- Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry, 1875–1914 by Dyan Colclough
By Dyan Colclough.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiv + 227 pp. Cloth $95, e-book $69.99.
Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry, 1875–1914, is a nuanced exploration of the tangle of economics, politics, philanthropy, social [End Page 149] policy, entrepreneurship, gender, class, and competing visions of morality that swirled around Victorian stage children. Going beyond the standard players and obvious themes, Dyan Colclough sorts out factions and recovers viewpoints of constituent groups often overlooked. The reader emerges with a vision of the breadth and utility of children’s contribution to the theater industry, how it was maintained, why it receded, and what issues remained in the early decades of the twentieth century. (This reviewer is mentioned in the acknowledgements and the footnotes.)
Colclough situates her work within recent scholarship on childhood and youth, extending some theses while disputing others. Truly interdisciplinary, the book also reflects a deep knowledge of theater history and practice. Colclough writes with a confident acuity that may be attributable to her prior work experience in the entertainment industry as a licensed chaperone for professional performing children, as well as her splendid archival research.
The book is set at the peak of British society’s “fixation with childhood,” when, not coincidentally, the theatrical industry was “of central importance in the economy and within that society” (165–66). Non-theatrical work opportunities for children were diminishing as public opinion and policy increasingly favored the schoolroom over the factory as the proper place for children. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the working stage child in economic and labor contexts. Chapter 3 inspects the relationship(s) between the performing child and its audience. Chapters 4 and 5 lay out the various factions involved in efforts to aid, regulate, or employ stage children.
Beginning with an economic analysis of stage children as “Raw Material, Labor and the Finished Product” (35), Colclough walks us through each phase. Children from various social classes were recruited, trained, and supplied as market demand increased. Non-British readers may be amazed, as I was, by the sophistication of the linked training-booking business during this period. Savvy entrepreneurs established dancing schools and training academies that netted double payments by collecting tuition from parents and booking fees from theaters. Children were signed to long-term contracts that authorized only the school to book them, in any entertainment it chose.
Colclough nimbly connects stage children’s labor with the theater industry’s successful campaign to raise the respectability of its product via family-friendly fare. Middle-class children transitioned from rapt spectators, attracted by the children they saw on stage, to child performers who attracted more middle class audiences, increasing demand for even more child-populated entertainments. Chapter 2 unpacks the attractions and realities of stage labor. Colclough recovers a great number of children’s voices (albeit some are second-hand and others [End Page 150] are adult remembrances) to demonstrate the multiplicity of children’s work-life experiences. Though motivations and responses varied by class and gender, the sheer joy of applause figured in all their choices.
Chapter 3 analyzes the asymmetrical bonds between children and their audiences. For spectators who reveled in fantasy, the performing child “both packaged and sold an idealized notion of childhood” (81). A fanciful image of theatrical work was encouraged by the media’s “promotion of the public personas of stage children” (80). The audience, encountering stage children “in the world of leisure,” based their perceptions of performer’s lifestyles “on illusion rather than on reality” (78). Yet, a stage child’s continuance in the profession depended on maintaining a connection with the audience. This link was often sexualized by spectators who responded to both the innocence and the allure embodied by the child performers, the vast majority of whom were female.
The (potentially lost) innocence of child performers was a focus of one of the several entities involved in conflicts described in chapters 4 and 5. Colclough teases out the gendered thinking that created a double standard for girls and...