In 1849, at the age of sixteen, he made his first appearance on the stage as Tyrrell, in “Richard III.,” and gave great satisfaction by his rendition of the character.  From this time he continued to appear at various places with his father, and in 1851 won his first great success in the city of New York.  His father was playing an engagement at the Chatham Theater at the time, and was announced for Richard III., which was his masterpiece.  When the hour for performance came, he was too ill to appear.  The manager was in despair, for the house was filled with a large audience, who were impatient for the appearance of the humpbacked king.  In this emergency Edwin Booth offered to take his father’s place, and the manager, pleased with the novelty of the proposal, accepted it.  Young Booth was but eighteen years old, and had not even studied the part, and it was a perilous thing to venture before an audience in a role in which one of his name had won such great fame.  But he was confident of his own powers, and he had so often hung with delight upon his father’s rendition of the part, that he needed but a hasty reference to the book to perfect him in the text.  He won a decided triumph, and the public promptly acknowledged that he gave promise of being an unusually fine actor.

In 1852 Mr. Booth went to California, and engaged for the “utility business.”  He spent two years in careful and patient study in the humbler walks of his profession, learning its details, and doing much of the drudgery essential to a thorough knowledge of his art.  In 1854, he went to Australia, and played a successful engagement there, stopping on his way at several of the Pacific islands.  On his return, he played an engagement, with marked success, at the Sandwich Islands, and then went back to California.

In 1857 he returned to New York, and, on the 4th of May, appeared at Burton’s Theater, in the character of Richard III.  A writer who witnessed his performance on that occasion thus speaks of him:  “The company was not strong in tragedy; the young actor came without reputation; the season was late.  But he conquered his place.  His Richard was intellectual, brilliant, rapid, handsome, picturesque, villainous.  But the villainy was servant to the ambition—­not master of it, as a coarse player makes it.  The action was original; the dress was perfect—­the smirched gauntlets and flung-on mantle of the scheming, busy duke, the splendid vestments of the anointed king, the glittering armor of the monarch in the field.  His clear beauty, his wonderful voice—­which he had not learned to use—­his grace, his fine artistic sense, made all triumphs seem possible to this young man.  Evidently there was great power in the new actor—­power untrained, vigor ill directed.  But what was plainest to be seen, was the nervous, impulsive temperament, which would leave him no rest save in achievement.  He might come back to us a robustious, periwig-pated fellow, the delight and wonder of the galleries.  He might come back the thorough artist, great in repose as in action.  But it was clear enough that what he was then in Richard, in Richelieu, in Sir Edward Mortimer, he would never be again.”