Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: "All Work, No Play", and: The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (review)

It's an exciting time to be working on the figure of the nineteenth-century child. New books tackling neglected material appear every season. For Victorianists, study of the child seems especially vital. Recent work, such as Carolyn Steedman's 1995 Strange Dislocations, Catherine Robson's 2001 Men in Wonderland, Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster's 2005 The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, or Caroline Levander's 2006 Cradle of Liberty, has complicated and refused truisms about the child's supposedly timeless identity as Wordsworthian innocent. The emphasis of the last twenty years in literary studies on the facts of social history and material culture has shifted attention away from canonical texts and from supposedly shared or universal experience. Studies of the child have demonstrated that even normative middle-class experience is complex; carefully taking into account competing impulses and historical changes within the status quo that offered itself as universal, these studies have redefined that status quo. They have also insisted that criticism attend to the experience of other children—of the working class or the colonies—who might not have experienced childhood at all as it has traditionally been defined.

In such recent studies, scholars return to the historical record so that, in precise and extensive ways, they can recontextualize terms, such as "the child," we have often taken for granted. Current scholarly practice has kept pace with such shifts. Searchable online archives have made more accessible a range of materials too diffuse for most of us to use efficiently before. Powerful search engines permitting keyword searches through archives of contemporary newspapers and reviews enable comprehensive reception studies; those reviews turn out to treat unexpected or unknown texts, extending our inquiry. These new virtual resources have revealed just how much Victorians thought about children and in how many different ways. Literary critics inspired by such renovations in approach and method could not do better than to turn to these two books under review. Each is an important example of current trends; each approaches them differently in instructive ways.

Anne Varty's Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain provides a far-reaching account of a vital area, long overdue for sustained consideration. Although scholars such as Tracy Davis and Hazel Waters have written essays about children in Victorian drama (as Marah Gubar does in Dennis Denisoff's collection), Varty brings together a staggering mass of material in this full-length study: actors' autobiographies, theater records, contemporary accounts and reviews in newspapers and theater magazines, legal reform documents, and forgotten plays as well as modern scholarship on both Victorian children and Victorian theater. She provides an extensive picture of the importance of children's theater and child actors in Victorian Britain. On top of such invaluable cultural documentation, her interpretation of children's theatrical appeal during the period complicates understandings of its "shifting social constructions of children and childhood" (5).

I find especially valuable her highlighting of paradoxical contemporary attitudes. She starts from the contradiction that children's theater flourished just when protectionist legislation most successfully regulated other kinds of child labor. This insight provides for incisive readings: productions of Richard Peake's The Climbing Boys (1832), a popular play decrying the exploitation of young chimney sweeps and the abuses of child labor, ironically depend on the work of child actors starring in it, a paradox lost on its audiences because "middle class and cultured ideologies about children and childhood obscured the fact that theater children were workers" (148–49). Varty is best at exposing class inequities but uncovers representational paradoxes too: the surface resemblance between acting and play (often conjured when apologists for children's acting tried to rebut attempts at reform) point to unstable circularities. Can the imitative provide an authentic...