, at Drury Lane.
7.
Two years later Thomas Holcroft went to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald.
8.
Thomas Holcroft's novels include Alwyn, an account, largely autobiographical, of a strolling comedian, Anna St Ives, and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor.
9.
Thomas Holcroft wrote Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris, some volumes of verse, and translations from French and German.
10.
Thomas Holcroft joined the Society for Constitutional Information in 1792 and was appointed a member of a liaison committee to work with the LCS in early 1794.
11.
Thomas Holcroft died in 1809, not long after a deathbed reconciliation with his closest friend from the 1790s, William Godwin.
12.
Thomas Holcroft's Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.
13.
Thomas Holcroft resided later at Hamburg, and in 1805, after Cole's death, was married to Georges Danton's cousin Georges Nicholas Mergez, a general in the Napoleonic army.
14.
In 1778, three years after the death of his second wife, Thomas Holcroft married Diana Robinson, who died in 1780 after giving birth to a daughter Fanny Margaretta.
15.
Fanny Thomas Holcroft was the author of the noted Romantic anti-slavery poem, "The Negro", as well as novels such as Fortitude and Frailty and The Wife and the Lover.
16.
Thomas Holcroft was the daughter of a longstanding friend, Charles-Andre Mercier, brother of the French dramatist Louis-Sebastien Mercier.
17.
The widowed Louisa Mercier Thomas Holcroft remarried James Kenney, the dramatist, in 1812 and became the mother of three sons and three daughters.