 By the end of the 1830s, the theatre was less used for performances, and increasingly used for meetings of the Temperance society and for formal lectures.In 1843 Edmund Sharpe bought the theatre, and after an extension and alteration, he reopened it in 1849 as a music hall as well as a museum for the local Literary and Natural History Society.By 1860 it was owned and operated by a private company called the Lancaster Athenaeum, which Sharpe founded.