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toward the Palace where there was promise of more people and more food and drink. As the popular song goes, there is no honour given to white hairs when they are buried, buried down in London town.
    Sophie and I hurried through the rest of our picnic.
    * * *
    In the afternoon, I was back inside the theatre preparing a prompt script for Crosby Ravensworth . I continue to have fits of apoplexy about the pantomime. Mr. Farquhar Pratt was not at all convincing at the company meeting yesterday. He is usually quite free with his ideas when he is writing; usually, he will regale me and anybody else who will listen with a hundred and fifty plots which are clattering about inside his addled brain or he will babble on about the creation of a villain, black-moustachioed and hissing freely like the serpent in the proverbial garden, to rival Iago. There is no such expansiveness in the old man now.
    The fissure of time between now and Boxing Day began to crumble and to implode at the precise moment when the new apprentice came into view. The opening of the panto, toward which we are all in this theatre labouring with singleness of pur pose, now seems two days, and not two months, away. I need remind no one that the Boxing Day opening is the most significant event of the New Albion’s season. Upon its success depends the annual New Year’s bonus which all employees of the theatre have come to expect. There will be much gnashing of teeth if the play script is not worthy.
    Saturday, October 12, 1850
    A brief and anonymous article appeared in The Tatler today, dealing with the daily movements of our own Fanny Hardwick, a young actress with the company. The article is symptomatic of the kind of smutty journalism we have come to expect. I quote the opening paragraphs:

    While shopping for trendy clothes in Covent Garden last week, the author happened to see young Fanny Hardwick, celebrated beauty and now actress at the New Albion Theatre. She was dressed in a fashionable skirt and shawl, a hat partially covering her auburn ringlets. Carrying a plethora of packages, no doubt articles of clothing she had purchased on that day, she negotiated her way through the crowded streets. The author remained at a distance but followed her from Covent Garden to Leicester Square, where the morning rain had rendered the cobblestones so slippery as to make it impossible for Miss Hardwick to keep her footing. A stiletto heel caught in the fissure between the stones, and the beautiful young actress slid to the pavement, her skirt and crinolines rising to a point immediately before the knee. Many male admirers, the present author included, were in awe of Miss Hardwick’s pristine beauty, her shapely legs exposed inside satin stockings, her tall red shoes laced past the ankle.
    It has long been rumored that Miss Hardwick comes of genteel stock, and if sheer physical perfection is an indication of good breeding, then the present author professes to be a convert to that theory. The young actress has often been seen in the company of an aristocratic-looking young man. If she is indeed a rich man’s daughter, what might have possessed her to take up a life in the theatre, especially in a theatre so scandalous for its panderings to a criminal class of spectators as the New Albion in Whitechapel? It is well known that the New Albion does not even have separate dressing rooms for its actors and its actresses. How can a young lady of quality maintain her innocence in such an environment? The pres ent author promises to cogitate upon these questions in the future and to investigate the probability of Miss Hardwick’s noble lineage. Further installments on the lives of actors and actresses of London will be available in future columns of The Tatler.
    Not only are the facts wrong in this blasphemous piece of journalism – the New Albion does now have partitioned dressing rooms for actresses and actors, in part owing to the agitation of Miss Hardwick herself – the