Robert Barnabas Brough

Robert Barnabas Brough combined journalism, poetry, fiction, and drama during the middle of the nineteenth century. The Dictionary of National Biography records that the English writer was born in London in 1828, worked as a clerk in Manchester, and contributed to the Liverpool Lion before developing a broader literary career. His first dramatic effort, The Enchanted Isle, was written with his brother William Brough, beginning a theatrical association that accompanied his journalism and verse. Crinoline an Original Farce, in One Act belongs to this stage work. Bibliographic records date the piece to 1856 and identify Thomas Hailes Lacy as its original London publisher, placing it within the inexpensive acting editions through which Victorian plays circulated among theatres and readers. The farce’s compact one-act form also shows a practical side of Brough’s writing, distinct from his longer prose and poetry but consistent with a career conducted across newspapers, books, and the popular stage.