Classifying the Juvenile Actor

Abstract

Running in tandem with the manifold representations of the child on stage during the Victorian period is the narrative of debate about child labour. Lord Shaftesbury is the politician most closely associated with pioneering legislation to ameliorate working conditions for children during this period, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1844) won immediate popularity as a literary condemnation of the plight of these exploited workers. Children who worked in the entertainment industry were, however, overlooked by politicians until the 1870s, and they were the last group of children to be protected by legislation. When finally they were recognised as workers, and protected by the Act of Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889, Mrs Fawcett placed resistance to this classification in the contexts of other employments: It is to be noted as a characteristic of the gradual spread of this principle [that children under ten years of age are not to be employed at all] of our legislation from trade to trade, first to children in mines…that the representatives of each trade in turn thought it ‘little less than a crime’ to apply the restrictions upon juvenile labour to their own business. When the master chimney-sweeps were forbidden to use little naked bleeding children to clean chimneys, they said the risk of London being destroyed by fire was indefinitely increased after the prohibition.…In this respect the theatrical profession has not been in any way exceptional.502 KeywordsChild LabourApril 1879Chimney SweepTheatre ChildCrystal PalaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.