to Torquay on doctor's orders, but found no improvement in his health and returned to London after two weeks. He was too ill to have any hand in the production of his last play, War, a drama staged at the St James's Theatre on 16 January 1871. Robertson died at his home in Chalk Farm, London on 3 February 1871, aged 42. He was buried in Abney Park Cemetery. More than a thousand people attended the funeral, including the entire company of the Prince of Wales's, led by Marie Wilton, who placed a chaplet of flowers on the coffin. The theatre was closed that night in tribute to Robertson – an exceptional honour, according to The Times: Plays Robertson's reputation rests on his series of plays for Marie Wilton's company at the Prince of Wales's Theatre. They were seen as "problem plays", because they dealt seriously and sensitively with social issues of the day. Caste was about marriage across the class barrier and Society explored prejudice against social mobility. The plays were notable for what the critic Thomas Purnell dubbed their "cup and saucer" realism, treating contemporary British subjects in settings that were recognisable, unlike the oversized acting in Victorian melodramas that were popular at the time. The characters spoke in normal language rather than declaiming their lines. Looking back thirty years later at the original production, Bernard Shaw called Robertson's play Caste "epoch making ... After years of sham heroics and superhuman balderdash, Caste delighted everyone by its freshness, its nature, its humanity". Shaw was mistaken in supposing everyone was delighted: some critics wrote that there was nothing in Robertson's plays but commonplace life represented without a trace of wit and sparkle, and absurdly realistic. More typical was the comment by a correspondent in The Era shortly after Robertson's death, asking who else could "successfully break, as he did, the trammels of conventionalism, and show us upon the stage living, breathing figures of flesh and blood, who walk, talk, act and think as tangible men and women really do in this work-a-day world of ours". Some later analysts have disputed whether Robertson really originated some of the innovations attributed to him. In a 1972 study Errol Durbach suggests that "the 'revolution' had been initiated in France years before by Scribe and Sardou, those forerunners of the bourgeois domestic theatre and the well-made play". Durbach adds that in England, Vestris