The Actor-Manager

by Leonard Merrick

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Leonard Merrick was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the "novelist's novelist."

Reviews

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonard Merrick, who failed as an actor, loved the stage as only a spurned lover could. He was always at his best when writing about the theatre, and ‘The Actor Manager’ is one of his most theatrical books.

It begins, in classic Merrick style, with a young actor and actress meeting in a highly unromantic chop-house on Christmas Eve. Their impecunious and unglamorous lives are contrasted painfully with their glowing and idealistic theatrical dream-lives. It is made clear that such dreams are bound to be disappointed.

But Merrick is too humane a writer too punish his characters harshly (he is no Gissing): or rather, he punishes them with success rather than with failure, while making it clear that their success is a quirk of fortune, and that for the vast mass of struggling dreamers there is no such luck. The young actor breaks through, becoming the titular ‘Actor Manager’, but his very success brings him into contact with the sordid realities of the theatre, the follies of love, and the moral dilemmas of the ‘new’ man and the ‘new’ woman.

The book is all very ‘modern’ for its time, and observed with meticulous realism. These very strengths may make it seem ‘dated’ to some modern readers. But when a taste for Merrick is acquired – perhaps it is necessary to love the theatre, and to be of a melancholy disposition – it is not easily lost.