Watts Phillips

Watts Phillips (16 November 1825 – 2 December 1874) was an English illustrator, novelist and playwright best known for his play The Dead Heart which served as a model for Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

In a memoir, his sister Emma recalled that he had “many difficulties” in his life and waged “a gallant struggle against chequered fortune.” She described him as a “bright and buoyant character”, “a really brilliant, energetic man, who had many gifts and accomplishments, with a cheerful, undaunted spirit, which to the last helped him to encounter trials, and a vein of humour which was as much at the service of his friends as it was to that of the public.” Emma also noted that “at times he sank into fits of despondency, from which he suffered much.”

A friend wrote of him that, “Few men were quicker of temper, more bitter and sarcastic in anger – and very few were so ready to forget and forgive…he could never sleep after a quarrel…until there had been a reconciliation.”

Watts Phillips was born in Hoxton in the East End of London, UK, second son of Esther Ann Watts and Thomas Phillips, a timber merchant and upholsterer. He was the grand nephew of Giles Firman Phillips, a watercolour artist of some repute familiarly known as 'Twilight' Phillips from a series of paintings depicting various landscapes at twilight. Watts Phillips initially sought a career on the stage. After becoming acquainted with well-known figures of the theatre world, such as John Baldwin Buckstone and Mrs. Nesbitt, he began acting in Edinburgh, eventually playing roles at the Saddlers Wells Theatre in London.

Acting did not pay well and, at the urging of his father, Phillips trained to be an illustrator under George Cruikshank, who remained a friend for the rest of his life. Phillips also studied oil painting and was a fellow student of Holman Hunt. Through Cruikshank and his theatre connections, Phillips became acquainted with Samuel Phelps, Robert Barnabas Brough and his family, Augustus Mayhew and his brother Henry Mayhew, Albert Richard Smith, Douglas Jerrold and Mark Lemon.

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