Marianne Smith Denvil (1809-1889), wife of Henry Gaskell Denvil (1804-1866); East End theatre, taken over by Henry Denvil in the spring of 1840; wife Marianne was the house dramatist; At the beginning of 1841, Marianne was pregnant with their seventh child; over the course of 1841, she dramatised four of Prest’s novels while he adapted a fifth; Marianne was roughly the same age as Thomas Peckett Prest; Nothing is currently known of her early life or parentage; According to genealogist Stanley W. Clives, she married Henry Gaskell Denvil in 1823 when she was only fourteen and he was nineteen; she would only be writing to provide for her family; Thomas Frost (1821-1908) names Mrs. Denvil as a Lloyd author, alongside Prest, but I have found no corroborating evidence that she did write novels, let alone for Lloyd; In 1841, Henry and Marianne Denvil lived just around the corner from the Pavilion Theatre on Mount Street, now Mount Terrace, a short street that stretches east from New Road; children: 10-year-old Rosalie, William, 9, Manfred, 7, Isabella, 3, and Alice, 2;
Ela, the Outcast (1840-1841), Prest’s incredibly popular retelling of Hannah Maria Jones’s Gipsey Girl (1836), was first performed at the Pavilion in February 1841, Marianne nevertheless had plenty of material to construct her play; Marianne’s newborn son died during the second half of the year, but she had to keep writing; She ripped her next dramatisation, which premiered in July, from the pages of the Penny Sunday Times, ‘The Death Grasp’; Around the moment Kathleen appeared on stage, Punch made fun of Mrs. Denvil’s dramatisations, implying that she will dramatise anything; In early December 1842, the trustees complained that Henry was not repaying his debt and entered into legal proceedings. He retaliated by packing a full house on Monday 5 December, and then refusing to play. A performer estimated he ‘might have cleared £60, and perhaps more’ that evening. Marianne is mentioned in the account as having publicly supported her husband, shouting from the boxes, where she stood: ‘Bravo, Denvil, don’t play!’; While Henry found short-term employment at a variety of theatres after the Pavilion debacle, Marianne sold her plays to a different set of venues, including a dramatisation of Lloyd’s Helen Porter; or, a wife’s tragedy and a sister’s trials (1847) entitled Pride and Crime presented at the Effingham Saloon (October 1846), midway through the romance’s two-year serialisation.