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How to Settle Accounts with your Laundress: An Original Farce, in One Act cover

How to Settle Accounts with your Laundress: An Original Farce, in One Act

Chapter 5: Transcriber’s Note
By J. Stirling Coyne
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About This Book

Set in a fashionable tailor’s show-room, this one-act farce follows a vain tailor who prepares a private supper for an opera dancer while managing a bumbling page and arranging clothes and provisions. Domestic and professional spheres collide when the laundress arrives to collect garments and routine errands trigger a cascade of interruptions, misunderstandings, and rapid entrances and exits. The action depends on visual costume changes, precise stage business, and situational comedy to produce farcical confusion while gently exposing social pretensions and class contrasts in a compact, briskly paced structure.

Transcriber’s Note

This transcription is based on pp. 11-19 of Dicks’ Standard Plays No. 1006. The images used in this transcription have been posted on the Internet Archive at:

archive.org/details/CoyneLaundress

In addition, a microform copy of the same edition, which was made available by the University of California, Davis, was used as a secondary source.

In general, this transcription attempts to retain the formatting, punctuation and spelling of the source text. In a few cases where the quality of the printing made a word or a punctuation mark hard to read, the obvious reading was considered the correct reading without comment. A few changes were made to smooth out some of the inconsistent editing of the source text.

The following changes were made:

  • p. 11: (Widgett’s Page and Light Porter)—Changed “Widgett’s” to “Widgetts’”.
  • p. 13: since the evening I danced with her at the Casino. (Calls,) Twill!—Changed the comma after “Calls” to a period.
  • p. 14: Mary. And your remember how we used to go together to Greenwich—Change “your” to “you”.
  • p. 14: law! how we use to laugh to be sure!—Changed “use” to “used”.
  • p. 14: and a heap of beautiful thing.—Changed “thing” to “things”.
  • p. 15: to wring my heart and mangle my affections like that, (Sobbing.)—Changed the comma after “that” to a period.
  • p. 15: (Lays his hands on his bosom.—Added a closing parenthesis for consistency.
  • p. 16: you don’t mean to say your agoing to sup here?—Changed “your” to “you’re”.
  • p. 16: (Pushes her again into the chair. (Aside.)—Deleted the opening parenthesis before “Aside”.
  • p. 17: Enter two WAITERS, L, carrying tray with supper, covered dishes, plates, bottles, &c.—Inserted a period after “L”.
  • p. 17: Its only, “Coming, sir, in one minute...”—Changed “Its” to “It’s”.
  • p. 17: Pulls a handful of the hair out of the chair-seat, goes to to the chimney-glass—Deleted the second “to” after “goes”.
  • p. 17: You’ve particular business with him.—Changed the period to a question mark.
  • p. 18: Cheri. Oh, you droll wretch, you’ve ten times funnier—Changed “you’ve” to “you’re”.
  • p. 18: Mary. There’s no bread, my good fellow—Added a period to the end of the sentence.
  • p. 18: Mary (Helps Mdlle. Cheri Bounce.)—Inserted a period after the character title “Mary”.
  • p. 18: Marg. Celery, waiter.—Changed “Marg.” to “Mary.”