Before following Aldridge to London, allow me to mention two other actors who indirectly helped Aldridge launch his theatrical career: namely, Charles Mathews the Elder, England's most popular comedian, and James Hewlett, the leading thespian at the African Theatre in New York City.

Mathews made his first professional tour of the United States in 1822– 23, performing a variety of light comic roles in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to large, enthusiastic audiences. Like earlier British stage stars, he had been lured to the New World by Stephen Price who had dangled before him the prospect of making lots of money; but unlike his predecessors, he was also interested in taking advantage of his experiences abroad to extend and diversify his theatrical repertoire. Known as the “inimitable mimic,” Mathews was an exceptionally gifted impersonator who for more than a decade had been staging one-man shows in which he enacted a host of colorful characters in interaction. This he did by narrating a series of adventures and misadventures in the course of which he assumed with lightning rapidity the different accents, gestures, manners, thoughts, and even clothing of archetypal British and foreign eccentrics. To vary the entertainment he interspersed amusing songs related to the actions or characters in the story, and he normally ended the show with what he called a “monopolylogue,” a separate short farce in which he played all the half-dozen or more characters simultaneously. In 1817 he had formalized this type of mimetic comedy into an annual “At Home” entertainment, which he performed at the English Opera House for forty nights each spring before taking it on a tour of the provinces for the rest of the year. He had produced fi ve such shows throughout the British Isles before his first visit to the United States.

Mathews's virtuosity in these At Homes, attested to by an army of admirers that included Charles Dickens, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Washington Irving, and fellow actor William Charles Macready, was thought to go well beyond mere mimicry.