Authoring the Managerial Memoir

This essay tells the story of the production and reception of John Ebers’s Seven Years of the King’s Theatre (1828), the first book-length managerial memoir published in London. The book has long been used as a source of information about the Italian opera in the 1820s, based on Ebers’s authority as the lessee of the King’s Theatre and as someone with an insider’s knowledge of the leading singers and dancers. However, as this essay demonstrates, Ebers played little role in writing the book, even though his name appears on the title page as the author. Instead, the book’s production was driven by its publisher, William Harrison Ainsworth. When Ainsworth became engaged to Ebers’s daughter in 1826, Ebers gave Ainsworth his publishing business to run as his own. When Ebers’s reign as manager of the King’s Theatre then ended in 1827, Ainsworth saw an opportunity to capitalize on Ebers’s fame by producing a memoir of his time as manager and lessee. This essay seeks to reorient scholars’ approach to the managerial memoir as a historical document by turning attention away from its value as a source of information about opera. Instead, it explores how Ainsworth was strategically engaged with the marketplace in the process of overseeing the book’s production and, in turn, how the press then mediated the public’s exposure to the book’s content.