“Preserved from Oblivion”: Using Victorian Toy Theatre to Recreate Early Melodrama
Quarantining has brought back toy theatre, at least on YouTube, with dozens of videos of performances, how-tos, and interviews. Toy theatre was a common pastime in nineteenth-century Britain as in other Western countries. It required children and teenagers to buy printed sheets with images of the characters in different postures and the various scenes of a play. They would then colour them, and cut up the characters to paste them on cardboard. On a miniature wooden stage, they could enact the plays by following the instructions of the book of words (similar to a playtext), placing the proper scenes as backdrop and moving the paper figures along rails. A significant part of the juvenile drama repertoire stems from early melodrama, the most popular being The Miller and his Men (1813). Shakespeare and the stage adaptations of Sir Walter Scott’s novels were also widely produced for toy theatre. The sheets of characters and scenes as well as the book of words thus captured the live performances from the 1810s to the 1840s and provide a source to study their reception throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Toy theatre did not preserve in print the Victorian plays adapted from sensation fiction most commonly associated with melodrama, such as The Woman in White (1859-1860) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Victorian consumption practices can be reconstructed through the recorded and published experiences of white Englishmen who went on to have careers in the arts. These nostalgic writings recount the painstaking preparation of the paper figures more so than the restoration to three dimensions in miniature stage performances. One important exception is the famous
explosion in The Miller and his Men, which led to many tales of fires breaking out. Collectors to this day favour “virgin” sheets that have not been cut-up and pasted or even coloured, unless by the printer-publisher himself. Some collectors present shows with their fully functioning toy theatres. This presentation will highlight the nostalgia in recorded experiences of toy theatre.
Marie Léger-St-Jean is an independent scholar and digital humanist based in Montréal and working on nineteenth-century transnational transmedia mass culture. She is the founder of Price One Penny, a bibliographical and biographical database about the countless publishers and authors involved in the production of cheap literature in London between 1837 and 1860. She received the 2020 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) Field Development Grant to update the site for its 10th anniversary. Her solo work has appeared in edited collections (Edward Lloyd and his World and Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain). She has three forthcoming co-authored articles following her publication with Katie McGettigan in Amerikastudien/American Studies.
