Jimmy Rogers

A carte-de-visite portrait of the comic actor James ('Jimmy') Rogers, seen here in The Goose with The Golden Eggs, by Augustus Mayhew and H. Sutherland Edwards, a one-act play first performed at the Royal Strand Theatre, London, in the first week of the September of 1859. The production ran until May of the following year.

A giant of the mid-Victorian stage who achieved enormous success, Jimmy Rogers was a comic actor ‘of repute in his line and a great favourite with his audiences’ (The Times, 9 February 1857). The theatre critic Clement Scott wrote that: ‘The humour of Rogers was gentle and exquisitely pathetic.' Elsewhere, an anonymous reviewer contributing to the journal Fun under the name ‘The Odd Man’ commented that Rogers ‘always looks and talks so funnily under the pressure of any mental or physical disturbance, that the audience of that theatre must recognise in him one of the most pleasant of pains-taking actors’ (14 February 1863).

Photographed in the spring of 1860 by Camille Silvy of London.