Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
39th Edition.
Shauna Vey. Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 217pp.
There’s probably never been a time when children were not being rigorously trained to perform on the stage, either as part of a family tradition or as a means of supplementing a family’s income, regardless of whether the child’s antecedents or parents were themselves in show business.
In some cultures, it’s expected that if your parents are actors you’ll be one too. Take Japan, for example, where children born into the families of kabuki actors begin training in their preschool years, often making their professional debuts at three or four. Anyone who’s ever spent time on TikTok for a few minutes is likely to have seen child actors, singers, acrobats, dancers, and musicians, not to mention martial arts practitioners, display astonishing skills at ages when most children are still learning their ABCs. As we watch, we’re probably worrying about what these kids had to go through to achieve such awesome results.
There have been any number of studies of the phenomenon of the professional child actor (to isolate that specific form of performance), many devoted to those precocious young artists who became famous in movies, where their performances remain frozen, available to the ages, long after the kids grow up and mature (if, given the many who die young, they ever get that far). The circumstances of modern child actors in America, too many to name, are familiar fodder for books and articles, especially when their stories involve parental or managerial (often the same thing) malpractice leading to significant psychological, physical, or financial problems.
If such problems persist today, when a panoply of laws and regulations exist to protect young artists from exploitation and overwork, what might have been the case before such guidelines were drawn? In 2015, Shauna Vey, a professor at New York City College of Technology, published an excellent study, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre, which investigates the situation of child actors in the premodern American theatre, as represented by a (primarily) antebellum company whose players were all children.
Vey’s well-researched book uses the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians, formed by Robert G. Marsh (né Guerineau), to contemplate the place of child actors on the mid-19-century stage and the era’s changing social attitudes toward children per se, childhood being understood as a social construct. Vey investigates children’s roles as workers, and the degree of personal agency they possessed, while also providing an account of the troupe’s performance history, both in America (including San Francisco and Sacramento) and Australia and New Zealand. Also closely examined are issues related to changes in the way people were paid and the nature of apprenticeships and training.
Attention is given to the biographies of both the troupe’s founder and manager, Marsh, and his principal performers, these latter being considered representative of the career trajectories followed by child actors of the day. Those actors described in detail are Mary Marsh, who died at 12 when her costume caught fire onstage during a performance; her younger brother, George, who eventually left acting to become a printer; and Louise Arnot, who usually played male roles for the company, and went on to have a long, respectable career.
Considerable background is also provided for two important youngsters in the troupe, Alfred Stewart, whose mother’s attempt to use the courts to retrieve her son from the company is closely reported, and Louis Aldrich, who enjoyed a successful career into his maturity, even becoming president of the Actors Fund of America. Vey is concerned with using these children, especially the first three, to expand on what the life of an American child actor—a career involving constant travel, often without one’s parents—was like.
Reference often is made to other important child actors of the time, such as Lotta Crabtree, Cordelia Howard, and the Bateman sisters, Kate and Ellen, who played children’s roles opposite adults playing adult roles. However, the Marsh troupe was unique in being devoted to having all its roles played by children. So while Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was played by a young girl, St. Claire and Uncle Tom, for example, were also played by children. Cross-dressing, mainly by females portraying males, was widely employed.
Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre is a scholarly, fully documented work, but it’s clearly written, rarely allowing academic fuss or jargon to interfere with accessibility. It contains far more engrossing material, both sociological and theatrical, than I have room to mention. It should prove of interest to anyone who’s either been a child performer, knows someone who has, or has ever thought of what such a life might entail, especially for children who lived their lives upon the wicked stage in the 1840s through the 1860s.
Shauna Vey isn’t Dickens, Robert Marsh wasn’t Vincent Crummles, and Little Mary Marsh wasn’t the Infant Phenomenon, but it’s hard not to think of Nicholas Nickleby when reading about the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians. The Marsh Troupe was real, its greatest loss was truly tragic, and its triumphs were historically significant. Child actors haven’t been the same since.
Coming up: Ron Fassler. The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings & Replacements.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
