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

Shauna Vey’s Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre is a fascinating history of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians. This company of approximately thirty children toured from 1855 until 1863 performing popular plays for adult audiences. Vey impressively pieces together their activities to illuminate the economic, staging, and touring practices common to many troupes and the experiences of children in mid-nineteenth-century America. She participates in the recent scholarly trend to uncover the experiences of children through empirical and archival research to interrogate ahistorical assumptions. Vey’s book is a welcome addition to this field. She does recover some of the “lost voices” and experiences of children. Moreover, by interrogating the experiences of these professional children at “the moment just before American childhood would be utterly transformed,” she productively engages with debates around sentimental and economic understandings of childhood and questions of childhood autonomy (7). Acknowledging the paradoxical understandings of childhood at a moment in which the notion of the protected and sentimentalized child was gaining force and attitudes towards child labor were changing, Vey focuses on the professionalism of this troupe and its young performers to interrogate what it meant to be a child at this significant historical juncture.

Vey’s study is a micro-history, and she persuasively asserts its value by claiming that the history of this little-known company is the “perfect vehicle for exploring the world of nineteenth-century actors and examining the societal construction of childhood, just as both were changing” (143). While she draws occasional connections with other instances of children’s performance throughout history, the study is strongest when she focuses on the connections, and differences, between this juvenile troupe and wider theatrical practices and child performers in the period. The book’s careful structure facilitates the creation of an interesting narrative around the company that simultaneously engages with a series of larger thematic concerns pertinent to childhood studies. Following an introduction that ably sets out the case for the importance of this subject, six chapters explore the wider implications of child performance via a focus on different periods in the company’s brief history and its major personalities. Chapter 1 recounts the familial origins of the company by focusing on its founder, Robert Marsh, offering a vivid insight into the repertoires and practices of this novel company. Chapter 2 examines some of the difficulties faced by the company in the late 1850s and reads contractual documents and legal wrangling between Marsh and the parents of two actors, Louise Arnot and Alfred Stewart, to raise questions about the personal or collective agency of these child actors. It provides an exceptional view into the economic position of the child within cultures of labor and apprenticeship. Chapter 3 concentrates on Mary Marsh, daughter of the founder, who died in a horrific onstage accident. Analyzing her roles and contemporary perceptions of her as innocent victim, Vey proposes that her short acting career propagated the sentimentalization of the child. This chapter usefully extends Vey’s consideration of the curious paradoxes of the multiple versions of childhood in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 4 moves on to consider how the company overcame the difficulties posed by Mary’s death, the approaching civil war, and the fact that the children were aging. Vey stresses Robert Marsh’s role as a theatrical innovator as he takes advantage of opportunities to tour to California, Australia, and New Zealand. This chapter depicts the company as a professional and economic entity prepared to adapt to survive, even though, in spite of Marsh’s new strategies, the company would ultimately disband in 1863 when many of the key actors had grown up and moved on. The final two chapters return to focus on important actors: Louise Arnot, the company’s “leading man,” in chapter 5 and Georgie Marsh, the comic, in chapter 6. By charting the...