"In 1875, two years after Macready's death, his Reminiscences and selections from his diaries and letters, edited by the late Sir W. F. Pollock, bart., were published by Messrs. Macmillan. At that time it was thought desirable to withhold a considerable portion of the diaries, but after the lapse of nearly forty years the reasons for this suppression no longer hold good, and the most important of the omitted passages are accordingly given, for the first time, in the present work." --v.1, pref.

Besides being a great actor and the friend and associate of Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Browning, and most of the principal figures in the drama and literature of his time, William Charles Macready (1793-1873) was a compulsive diarist. His journal of twenty-one years, during most of which he was at the head of the English stage, is a candid and absorbing self-revelation.