Bartley [Thomas] Campbell

Campbell, Bartley [Thomas] (1843–88), playwright. He began his career as a newspaperman in his hometown of Pittsburgh, later working on Louisville and Cincinnati papers. In 1869 he founded the Southern Monthly Magazine in New Orleans, but with the success of his first‐produced play, Through Fire (1871), he abandoned journalism and determined to support himself solely by his playwriting. Although Campbell is frequently called America's first fully professional dramatist, he often produced and directed plays as well. After writing the social comedy Peril; or, Love at Long Branch (1872) for E. L. Davenport, he helped convert R. M. Hooley's Chicago theatre (Hooley's Theatre) from minstrelsy into a legitimate playhouse where they staged such plays of his as the melodrama Fate (1873), the domestic drama Risks; or, Insure Your Life (1873), the Civil War play The Virginian (1874), the “military comedy” On the Rhine (1875), the Irish rebellion drama Gran Uaile (1875), and the comedy My Foolish Wife (1877). Not until an 1876 trip to London did Campbell begin to write the type of Western dramas for which he would become famous, most memorably The Vigilantes; or, the Heart of the Sierras (1877) and My Partner (1879). His other noteworthy plays include the melodrama The Galley Slave (1879), the Russian drama Siberia (1882), and The White Slave (1882). A number of other plays that Campbell wrote and produced at the same time failed, with losses outrunning the income from his hits. Unable to handle emotionally the financial problems that followed, he was committed to a mental institution where he died two years later. For a short while, from about 1875 to 1883, Campbell not only was the most successful American playwright but also was hailed by many critics as the best the country had yet produced. Reaction quickly set in, and at his death Andrew C. Wheeler, writing as Nym Crinkle, noted, “He never quite reached the level of literary greatness, but he overshot the level of generous impulse—if impulse can have a level.” Nevertheless, his best plays remain eminently readable, and probably, if given a chance, eminently playable.

Campbell, Thomas (1733-1795), clergyman and author. Born in Glack, Co. Tyrone, and educated at TCD. A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (1776), in forty-five letters, purports to be the record of an Englishman's tour, and argues for political union. A Diary of a Visit to England in 1755 (1854) was discovered in Sydney, Australia, where his brother Charles had emigrated in 1810. It describes meetings with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Burke.