On arriving in London, Aldridge learned that a fellow British actor had gone to Berlin to perform, taking along a professional “company of twenty-five actors and actresses, complete with a stock of costumes and scenery.” Curious to know how they were faring, Aldridge wrote to a friend there, Gebrüder (Brother) Kohn, asking for information on their reception:

Aldridge had good reason to be curious, for this rival Othello was not an ambitious amateur but rather Samuel Phelps, the actormanager who had run the Sadler's Wells Theatre for the past fifteen years, winning acclaim for having rescued it from degradation by improving its offerings and disciplining its audience. He had taken over the management in 1844, the year after passage of the Theatre Regulation Act, which had licensed all theaters in London and surrounding areas to act regular drama, a privilege that earlier had been reserved only for the city's patent theaters in the West End: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket.

Phelps's first objective was to clean his house thoroughly, making it a fit place for elevated entertainment of the highest standard. In an essay published in Household Words in 1851, Charles Dickens had praised Phelps's complete transformation of this rather disreputable establishment: