SOURCE: An introduction toThe Life of Thomas Holcroft, Constable & Company, 1925, pp. xv-lv.

In the following excerpt, Colby surveys Holcroft's life and works.

Tom Moore once said that he rated the autobiographies of Holcroft and of Gifford “the two most interesting specimens in the language.” A hundred years have passed since the remark was made by Moore, and the relative merits of the present volume may be less. Yet its absolute and intrinsic value is still very great. As a novelist, Holcroft was undistinguished. As a playwright, he was commonplace, in spite of undoubted successes, in spite of the distinction attaching to his name by his piracy of Le Mariage de Figaro, in spite of his fortuitous translation of Pixerécourt's Coelina into the first English melodrama, and in spite of the repute attained by his comedy of The Road to Ruin. As a radical revolutionary, he believed...