Ira Aldridge may have agreed to give his final performances on his first Continental tour at Dusseldorf's City Theater because the manager there was Theodor Eberhard l’Arronge. L’Arronge, when he was the manager of a theater in Aachen thirty-two months earlier, had given Aldridge his first opportunity to appear before a German-speaking audience that knew and appreciated Shakespeare. Aldridge's success there as Othello, Shylock, and Mungo (in Isaac Bickerstaff's play The Padlock) had immediately led to engagements elsewhere in Prussia and Germany, culminating five months later in a series of performances in Berlin that won him a gold medal from a king as well as opportunities to appear in theaters elsewhere in Europe. To repay the debt he owed l’Arronge for setting him on this lucrative course, he repeated his original program—playing Othello on March 31 and Shylock and Mungo on April 3, 1855.

Aldridge apparently left for London the next day, for one of his admirers in the Netherlands received a letter from him on April 6, stating that he and his wife had fallen seriously ill on their return to England. Judging from the tenor of her immediate reply to his message, one suspects this correspondent may have been, or may have imagined herself to be, rather more than merely a “true friend” of the famous actor: