Abstract
On July 27, 1857, Mrs. Hannah Stewart of Cincinnati, Ohio, signed a contract with Robert G. Marsh of New York binding her son Alfred to perform for two years with a theatrical troupe Marsh managed. This was an economically pivotal time for boy workers in all walks of life as traditional apprenticeships mutated into cash wage jobs. The Marsh-Stewart arrangement encompasses elements of both the traditional craft apprenticeship and its successor, the wage job. The case of Alfred Stewart illustrates how the US antebellum theater aligned with contemporaneous industries in treating child performers less like artists and craftsmen and more like laborers. The contract illuminates the dissolution of apprenticeship as the dominant path to an adult acting career.
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Notes
See W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
Nina E. Lerman, “Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life: Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-Century Philadelphia,” Technology and Culture 38:1 (January 1997): 31–59;
Brian P. Luskey, ““What Is My Prospects?”: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,” The Business History Review 78:4 (Winter 2004): 665–702;
Richard D. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990);
Ian Quimby, Apprenticeship in Colonial Philadelphia (New York: Garland, 1985; reprint of MA thesis, University of Delaware, 1963).
Edel Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 57, 56.
Andrew Gurr asserts that arrangements were not so formal, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th ed., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 113–14.
Robert J. Myers and Joyce Brodowski, “Rewriting the Hallams: Research in 18th Century British and American Theatre,” Theatre Survey 41:1 (May 2000), 1.
See also Don B. Wilmeth with Tice Miller, Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182.
Laurence Senelick, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 1825–1877 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), passim.
Cordelia Howard Macdonald and George P. Howard, “Memoirs of the Original Little Eva,” Educational Theatre Journal 8:4. (December 1956), 281.
See also Heather M. McMahon, “Profit, Purity, and Perversity: Nineteenth-Century Child Prodigies Kate and Ellen Bateman,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2003);
Robert Samuel Badal, “Kate and Ellen Bateman: A Study in Precocity” (PhD, diss., Northwestern University, 1971).
Senelick, Age and Stage, 63. An adult member of the same company earned $18 perweek. As a young actor in 1842, Cordelia’s father had been paid $8 perweek (18). For actors’ salaries after 1880, see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984). There is no comparable study for the antebellum period.
North American, December 31, 1847 vol. LXV, issue 16205, advertisement p3 col 5; [Philadelphia] Public Ledger, February 26, 1848, vol. XXIV, issue 133 p2; J. S. Dalrymple, The Naiad Queen, lists “Mr. Marsh” as Sir Rupert in Burton’s 1848 production. George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), vol. V, 596; vol. VI, 140, 191, 229.
Thomas Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903), 306, 308, 311, Google Books, accessed July 17, 2010.
On Spaulding, see John S. Kendall, The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 477–79;
David Carlyon, “Spaulding and Spicy Rice,” chapter 6 of Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard of (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
Kurt Gänzl, Lydia Thompson Queen of Burlesque (New York: Routledge, 2002), 84.
A study of twentieth-century child actors noted issues that arise when parents function as agents or business managers. Mothers who acted in dual capacities were later evaluated by their adult children as less caring and more over-controlling. SeeLisa J. Rapport and Matthew Meleen, “Childhood Celebrity, Parental Attachment, and Adult Adjustment: The Young Performers Study,” Journal of Personality Assessment 70:3 (June 1998): 484–504, esp. 499.
See Benjamin McArthur, “ ‘Forbid Them Not’: Child Actor Labor Laws and Political Activism in the Theatre,” Theatre Survey 36:2 (1995): 63–80,
and Shauna Vey, “Good Intentions and Fearsome Prejudice: New York’s 1876 Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children,” Theatre Survey 42:1 (May 2001): 53–68.
James H. McTeague, Before Stanislavski: American professional acting schools and acting theory, 1875–1925 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993).
David Belasco, Theatre Through its Stage Door, 1919, reissued, ed. Louis V. Defoe (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 132.
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© 2014 Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow
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Vey, S. (2014). An American Antebellum Child-Actor Contract: Alfred Stewart and the Shift from Craft Apprentice to Wage Laborer. In: Arrighi, G., Emeljanow, V. (eds) Entertaining Children. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305466_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305466_3
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