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GRECIAN DRAMATISTS 89
the time came for dialogue to suit the stage-carpenter's convenience according to whatever prison or precipice, rail-smash or shipwreck, waterfall or earthquake, heaven or hell, needed to be brought out of the scene-dock before the moths got at it. Keeping pace with energetic scene-shifters was hard work. Another stage-struck, would-be author, tall, lanky and hook-nosed, was allowed to help. Inspired by the manager's example of turning Oliver to Conquest, Metzger suggested to his new partner, " I'll be Meritt and you be Success ". But the newcomer, not liking this strong smack of the Brothers Knockabout, stuck to his own name of Henry Pettitt. There was nothing of the stage in his upbringing apart from a childhood's prank at Sadler's Wells, where he went on in a crowd and got badly knocked about through fighting too realistically. He was a writing-master before making the change in his career that led to a fortune of nearly .£50,000. From a school at Camden Town he set out on his travels, first as advance agent for a circus in which he played Tybalt in Romeo And Juliet on horseback. As business manager of an opera company he was kept so short of funds that he stole the proprietor's Christmas goose so that the singers should not go without a Christmas dinner. Such adventures did not teach him stagecraft, nor was he born with it, since his father was a civil engineer. Yet as soon as he entered the Grecian as its treasurer, at the age of nineteen, Pettitt turned dramatist. With Meritt he wrote British Born, which was so full of patriotism that it was immediately bought by Belasco and presented as American Born in San Francisco.
When rebuilt in 1877 the Grecian was advertised as " one of the largest and most beautiful theatres in London, and capable of holding nearly 5,000 persons ". The opening piece by Conquest and Pettitt was Bound To Succeed ; or, A Leaf From The Captain s Log Book, a tale of Muscular Christianity (so the programmes said) from Tasmania to Tasmania Dock, with the manager as an inventive genius and his son as " a nervous gentleman ". When offered £21,000 for his theatre (by an aspiring impresario who soon parted with it at a loss to the Salvation Army), Conquest transferred to the Surrey and made that birthplace of melodrama the scene of its renaissance. The old house, keeping up its old habits, had been burned down in 1865. The new house had a proscenium of a size worthy to frame the most awful disasters the new proprietor could think of, but before his arsenal of terror-striking appliances could start production, Meritt and Pettitt had been inveigled into exploiting Grecian drama for somebody else's benefit. Drury Lane was now under the command of a young actor, Augustus Harris, son of the Augustus Harris who had staged grand