AustLit

The English dramatist 'William Thomas Moncrieff' (William George Thomas) wrote more than a hundred plays for the English stage during the 1820s and 1830s. Although there is no evidence that he visited Australia, he wrote the play Van Diemen's Land, one of the earliest plays about Australia produced in London.

His plays included an adaptation for the stage of Pierce Egan's enormously popular series of sketches of London life, introducing into Tom and Jerry the character of Jemmy Green, a 'green' East-Ender. The play was produced in London in 1821 and later performed in Sydney in 1834. The character of Jemmy proved to be very popular and a similar figure of the 'new chum' appeared in Australian drama in the plays Jemmy Green in Australia by James Tucker and 'Life in Sydney: or, the Ran Dan Club', which was an adaptation of Life in London.

Moncrieff's work was sometimes published in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers including the Temperance Advocate and Australasian Commercial and Agricultural Intelligencer.