Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey (review)

Although unknown now, the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians toured the world to rapturous audiences in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Starting off in Troy, NY, the company ventured as far as Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, performed everything from Shakespeare to slapstick comedy to complex dance routines, and comprised up to forty boys and girls from the ages of five to eighteen. While they were never big stars, they were ubiquitous: hard-working journeyman actors managed by the troupe's founder, Robert G. Marsh.

Shauna Vey's meticulously researched book opens up the world of the BOOK Marsh Troupe for us. Melding social and cultural history, she investigates the working conditions of child actors and the larger context of cultural assumptions about and understandings of childhood as a phenomenon. Providing both close analysis of three of the leading performers in the troupe—Mary Marsh, Georgie Marsh, and Louise Arnot—she intertwines biographical details with an exploration of how these children fit into the personae available to young actors.

As a whole, the book is an implicit argument for giving child performers (and indeed child workers more generally) their due as creative, imaginative, skilled professionals who are, above all, doing a job. The mid-nineteenth century is an ideal moment to explore the development of childhood as a cultural formation, since many of the enduring concepts of children—as innocent, as outside economic systems, as nonsexual, as nonproductive—emerged then. The Marsh Troupe was at its apex in the middle of this process, and as Vey points out, its story represents "the conjunction of so many emotionally charged elements: parents, children, performance, business, law, life, death, celebrity, loyalty, and betrayal" (xi). As professional children, in all senses of the term, the performers in the Marsh Troupe had to both conform to romanticized visions of the child and yet thrive in a highly competitive and demanding field.

The characters in this book are irresistible, and Vey tracks them from their entrance into fame on to, for some of them, the obscurity of their adult lives. Robert Marsh was a consummate theatrical opportunist: he cast the children into popular plays like Uncle Tom's Cabin or (even more amazingly) The Drunkard, taught them complex unison dance routines, trained the most talented into specific personae such as the ingénue, the tomboy in breeches roles, the "Irish comic," and the physical comedian, and moved them to wherever the action was. For Marsh, the line between professionalism and the absence of empathy is very thin indeed. After his daughter Mary died horrifically in an onstage immolation (her costume caught on fire from the footlights and she was severely burned), Marsh took a break of only a few weeks before taking another engagement.

As Vey points out, "he had forty children on his payroll and an investment in sumptuous sets" that weren't going to pay for themselves. But this business savvy had real repercussions. The troupe was well-known nationally, and newspapers questioned what they saw as a heartless return to business. Marsh had to write a long letter to several papers across the country to defend his decision, arguing that he had made commitments to both his actors and his audiences that he could not abandon. The ramifications were personal too: Vey points to the decades-long absence of any communication between Marsh and the adult George, an estrangement that ended only at the close of Robert's life.

For Vey, "Little Mary" Marsh embodies all the contradictions of the mid-nineteenth-century child performer. Her acting career began at the age of six, and she expertly balanced consummate professionalism with a flawless image of innocence. In death as well as in life, she played out the subjectivity of the pure and doomed child heroine whose demise saves the benighted souls around her. Indeed, it...