Abstract
This book explores and evaluates the contribution of theatrical child labor to the success of commercially provided, performance-based leisure during the period 1875–1914. I was originally drawn to this subject area by insights gained from my personal involvement in the entertainment industry as a chaperone to children who worked within the film and theatre industries. I was licensed to act as loco parentis to child performers who were younger than 16 years of age. My initial research was driven by an awareness of the juxtaposition of attitudes toward and management of child performers in the workplace and the ways that the general public respond to these children. It became clear that child performers were/are an exclusive group who straddle the two worlds of entertainment and work, and that this dichotomy presents the child with problems, benefits, choices, and experiences unique to performing children. It also became clear that the real child becomes lost within the artistic priorities of writers and directors allied to audience engagement with the characters portrayed. My initial intention was to undertake a contemporary study but before embarking on work that focused on modern-day performers I sought to contextualize the experience of contemporary children. On turning to the history books to frame my study I discovered that the history of British child performers as a workforce had been largely overlooked.
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Notes
D. Colclough, “British Child Performers 1920–1940: New Issues, Old Legacies,” in Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry, ed. G. Arrighi and V. Emeljanow (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 73–90.
T. C. Davis, “The Employment of Children on the Victorian Stage,” The New Theatre Quarterly, 2 (1986): 116–135.
B. Crozier, “Notions of Childhood in the London Theatre 1880–1905,” Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cambridge University, 1981.
T. C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). See also Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
H. Waters, “‘That Astonishing Clever Child,’ Performers and Prodigies in the Early and Mid-Victorian Theatre,” Theatre Notebook, 2 (1996): 78.
C. Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago, 1995).
P. Horn, “English Theatre Children 1880–1914: A Study in Ambivalence,” History of Education, 25, 1 (1996): 37–54.
J. Pritchard, “Collaborative Creations for the Alhambra and the Empire,” Dance Chronicle, 24, 1 (2001): 55–82.
S. Vey, “Good Intentions and Fearsome Prejudice: New York’s 1876 Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children,” Theatre Survey, 42, 1 (May 2001): 54–68. See also T. J. Gilfoyle, “The Moral Origins of Political Surveillance in New York City 1867–1918,” American Quarterly, 38, 4 (1986): 637–652; B. McArthur, “‘Forbid Them Not’: Child Actor Labor Laws and Political Activism in the Theatre,” Theatre Survey, 36 (1995): 63–80.
E. Barlee, Pantomime Waifs, or, a Plea for Our City Children (London: Partridge, 1884).
A. Carter, “C. Tranders, Cara Tranders’ Reveries: The Autobiography of Cara Tranders. Ballet Girl at the Empire Palace of Varieties, 1892–99,” in Rethinking Dance History, ed. A. Carter (London: Routledge, 2004).
J. Davis, “Freaks, Prodigies and Marvelous Mimicry: Child Actors of Shakespeare on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” Shakespeare, 2, 2 (2006): 179–193.
A. Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: “All Work, No Play” (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also A. Varty, “The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby,” New Theatre Quarterly, 21 (2005): 218–229.
M. Gubar, “The Drama of Precocity: Child Performers on the Victorian Stage,” in The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (London: Ashgate, 2008), 63–78; M. Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); M. Gubar, “Who Watched the Children’s Pinafore? Age Transvestism on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” Victorian Studies, 54, 3 (2012): 410–426.
J. Sattaur, Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).
J. Klein, “Without Distinction of Age: The Pivotal Roles of Child Actors and Their Spectators in Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 36, 2 (2012): 117–135.
G. Arrighi and V. Emeljanow, “Entertaining Children: An Exploration of the Business and Politics of Childhood,” New Theatre Quarterly, 28 (2012): 41–55. See also G. Arrighi and V. Emeljanow, eds., Entertaining Children (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
S. Fosdick, “Follow the Worker, Not the Work: Hard Lessons from Failed London Music Hall Magazines,” Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, 5, 2 (2003). See also M. Scott Phillips, “Rational Entertainment, Music Hall and the Nineteenth-Century British Periodical Press,” Theatre History Studies (2002): 195–209.
M. J. Corbett, “Performing Identities: Actresses and Autobiography,” Biography, 24, 1 (2001): 15. See also S. Smith, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory, ed. S. Sidonie Smith and J. Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2000), 108–115; J. Jensen Wallach, “Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material,” Biography, 29, 3 (2000): 446–461; M. B. Gale and V. Gardner, eds., Autobiography and Identity Women Theatre and Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); M. Kadar, Tracing the Autobiographical (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005).
For useful summaries of legislation directed to the protection and welfare of children, 1870–1914 see F. Keeling, Child Labor in the United Kingdom (London: P. S. King & Son, 1914). See also G. K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).
A. Allen and A. Morton, This Is Your Child: The Story of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).
A. Davin, Growing up Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 9.
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© 2016 Dyan Colclough
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Colclough, D. (2016). Introduction. In: Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496034_1
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