My Lord,
The patronage with which you have been pleased to honour the productions of a minstrel who appreciated Melody as the soul of Music, and whose metrical attempts to portray the rough-hewn natural characters, and stimulate the gallant exertions, of a class to whom their Country is so infinitely indebted, entitles your Lordship, and the patriotic Board who have added their distinguished sanction of the following Selection, to the thanks of all lovers of Old English Ballads, who retain what SHAKSPEARE calls a smack of predilection for home-brewed excellence […]
THOMAS DIBDIN: dedication of Songs by Charles Dibdin to The Right Honourable the Earl of Minto, 1 January 1841
The twelfth child of a parish clerk and a long-suffering mother, who gave birth to at least fourteen children, Charles Dibdin was exceptionally gifted and versatile, and throughout his life was active as singer, actor, violinist, organist, poet, painter, entrepreneur and song-writer. Self-taught as a composer, by the age of fifteen he was occasionally singing in the chorus at Covent Garden. Aged eighteen, he published A Collection of English Songs and Cantatas; the following year The Shepherd’s Artifice, for which he wrote both words and music, was premiered at Covent Garden, with Dibdin in the lead role. As an opera singer, he specialized in character parts, lacking the figure for main roles. He collaborated on many playhouse operas with the Irish librettist Isaac Bickerstaffe, and specialized in comic operas such as Lionel and Clarissa (1767). He left Covent Garden in the summer of 1768 and began a seven-year spell under Garrick at Drury Lane, where The Padlock was premiered in 1768, and in which Dibdin played Mungo, the first blackface role in British theatre. The only surviving operas he wrote with Bickerstaffe are The Recruiting Serjeant (1770) and Lionel and Clarissa. Librettist and composer also collaborated on The Seraglio (1776), whose influence on Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail has been much debated.
As he grew older, Dibdin became increasingly truculent. He married before he was twenty, soon left his wife for a pantomime dancer, Harriet Pitt, by whom he had two sons, and then abandoned her for a Drury Lane singer, Miss Wilde. Though Garrick was godfather to one of his sons, he refused to renew Dibdin’s contract when it expired, and the composer, deeply in debt, was forced to flee to France, where he wrote a number of libretti and dialogues in an effort to pay off his debts. Due to the worsening political situation in France, he returned in 1778 to London, where he was engaged once more at Covent Garden. With Charles Hughes he now turned his energies to creating a new theatre, the Royal Circus, where riding displays (Hughes had owned a riding school) alternated with short operas and ballets. The indefatigable Dibdin composed the entire repertory and also coached the children. He mismanaged the business side of the theatre, sustained substantial debts and spent a while in the debtors’ prison, where with undiminished energy he wrote a bitter book about his experiences, The Royal Circus Epitomised. Released, he attempted to emigrate to India, and to raise the money he made a nine-month tour of English towns, with programmes of ‘Reading and Music’, accompanying himself ‘on an instrument of a peculiar kind, combining the properties of the pianoforte and the chamber organ’, to which he attached bells, side-drum, tambourine and gong. He finally set sail for India, reached Dunkirk, where he became violently seasick, and disembarked at Torbay. From 1789 to the middle of 1805, he gave a series of one-man shows (he called them ‘Table Entertainments’) in London at several venues, including the King’s Street auction rooms, the Lyceum and the Polygraphic Rooms. The success was such that in 1792 he opened another theatre, the Sans-Souci, which had been built to his specifications, followed by the New Sans-Souci four years later. After the declaration of war against Napoleonic France in May 1803, the Government asked Dibdin to produce British war songs on a monthly basis, as a result of which he was given a pension of £200 by the Government. Though the pension was cancelled in 1807, he continued the shows for a few more seasons. His deep bass voice, however, had now faded, and to help him in his financial stress a dinner was arranged in his honour which raised £640. He struggled on for another few years but died destitute in his house in Arlington Street, Camden Town, paralysed by an unknown illness.
This extraordinary man, apart from composing many hundreds of songs, operas, pantomimes and dialogues, produced three music text books, and at least ten other publications, the most remarkable of which are his autobiography, The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin … With the Words of Six Hundred Songs (4 vols., 1803), which describes his relations with Garrick and other actors; and Observations on a Tour Through Almost the Whole of England and a Considerable Part of Scotland (2 vols., 1801–2), which he also illustrated with sepia prints of his own paintings. He was buried in Camden Town Cemetery, known now as St Martin’s Gardens. His tomb was inscribed with a few lines from ‘Tom Bowling’ (‘Though his body’s under hatches,/His soul is gone aloft!’) but fell into disrepair. A newspaper article reported the neglect in 1889, and as a result of public fundraising a monument was raised in his honour – a Celtic cross with a carved anchor, rope and lyre.
Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of our crew;
No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,
For Death has broach’d him to.
His form was of the manliest beauty,
His heart was kind and soft;
Faithful below he did his duty,
And now he’s gone aloft.