Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Blanchard, Edward Leman
BLANCHARD, Edward Leman, son of William Blanchard, who for thirty-five years was a distinguished comedian at Covent Garden Theatre, was born Dec. 11, 1820. Mr. E. L. Blanchard became a constant contributor to periodical and dramatic literature at a very early period of his life, and before his twenty-fifth year was known to the public as the editor of "Chambers's London Journal," the author of "Bradshaw's Descriptive Railway Guides," and a series of handbooks, tales, essays, dramas, farces, and burlesques, which showed the exercise of a ready pen in the service of publishers and managers. He afterwards edited Willoughby's "Shakspere," "England and Wales Delineated," and wrote the novels of "Temple Bar," and "Man without a Destiny," besides supplying Miss Emma Stanley and Mr. W. S. Woodin with some of the most popular "entertainments" perhaps ever brought before the public. In addition to a quantity of literary work of a miscellaneous character, Mr. E. L. Blanchard has furnished the theatres with about one hundred pieces, most of them Christmas extravaganzas, in which he seems specially to have aimed at the dramatic illustration of fairy mythology. During more than thirty successive years the "Drury Lane Christmas Annuals" have proceeded from his pen. For the last twenty-one years he has been on the literary staff of the Daily Telegraph.