Hook, THEODORE EDWARD, prince of jack-puddings, was born in London, 22nd September 1788, second son of the Vauxhall composer, James Hook (1746-1827), by his first wife, the beautiful Miss Madden, who died in 1802. His elder brother, Dr James Hook (1771-1828), became in 1802 chaplain to the Prince of Wales, in 1825 Dean of Worcester, and was himself the author of a couple of novels. Theodore's education was almost limited to a year at Harrow and matriculation at Oxford; but while yet a minor he achieved celebrity as the author of thirteen successful comic operas and melodramas (1805-11), as a punster and matchless improvisatore, and as a practical joker—his greatest performance the Berners Street Hoax (1809), which took in the Lord Mayor, the Duke of Gloucester, and hundreds, thousands of humbler victims. Such talents claimed recognition, and in time the 'little pet lion of the green-room' gained the entrée of very high society. The Prince Regent himself remarked that 'something must be done for Hook;' and in 1812 that something was found in the post, worth £2000 a year, of treasurer to the Mauritius. There Hook fared gloriously, until in 1818 a grave deficiency was detected in the public chest; he was arrested and sent, almost penniless, to England. An acquaintance, meeting him at St Helena, said, 'I hope you are not going home for your health.' 'Why,' answered Hook, 'I am sorry to say they do think there's something wrong in the chest.' Himself he ascribed the 'unfortunate defalcation' to a black clerk, who had committed suicide; anyhow, though criminal proceedings were dropped, in 1823 he was pronounced a crown debtor for £12,000, and was again sold up and arrested. In 1825 he was released from the King's Bench, but not from the debt; however, he made no effort to discharge it. Meanwhile, in 1820, he had started the Tory John Bull, whose chief aim was to vilify Queen Caroline, and which in its palmy days brought him fully £2000 per annum. Sayings and Doings (9 vols. 1824-28) yielded other £4000, and nine more three-volume novels followed between 1830 and 1839—Maxwell, the half-autobiographical Gilbert Gurney, Jack Brag, &c.—four of them first appearing in the New Monthly Magazine, of which Hook was editor from 1836. So he lived for a time in great style; and even after debt drove him from St James's (1831) he still dined, diced, drank, and made sport in clubs and titled houses, whilst the woman he had betrayed, the mother of his five children, was left to the loneliness of the cottage at Fulham. Shakespeare has nothing more pitiful than Hook's words to the friend who had caught him in deshabille: 'Well, you see me as I am at last—all the bucklings, and paddings, and washings, and brushings dropped for ever—a poor old gray-haired man, with my belly about my knees.' He was only fifty-two then, and a week or two later he died, 24th August 1841. He is buried in Fulham churchyard.
See his Life and Remains, by the Rev. R. H. Dalton Barham (2 vols. 1849), and Lockhart's Quarterly article (May 1843; reprinted 1851).