Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey (review) Ryan Bunch The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 40, Number 1, January 2016, pp. 124-127 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2016.0009 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/621257 Access provided by Rutgers University (31 Dec 2016 06:13 GMT) 124 The Lion and the Unicorn Shauna Vey. Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2015. In Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors, Shauna Vey offers an engaging chronicle of a journeyman group of child actors, providing valuable insights into the changing status of children and theater in the United States in the mid- nineteenth century. Vey’s project focuses on a group of young actors whose careers were successful but presumably fairly typical. In this respect it is a response to an existing tendency to study the most exceptional child perform- ers and to assess their talents on the basis of current, rather than historical, constructions of childhood. Her method is to produce a microhistory of the Marsh children, culled from historical documents and enlivened by a nar- rative journalistic style gesturing at mystery and melodrama. Following the tenet of microhistorical research that particular lives are emblematic of their historical moment, Vey asserts that the Marsh children’s story is important precisely because, although successful, they were not huge stars. As Vey notes, the children “encountered the deep influence of melodrama, the shift to a wage-based economy, and the need for workplace reform. Their particular experiences illuminate the lives of nineteenth-century players” (3). What emerges is a portrait of a group of child subjects whose lives and careers reveal the ambivalent circumstances of the shift from economic to emotional value invested in children, fed by the same middle class sensibility that prompted some theater producers, including the troupe’s founder Rob- ert Marsh, to make the form appear more respectable by both representing childhood on stage and appealing to family audiences. Vey’s perspective on the Marsh Troupe is grounded in the prevailing paradigms of these changes, most notably the ideas presented by Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Basic Books, 1985). As Vey demonstrates, child actors occupied a complex position with regard to issues of labor and sentiment, because they were wage-earning workers—regarded and evaluated as professionals by audiences and critics—even as their on- stage personae satisfied the public’s desire for the new, romantic image of innocent childhood. Vey’s extensive archival research—culled from newspapers, contracts, advertisements, grave markers, and census records—is the starting point for insightful contextualization and interpretation. The early chapters give an overview of the troupe’s history under the leadership of Robert Marsh, who founded the company starting with his own two children. Along the way, Vey offers detailed profiles of Marsh and four of the children. Each of these subjects figures a different manifestation of social, theatrical, and economic change. For example, Alfred Stewart, the troupe’s fourteen-year-  Book Reviews 125 old specialist in Irish songs and sketches, had a contract with Marsh that reads like a hybrid of a traditional apprenticeship and the newer wage labor practices, revealing the complex relationship between freedom and protection in nineteenth-century childhood. This is no dry accounting of archival findings, however. In a typically vivid analysis, Vey describes an incident in which Louise Arnot refused, against her mother’s wishes, to leave the troupe. When her mother and a lawyer attempted to take her away, she resisted, putting up a fight in the street and attracting a crowd. Whereas Alfred Stewart had little agency in contractual battles between his mother and Marsh, Louise Arnot was able to assert her professional preference to stay with the troupe by drawing on her melodramatic acting skills. The newspapers cooperated by reporting the incident as an attempted abduction, yet they did not sentimentalize either the child or the mother, reflecting the attitude that Louise was property in an economic transaction. The element of melodrama illustrated in this episode is a running motif in the book. The most memorably narrated passages are of a piece with Little Mary Marsh’s melodramatic life and death; she was fatally burned onstage when her gossamer costume caught fire in the footlights. No outrage about workplace safety for children in the theater ensued from this disaster, however. Instead, Mary Marsh became the sacralized image of childhood innocence, martyred and immortalized following her tragic death according to the “para- digms of nineteenth-century melodrama, in which angelic children met early ends before sailing blissfully to heaven” (12). In another of Vey’s admirable turns of hermeneutic, Mary’s gravestone is shown to reflect the duality of the child actor as both laborer and precious angel, with the real Mary Marsh commemorated on one side of the stone, and the idealized stage persona on the other. Louise Arnot’s visit to Mary’s grave in adulthood, which opens the first chapter, is related in romantic language and recreated dialogue as reported by a local newspaper. Later chapters dealing with the adult lives of Louise Arnot and George Marsh, Mary’s brother, concern their negotiations of maturity and the ques- tions of freedom and dependence that followed them beyond their juvenile careers. George seems to have quit acting, but the records of his somewhat mysterious adulthood leave lingering questions about his complex familial and professional relationship to his impresario father. Meanwhile, Arnot’s successes as an adult actor challenge the ideal of protected childhood. Her childhood competence and training in the theatrical profession made her a more than usually independent woman of the nineteenth century: what’s more, her roles had never relied on romanticized girlhood but rather on tomboy tropes. These final portraits bring the book to a fitting denouement after the 126 The Lion and the Unicorn earlier dramatic episodes. Throughout, Vey has the challenge of making available as much informa- tion as possible about her research without straying too far from the central arguments, all the while balancing deft analysis with a willingness to some- times allow the materials to speak for themselves. In sections of the book that are guided by accounts of the facts, we are left sometimes to draw our own conclusions. At other times, threads of the narrative are left off and then picked up again in a later chapter for further exploration. For example, the chapter on the troupe’s tour of Australia and New Zealand reads mostly as a straightforward account of Robert Marsh’s attempts to find a new audience for the juvenile troupe when their novelty was fading in the United States and some of the mainstay members were aging out, including Louise Arnot who was able to marry and leave the troupe of her own will during the Australian tour (in contrast to the episode described above). It is in the following chapter on Arnot’s adult career that we are treated to a fuller discussion of this as- sertion of independence and its implications for her continued success. Vey’s narrative style does much to bridge the transitions between factual reporting and interpretive analysis, weaving each into an engaging scholarly story. A limitation of the microhistorical approach is the difficulty of knowing just how reliably a particular case study can be assumed to represent wider trends and practices—or, assuming that it does, whether anomalies or regional variations might be missed. Indeed, the Marsh troupe itself was unusual in the United States in that there were no other all-child troupes composed of children from different families. Vey both acknowledges these issues and offers a rationale for the approach in a vivid personal reminiscence in her afterword. Like a jar-sized biological sample taken from a lake, the microscopic approach to history might not ensure, by itself, that we have been able to take in the whole landscape, but it does allow us to “test some assumptions” (143). The framework for the more panoramic view is provided by the existing literature, including Vey’s own earlier work in childhood, theater, and the nineteenth century, as well as the contributions of her colleagues in related areas, including Marah Gubar, Robin Bernstein, Nan Mulleneaux, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Jane O’Connor. In conversation with these scholars, Vey turns the microscope on the Marsh troupe, its child actors, and their contem- poraneous reception to challenge more recent tropes of the extraordinariness of child performers. At the same time, however, we come to realize that the issues of agency and labor confronted by the Marsh children in nineteenth- century entertainment continue to be relevant in the modern industry. The book thus contributes valuably to several fields of inquiry and will be of benefit to scholars and students across disciplines.  Book Reviews 127 Ryan Bunch is an artist associate in the Department of Fine Arts at Rutgers University-Camden, where he teaches applied vocal performance. His work with community theaters in the Philadelphia area informs his musicologi- cal research, which focuses on childhood, adolescence, and the American musical theater.