English stage. In Jameson's ‘Wild Goose Chase,’ Drury Lane, 21 Nov., he was Captain Flank. Mercutio was allotted him the following season, with Motley in the ‘Castle Spectre,’ and Tom Shuffleton in ‘John Bull.’ From this time his name, never frequent in the London bills, disappears from them. During eight or ten years he managed the Brighton Theatre. In 1837 and 1838 he was stage-manager at the Haymarket, and in the latter year became, under Bunn, stage-manager for a second period at Drury Lane. In 1840 he played at Her Majesty's his great part of Jerry Sneak to Dowton's Major Sturgeon. At the Haymarket he took a benefit in 1842. Russell was supposed to be a well-to-do man. The proceeds of his benefit were, however, swallowed up in the defalcations of a dishonest broker, and he was reduced to poverty. He died at Gravesend, in the house of a daughter, 25 Feb. 1845, at the reputed age of seventy-nine. He was twice married, and left three daughters.
Russell's great part was Jerry Sneak; he was unsurpassed in the Copper Captain, and excellent in Paul Pry, Billy Lackaday, Sparkish, Rover, and Young Rapid, in some of which characters he was a formidable rival to Richard Jones. In parts such as Doricourt and Belcour he never rose above mediocrity. Mrs. Mathews speaks of him as the prince of hoaxers, and tells amusing stories of the tricks he used to play on his friend and associate, William Dowton [q. v.]
A portrait by De Wilde of Russell as Jerry Sneak, with Mrs. Harlowe as Mrs. Sneak, and Dowton as Major Sturgeon, and a second of him, also by De Wilde, as Jerry Sneak, are in the Mathews collection in the Garrick Club. An engraved portrait of him after Wageman, in the same character, accompanies the memoir in Oxberry's ‘Dramatic Biography.’ Another actor, J. Russell from York and from Edinburgh, appeared in London at the Haymarket, 15 July 1818, as Doctor Ollapod, in the ‘Poor Gentleman,’ and played, among other parts, Dandie Dinmont and Shylock. He was a good actor, and his appearance at the same house with Russell caused some confusion. While at Edinburgh he visited Sir Walter Scott and sat for his portrait as Clown in ‘Twelfth Night,’ in a picture for some years on the walls at Abbotsford.
[Genest's Account of the English Stage; Oxberry's Dramatic Biography, i. 97, new ser. ii. 37; Gent. Mag. 1845, i. 446; Theatrical Inquisitor, various years; Georgian Era; Dramatic and Musical Review, various years; Clark Russell's Representative Actors; Dibdin's Reminiscences, 1837, passim; Mrs. Mathews's Tea-Table Talk, 1857.]
RUSSELL, THEODORE (1614-1689), portrait-painter. [See Russel.]
RUSSELL, THOMAS (1762–1788), poet, second son of John Russell (1725–1808), a prosperous attorney of Beaminster in Dorset, by his wife Virtue (1743–1768), daughter of Richard Brickle of Shaftesbury, was born at Beaminster in January or February 1762 (baptised 2 March). His father's family had been for generations merchants and shipowners at Weymouth. His elder brother, John Banger, had antiquarian tastes, and contributed to the second edition of Hutchins's ‘Dorset’ (1796–1803). After attending the grammar school at Bridport, he entered Winchester as a commoner in 1777, and before the end of the year was already in sixth book and fifteenth boy in the school. In 1778 he entered college, and next year was senior in the school; he gained medals for Latin verse and Latin essay (1778–9), and was elected to New College in 1780, being second on the roll. He graduated B.A. in October 1784, was ordained deacon in 1785, and priest in 1786. In the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (1782, p. 574, and 1783, i. 124), under the signature ‘A. S.,’ he wrote two erudite papers on the poetry of Mosen Jordi and the Provençal language, defending his former master, Thomas Warton, against Ritson's ill-tempered ‘Observations’ upon the ‘History of Poetry.’ A career of brilliant promise was cut short by phthisis, of which Russell died at Bristol Hotwells on 31 July 1788. He was buried in the churchyard of Powerstock, Dorset, a mural tablet being erected to his memory in the tower of the church. Until shortly before his death he was engaged in correcting his poems. He left a few fragments in manuscript, now in the possession of Captain Thomas Russell of Beaminster.
In 1789 appeared ‘Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems by the late Thomas Russell, Fellow of New College,’ Oxford, sm. 4to; these were dedicated to Warton by the editor, William Howley, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. A fine scholarly taste is exhibited in the versions from Petrarch, Camoens, and Weisse, but the most noteworthy feature of the little volume is the excellence of Russell's sonnets. Together with William Lisle Bowles, a fellow-Wykehamist of kindred sympathies, he may claim an important place in the revival of the sonnet in England. Wordsworth not only wrotewith warm appreciation of Russell's genius as a sonneteer (cf. Prose
