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Mr. Charles Kean as "Hamlet", 1856. Keane '...had been led by both his parents to expect the inheritance of an ample fortune...But clouds had been gradually darkening, and a crisis was at hand. It is needless here to dwell on particulars, or to say more than that, in his seventeenth year, [he]...was compelled to adopt the stage as the only possible channel through which he could obtain subsistence for himself and his mother. Thus Charles Kean became an actor....In a few years he reached this long-coveted point of his ambition; and in 1838 reappeared in the metropolis with a degree of fame which no country actor had ever achieved before, and repeated his opening character of Hamlet for twenty-one nights (twelve without intermission) to a succession of houses more crowded than any that had been attracted since the first appearance of his father in 1814'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.