Raw Material, Labor, and the Finished Product: The Theatrical Child as Employee

Abstract

The emergence of the late nineteenth-century entertainment industry was accompanied by the associated pressures of competitive and speculative production. Producers straddled the worlds of trade and leisure and were simultaneously answerable to their backers and to the paying public. Although there was much potential for profit, fortunes might just as easily be lost. Success was allied to securing the majority audience. Industry bosses needed to be astute and intuitive in determining, as Peter Bailey put it, “when to drop the ballet and promote gymnasts, to know how to compile a programme of the widest appeal.” 1 Throughout our period, supply of and demand for child entertainers show them to be one of the largest box-office draws of the time. When it came to theatre productions it was claimed that children comprised “some of their most attractive features” and should they be prevented from performing, it would “interfere with hundreds of operas and plays.” 2 The last 25 years of the nineteenth century saw the widespread employment and promotion of theatrical children. This fervent application of child labor points to its marked contribution to the commercial success of the entertainment industry. These 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.