HOOK, THEODORE EDWARD

born Sept. 22, 1788, London died Aug. 24, 1841, London prolific English playwright and novelist, the best-remembered of the fashionable novelists who, in the early 19th century, aimed to describe English society from the inside for those on the outside. The son of a popular songwriter, Hook, while a schoolboy at Harrow, had written the words for his father's comic operas and, by the age of 16, had become well known in London theatre greenrooms. He wrote farces and melodramas, ran into debt, and became dissolute, but in 1813 his friend the prince regent procured him the post of accountant general to Mauritius. Hook took to novel writing in an attempt to pay off the legal costs of his trial for mismanagement of public money: in 1817, when some 12,000 was found to have been stolen, Hook, although guilty only of negligence, was recalled, tried, and imprisoned. The success in 1824 of his Sayings and Doings, tales with a fashionable setting, each illustrating a proverb, was such that he extended their three volumes to nine in 1828. From 1824 to 1842 he wrote some 40 fictional works in a similar style.