Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians

About the show

Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians is an 1837 comedy in three acts adapted from Dickens's novel The Pickwick Papers by William Thomas Moncrieff. It was first performed at the Royal Strand Theatre in London on 17 July 1837. W. T. Moncrieff's 'Farcical Comedy' Sam Weller; or the Pickwickians opened at the Royal Strand Theatre in 1837 in a production directed by William John Hammond (1797–1848) The production was memorable for the Alfred Jingle of John Lee and the Sam Weller of Hammond. In the same year a production opened in New York and Philadelphia where it had a good run despite poor reviews. Dickens complained against this adaptation While Moncrieff had apologised to ‘Boz’ in his notes on the playbill this failed to placate Dickens, who caricatured Moncrieff as the 'literary gentleman' and actor-manager Vincent Crummles in his novel Nicholas Nickleby "who had dramatized in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels, as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out". Moncrieff's response was to plagiarise Nickleby in another production in 1839. As the title suggests, Moncrieff decided to focus on Sam Weller, the main comic character in the novel, rather than on Samuel Pickwick himself. The play had a revival at the New Strand Theatre in May and July 1838 with largely the original cast. The play was adapted in 1850 by Thomas Hailes Lacy as The Pickwickians; or the Peregrinations of Sam Weller as a comic drama in three acts in prose.