Protagonists in Paper: Toy Theatres and the Cultivation of Celebrity

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, several London printers began publishing designs to be used in toy theatres. Much that has been written about these toy theatres has focused on their mechanics and how they replicated the stage effects and scenic designs of the contemporary stage. Since few actual scenic and costume designs have survived from the early nineteenth century, toy versions of productions sometimes grant us the closest approximation we have of what plays of the period actually looked like, offering a wealth of information about their costumes and scenery.¹ However, the few authors who have written about toy theatres often overlooked the fact that the miniature versions frequently depicted famous actors in specific roles, sometimes providing captions beneath characters stating not just the part being portrayed but also the star performer whose face and bodily manner were being copied. Toy theatres offer an exciting glimpse into the past, a time capsule capturing how theatre was performed in the nineteenth century, but they also performed a valuable service for actors and theatre managers during the time they were in general circulation. These miniature theatres reinforced an iconography of celebrity that linked star actors with the roles they played, generating excitement around individual performers. They helped to promote the star system that dominated British theatre through most of the nineteenth century, and by closely examining miniature theatre prints, we can see the ups and downs of this star system being played out before our very eyes.

The first writers to comment on toy theatres tend to be nostalgic in their descriptions of miniature theatricals. These male authors recalling their own boyhoods tend to emphasize the roles the theatres played in the lives of young boys. Edward Draper, writing in 1868, remembers how “nearly every boy had a toy theatre, with its pasteboard characters and scenes” (181). John Oxenford, writing three years later, enthuses about how these theatres were once “the most valued treasure that a boy in his early teens could possess” (67). While Oxenford notes that “young ladies of the family might assist with their scissors or their camel’s hair pencil” he remarks that “in a well-regulated household the manager and proprietor was always a boy” (67). This comment seems to imply,

Figure 1.

Toy theatre with characters and scenes for The Silver Palace, Benjamin Pollock, wood, card, tinsel and metal, 63.5 × 68.5 × 61.0 cms.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 2.

Cover for Black-Eyed Susan, The Model Theatre, No. 6., Fred Shepherd, print on coloured paper.

© The New York Public Library.

however, the existence of less “well-regulated” homes where females had the audacity to engage in their own miniature theatricals. In fact, the actress Ellen Terry later wrote, “I remember the little stages well and there is nothing quite like them” remarking that she herself owned one when she “was a child” (3).

Chief among the backward-glancing aficionados of the toy theatre was the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1884 published “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” in The Magazine of Art, later collecting it together with other essays in his book Memoirs and Portraits (213–27). The title for the essay comes from the fact that one sheet of prints typically sold for a penny when uncoloured and twice as much when pre-coloured by hand.² The purchaser would then cut out the images, glue them to a hard surface (generally pasteboard or thin cardboard) and assemble them into a miniature theatre that mimicked the professional productions on the London stage. Though these ephemeral items generally did not survive intact, the Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a few fully built specimens, including one assembled by the toy theatre publisher Benjamin Pollock [Figure 1]. Amateur thespians could perform an entire play on such stages, complete with scene changes, characters in different costumes, and spectacular stage effects. Stevenson remembers the shop where he bought toy-theatre prints as being “a...