Thomas Baker (dramatist)
British attorney and writer, born 1680
Thomas Baker (c. 1680 – 1749) was an English dramatist and lawyer.
Life
Baker is said to have been the son of an eminent attorney of London, and is said to have been educated in Oxford.
A disparaging estimate of his character and his powers is furnished in the List of Dramatic Authors with some Account of their Lives, attributed to John Mottley (the compiler of Joe Miller's Jests), which appears at the close of Thomas Whincop's tragedy of Scanderbeg. According to this rather prejudiced authority, Baker 'was under disgrace' with his father, 'who allowed him a very scanty income,' and was compelled to retire into Worcestershire, where he lived as a schoolmaster and vicar until his death in 1749. His successor at Bolnhurst, John Jones, remarked in private papers that he was "A man of strange turn, imperious and clamorous upon topics of no service towards the promoting of true religion in his parish, and not a little addicted to stiff and dividing principles". He is reported to have 'died of that loathsome disorder, the morbus pediculosus.'
His namesake, David Erskine Baker, in the Biographia Dramatica, undertakes at some length his defence. He states that a character named Maiden, introduced in Tunbridge Walks, the best-known comedy of Thomas Baker, was intended by the author for himself. The character sprang into favour, and was imitated in the Fribbles and Beau Mizens of subsequent comedy.
Works
The plays of Baker, all of them comedies, consist of:
The Humour of the Age 1701, played the same year at Drury Lane, with Robert Wilks, Susanna Verbruggen, and Anne Oldfield in the principal parts.
The public source identifies “Thomas Baker (dramatist)” as british attorney and writer, born 1680. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Thomas, Baker and dramatist.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7787326. VIAF identifies the subject as 191648411. The Library of Congress control number is n83206677. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1680, 1749 and 1701.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Baker (dramatist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.