Denvil, Henry Gaskell, 1804-1866

The East End theatre, located in Whitechapel, had been taken over by Henry Denvil in the spring of 1840. His wife Marianne was the house dramatist; Marianne Denvil, née Smith, was roughly the same age as Thomas Peckett Prest, but she outlived him by decades. 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. He claims Henry was of the successful Lancashire merchant family. Family legend states he might be the brother of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)’s husband. A contemporary press account claims that around 1820, before he appended Denvil to his last name, Henry acted in Liverpool under the name of Stuart; In 1841, Henry and Marianne Denvil lived just around the corner from the Pavilion Theatre (191-193 Whitechapel Road) on Mount Street, now Mount Terrace, a short street that stretches east from New Road; In contrast, when Henry Denvil went bankrupt at the beginning of 1847, he was 42 and Marianne, 37; . Henry Denvil took over the Pavilion in the spring of 1840 without any capital, as he admitted later;