Penny Playwright - no. 256

Edmund "The Scribe" Grossey

Edmund Grossey eked out a modest living in 1820s Cambridge through a patchwork of literary pursuits. By day, he penned obituaries and wedding announcements for the Cambridge Chronicle, occasionally contributing florid reviews of university lectures that earned him favour with certain professors. His true passion lay in writing penny dramas performed at The Eagle's makeshift back-room stage, where local tradespeople would pay a penny to watch melodramas featuring thinly veiled caricatures of Cambridge notables. When commissions were scarce, Grossey could be found in St. Botolph's churchyard, offering to compose heartfelt letters for illiterate servants or love-struck students at threepence per page.

What Cambridge's respectable citizens didn't know was that Grossey was also the anonymous author behind "The Midnight Whisper," a scandalous weekly tabloid passed secretly through taverns and college kitchens. His gossip sheet revealed everything from professors' indiscretions with housemaids to merchants' creative bookkeeping practices. Grossey gathered these morsels by nursing a single ale for hours in tavern corners, his keen ears catching whispered conversations, or by skulking through Cambridge's narrow alleys at dusk. Publicly, he would join fellow writers in denouncing the "deplorable rag" while secretly delighting in seeing Cambridge's elite squirm when fresh editions appeared.

The ceramic ghost of Edmund Grossey captures his contradictory nature - primarily emerald green to reflect the envy that drove his gossip-mongering and the pennies he so desperately chased. Often streaked white as his paper, sometimes black streaks represent both his ink-stained fingers and the shadows he lurked within. His normally hollow eyes can occasionally be caught glinting gold, silver, or bronze, depending on the value of the secrets he's hoarding. Owners report that during particularly scandalous Cambridge events, Grossey's ghost seems to tilt slightly toward the source of gossip, as if still collecting material for his next edition of "The Midnight Whisper."