N.p.: N.p., N.d. [c.1860-c.1930]

4to quarter album, 136pp. excluding blanks, c.70 letters and c. 100 cabinet cards and postcard photographs tipped in. Handwritten title page. Marbled endpapers. Boards worn and marked, spine rubbed.

An album of Victorian and Edwardian theatrical ephemera, including letters, cabinet cards, postcard photographs and programmes, compiled by amateur actor Arthur Malcolm Heathcote.

Arthur Malcolm Heathcote [1847-1934] fell in love with acting and the theatre while an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford: pictures survive of him playing a variety of women's parts, there being no female undergraduates at the time. He spent 1873 in Peru, where he and his travelling companion H.M. Gibbs put on a season of plays, complete with lighting, scenery and costumes, for the citizenry of Matahuasi. Back in England, Heathcote married Mary Young, a vicar's daughter, had six children, and took to staging amateur productions in and around Winchester, often with the assistance of two of his daughters. He moved to Compton, near Winchester, in 1919: The Heathcote Players, an Amateur Dramatics Society founded in his memory in 1936, thrived into the 1970s.

Heathcote was equally enthusiastic about theatre when sitting in the stalls, and this album, compiled by him over a lifetime of theatre-going, is a wide-ranging compendium of Victorian and Edwardian theatre-going. The title page, written in Heathcote's hand, reads 'Actors of my time. (from about 1860 onwards) most of whom I have seen. Collected by Arthur M. Heathcote'. Inside is a large collection of letters and ephemera from most of the great names of British theatre of the era, and stretching into the 1930s. Many seem to be responding to fan letters from Heathcote simply asking for autographs; others seem to have been asked (rather optimistically) to attend one or other of Heathcote's productions, and others (even more optimistically) have been offered parts in plays written by Heathcote himself. (No takers.) Towards the rear of the volume are two ALS from Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, here signing his full name of Anthony Hope Hawkins, and declining to allow Heathcote to adapt a story from Hope's The Heart of Princes Osra (1896) ('There is in existence a version of the book as a whole [...] I am reluctant -- and I am not sure that I am entitled -- to prejudice it.')

Among Heathcote's many correspondents are Ellen Terry, Sir Henry Irving, Forbes Robertson, Winifred Emery, Dion Boucicault, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Cyril Maude and Marie Tempest. The letters are accompanied by more than a hundred photographic postcards, many signed and with play quotations.