That "fine word" illegitimate: children in late Georgian theater.

Carlson, Julie A.

   Upon a board
   Whence an attendant of the theatre
   Served out refreshments, had this child been placed,

   And there he sate environed with a ring
   Of chance spectators, chiefly dissolute men
   And shameless women ...

   ... but I behold
   The lovely boy as I beheld him then,
   Among the wretched and the falsely gay,
   Like one of those who walked with hair unsinged
   Amid the fiery furnace.

--William Wordsworth The Prelude 7:383-88, 395-99

Among the surprising finds revealed by online publication of the Godwin Diary is the frequency with which William Godwin attended London theater. At the height of his playgoing, Godwin attended theater eighty times a year, frequenting blockbuster spectacles as well as legitimate fare. Over the span of the diary (1788-1836), he records attending theater close to 2,000 times. (2) Even more intriguing is the number of times that Godwin records taking one or more of his children to Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Haymarket, Sadler's Wells, Astley's Amphitheatre, and other public exhibitions. Out of a total of one hundred eighty-three references to his stepdaughter Fanny in the diary, thirty pertain to attendance at theater (versus fifteen to Coleridge's 1811-12 lectures and six to painting-related exhibits). Of twenty-six references to his son William from 1803 until 1817 (that is, until he is fourteen), twelve, or virtually half, involve trips to the theater (as compared to three trips to a fair, three to Coleridge's lectures, and one to an art exhibition). Godwin's use of "M" to designate Mary as well as James Marshal makes ascertaining Mary's early theater visits difficult--there is a possibility that she was with Fanny at the viewing of Castle Spectre and Children in the Wood on 15 November 1799, though she would have only been two, and the annotators conclude that "M" refers to Marshal. Her first confirmed playgoing occurs at age three and a half, when she attends Shylock and Harlequin's Tour on 2 January 1801, with three more theater visits that year and four in 1802. Fanny is four the first time that Godwin takes her to see Children in the Wood, and together they attend theater three more times the following year. William is eight when he sees his first play, Pizarro, at Covent Garden, a play that his father had seen already thirteen times before. As usual, Godwin's diary provides no commentary on why he took his young children to the theater or what they experienced while there, but the fact of their attendance suggests that going to the theater played some role in Godwin's practices of childrearing and notions of suitable entertainment for them.

To what extent is Godwin anomalous in this notion or practice? Were children under fourteen visible attenders of theater in London and, if so, how did this affect adults or children as playgoers? Were children's visits dictated primarily by theater-based or extra-theatrical concerns? That is, can we correlate their presence to the showing of particular plays, genres, and actors or was it largely dependent on what types of care were unavailable elsewhere? Moreover, what mode of childrearing would taking young children to late Georgian theater imply? Abusive? Fantasy-friendly? Cavalier? Would it reinforce or contradict the wealth of writing in the period on children's minds and pedagogical requirements, complement or compete with the burgeoning market for children's books? I do not have definitive answers to these questions, difficult as they are, and made moreso by the lack of existing commentary by children or accurate commentary by others on them and by the capaciousness of the terms "infant" and "child" as used in the period. But asking how many children attended theater and how this affected playgoing and childrearing strikes me as an important way to sharpen our views of Romantic era children and the aesthetic education provided by viewing plays in late Georgian theater.

That Godwin--dubbed "the Philosopher" even by affectionate friends--loved playgoing and wrote enthusiastically for the stage challenges the claim that late Georgian theater represents mindless entertainment. (3) That he continued to take an enlarging group of children to the theater after he married Mary Jane Clairmont and began a children's book business with her suggests that he found positive overlap between playgoing and the conditions that he and others stipulate as conducive to a child's mental flourishing. I am struck by how rarely scholars writing on the popular topics of Romanticism and childhood or Romantic era pedagogy and children's books include theater in their considerations. This is all the more surprising because of theater's reputation for being a "juvenile" pleasure, a view that Romantic bardolators, in erecting firm divisions between viewing and reading, sensation and imagination, bodies and minds, did so much to perpetuate. (4) I suggest that instead of construing "juvenile" primarily as a developmental evaluation of mind that reflects negatively on theater and its mentality, we first consider "juvenile" as referring accurately to several late Georgian emergent stage realities that showcase and are geared toward eliciting childlike states of mind. Recognizing theater's growing reliance on the presence of children on stage better positions us to assess the juvenile aspects of theater's aesthetic education as central to the success of theater in facilitating mental transformation, not chronological stages of development.

The play titles that Godwin's diary records fall into three groupings that aid this reassessment. The earliest feature children in the narratives (Children in the Wood [attended 3 times], Deaf and Dumb), noticeable spectacle (Castle Spectre, Cinderella, Pizarro), or are pantomimes (Harlequin's Tour, Harlequin's Almanack, Furibond; or Harlequin Negro). Slightly later, they tend toward classical fare (Shylock [3 times], Richard in, Cato, Venice Preserved [3 times], Romeo, King John, Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Love for Love, and Coriolanus), though it is an open question whether the afterpiece is the draw. A third category involves plays written by close friends of the family, including family members (Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb, and A Tale of Mystery, Lamb's Mr. H--, Godwin's Faulkener, Coleridge's Remorse). (5) The Godwins also attend illegitimate arenas, whose offerings would fall into the first grouping, both chronologically and in terms of spectacle. They visit Astley's (10 May 1799), see 1/2 Don Juan, Royal +, Fete du Serrail, and Harlequin Hercules (Sadler's Wells, 1 July 1799), Gretna and the Pirate (Astley's, 15 September 1800), Alchymist (Sadler's Wells, 28 May 1801), Darby and Joan, Ambercrombie, Puss in Boots (Astley's, 6 July 1801), Victims of Tyranny (Astley's, 28 August 1802), Zoa and Wizard's Wake (Sadler's Wells, 9 September 1802), Talking Bird and An Bratach (Sadler's Wells, 23 July 1805), and Astley's at Olympic Pavilion (21 December 1808). Intriguing too is that the only references to attendance at theater with Wollstonecraft involve visits to the illegitimates.

The slippage that Jane Moody demonstrated between legitimate and illegitimate aesthetic orientations in London theater houses pertains also to the juvenility ascribed to plays that showcase children and to the genre of pantomime. (6) The Godwin children's attendance at both indicates that at least some middle-class children attended these offerings and possibly were taken to the theater because they were playing but does not indicate that either type of play was directed at children or devised with their minds in mind. More often than not, Godwin went alone or with other male and female adults when such fare was playing. In relation to pantomime, this pattern confirms the assessments of David Mayer and Andrew Stott that, given its "bawdy, energetic humour" and the fact that it offered "the only effective means of satire to hold the stage in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century," pantomime in the Romantic era was "attended by adults of all social classes and by comparatively few children." (7) Pantomime accrues and cultivates a sizable audience of children only later in the century when, starting in the 1840s, the Surrey institutes special "juvenile nights" during the pantomime season, Covent Garden holds "morning performances" for children in the 1860s with reduced prices for "children under the age of twelve," "most respectfully" instituted "to meet the wishes of parents," and the pantomime season is reduced to the Christmas holiday and targeted at children. (8) Pantomime scholar John O'Brien demurs somewhat in asserting that "over the course of its history from the 1720s to the early nineteenth century, pantomime was increasingly seen as a form of performance exclusively for children." (9) Pantomime librettist E. L Blanchard remembers not only loving Harlequin Ellar, "whose performances he had known since babyhood and could remember from the age of three," but also understanding from early on that "every trick had a sort of political, or social significance" and conveyed a "vast amount of information about passing events." (10)

Prints of the interiors of both patent and illegitimate London theaters as well as occasional press commentary from the period 1780-1820 notice the presence of children. A paragraph in The London Times of 4 April 1794 asserts that "[t]he squalls of infants, nightly prevalent at either Theatre, ought to be prevented; and perhaps no better method can be hit on, than making the nurses or mothers pay full price for their babes." Interrupted mid-sentence by a crying baby in the audience, John Kemble retorts, "Ladies and gentlemen, unless the play is stopped, the child cannot possibly go on." (11) The demographics specified in a clearly exaggerated account of Siddons mania possibly describe accurate proportions: "One hundred and nine ladies fainted! Forty-six went into fits!... Fourteen children, five old women, a one-handed sailor, and six common-council men, were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the lattices, and boxes, to increase the briny pond in the pit." (12) At least two neutral prints of the interiors of Drury Lane (Edward Dayes [1805] and Rowlandson and Pugin [1808]) and one of Covent Garden show a scattering of young children on benches in the pit and in first-tier galleries. One closeup, "Saloon in 1810," includes a young female in its depiction of nine adults. (13) Prints that have a specific focus, such as Thomas Rowlandson's paired etchings "Comedy Spectators" and "Tragedy Spectators" (1789), referenced by David Worrall as demonstrating audience interactivity rather than passivity, includes one boy amidst seven adults. (14) At least a couple of boys are visible on benches in the pit in "Interior of the Little Theatre, Flaymarket" (1815). (15)

Similar evidence of children in the audience is found in prints and press accounts of Sadler's Wells and Astley's during this period. The age-related demographics evident in "A View of the Confusion at Sadler's Wells" (1807) are confirmed by newspaper accounts of the stampede occasioned by a false alarm of fire. These accounts cite the average age of the eighteen people who were killed as "less than nineteen," the youngest being "a 9 year old nursery maid attending the theatre in the company of her employer and her employer's baby." (16)

Rowlandson's engraving of Astley's printed in Ackermann's Microcosm of London (ca. 1808) and an unidentified engraving from the same period show several children, anticipating in a lower key Charles Dickens's description of a "regular Astley's party" as composed of "pa and ma, and 9 or 10 children, varying from five foot six to two foot eleven and from 14 years of age to 4" and where the little girls are ushered in "by a young lady, evidently the governess." (17) George Cruikshank's 1811 print of Robert Elliston in the character of Sylvester Daggerwood at the Surrey includes one boy in the only two rows of the pit that it depicts, and one girl out of nine assembled in the box--depicted, moreover, as one of the few actually attending to the action on stage (fig. 1). "Royal Coburg Theatre Surry [sic] as first Opened 11 May 1818" depicts in the foreground three small children buying oranges from the female orange-seller. (18) A man holds up a very small child better to see the stage in "Proscenium of the Old Lyceum Theatre, or English Opera House in the Strand as it appeared on the evening of March 21, 1817." (19) The 1822 print of the famous mirror curtain at the Coburg shows numerous children in the front row enjoying their "theatrical reflection." (20)

This evidence suggests that the presence of babies and young children was unremarkable in two senses: an accepted part of the scene and comprising a comparatively small portion of it. I have found no evidence of any special accommodations for infants, who apparently sleep, cry, or are sporadically mesmerized in the arms of a nursemaid or parent sitting with the rest of the audience--or for actresses and other female stage personnel who nurse their infants in between appearances on stage. Mayer stresses the arduous conditions for playgoers in terms of getting there and sitting there for some five or six hours, with minimal conditions for physical relief. Though little hardship on infants, the demands on small children and nursemaids would be significant.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Plays that feature child actors touch on the best-documented aspect of children and theater in this period: infant mania, or the craze for child actors, that reached its peak in the Master Betty phenomenon of 1804-5, but whose import lasted for decades. The print "John Bull in Lilliput" (fig. 2) satirizes this craze already in 1805, as does press commentary denigrating the scores of mercenary and/or benighted parents pushing their children onto the stage. (21) A few scholars have explored the sensationalist aspects of this craze--its share in celebrity culture and erotic titillation for adults--but focus should be directed as well onto how envisioning the child actor expanded then-current notions of what a child's body, mind, and fantasy were deemed capable of performing. (22) Granted, the possibilities for children offered by late Georgian theaters remained largely in-house, in that children who became actors were still usually born into theater families and their circumstances were usually deemed threatening to middle-class respectability. But these distinctions are porous, especially to children. One thing that discourse regarding infant mania publicizes and advertises is the growing opportunity for children to be trained to act instead of dependent for access to the stage on being born into acting families.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Growth in the number of children required for London stage productions was tied to the popularity of pantomime and spectacle in both legitimate and illegitimate houses and the increasing demand for children in choruses, ballet corps, stage processions, and flocks of sprites or small animals. (23) Some of these roles can be conceived of as walk-on positions, but others require training, especially in music, gymnastics, and dance. It is an interesting fact of this stage of theater history that expertise in acting was acquired simply by practicing it on stage, usually first in the provinces, whereas expertise in pantomime and dancing required off-stage training, newly provided by neighborhood academies whose founders moved between assignments at legitimate and illegitimate venues. (24) As Frederick Burwick documents, Charles Dibdin establishes a Children's Theater more than once, the first with Charles Hughes in 1782, when they open the Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy on Great Surrey Street that boasts stage entertainments performed by children "of both sexes, from 6 to 14 years old, intended to act speaking pantomimes, operas, medleys, drolls, and interludes." (25) Then in 1805, Dibdin leases the vacated Sans Souci to Friedrich Schirmer for the performance of "Musical and Dramatical Interludes in the German Language" and in 1806 also to Henry Francis Greville for "Plays and Entertainments Performed by Children." (26)

Dibdin's first venture, with Hughes, founders for reasons that accentuate the hazards of illegitimacy: no license and abusive treatment of children by the person whom Dibdin hires to train them in dance, Giuseppe Grimaldi, who meanwhile is training and abusing his own two-year-old son, Joseph, in preparation for his debut as Little Clown in Drury Lane's The Triumph of Mirth; or Harlequin's Wedding on Boxing Day of the same year. A more accommodating bridge figure is the dancing master Gabriel Giroux, whom Robert Elliston hires to revive the children's performance school when he takes over management of the renamed Surrey Theater in 1810. Before that tenure, Giroux and his young children appear regularly at the Royal Circus until Jane Scott hires him for the first two seasons (1806-8) of the Sans Pared Theatre (later Adelphi [1819]) as choreographer, ballet master, and associate manager. There he choreographs and trains some forty children, whose most notorious performance is Monkey Island; or, the Faithful Negro that ran for fifty-eight nights from 21 December 1807 to 8 March 1808.

Hit or miss as they are, these academies were fledgling educational institutions for largely working-class children, noteworthy also for the ways that they bled schooling and parenting into each other. On one hand, they were unpredictable and sometimes short-lived, highly dependent on personnel whose own tenures and faculties were precarious; on the other, they provided a more disciplined, organized, and sociable environment than the catch-as-catch-can of being at home or backstage while parents were working. Moreover, the fate of Dibdin's Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy indicates that to some degree these (quasi-) establishments were monitored. Stott writes that Dibdin was "constantly called away from business to deal with complaints from angry parents" regarding the "regular beatings and sadistic punishments" that Grimaldi, Sr. meted out to his pupils until "eventually the local magistrates intervened and ordered 'a compleat [sic] investigation into the morals of the place.'" (27) Leman Thomas Rede's The Road to the Stage; or the Performer's Preceptor (1826) highlights this transitional stage in theater training. In calling for a full-blown "School for Young Actors," which the title page deems a "singular" omission in light of existing "Gymnasiums for Jumpers, and Seminaries for Swimmers," the book criticizes the unprofessional, and primarily mercenary, climate of private theaters cum acting academies. At the same time, Rede states that he is compelled to produce this roadmap because more children of non-theater families are wishing to act and will pursue this passion one way or another; thus they need not only training but also reliable practical advice on how and where to begin. Plus, Rede's pedagogical orientation is friendly to children's minds and the allure of theater. "I too well know the futility of counsel where it has to combat inclination. It is certain that no man can succeed in any business whilst his mind is fixed upon another pursuit--and those who know how strong a dramatic infatuation is, will, I think, agree with me, that parents sacrifice their children's interests in determinedly opposing it." In addition, "If we are to be told that numbers [of aspiring actors] have existed in barns, and expired in workhouses, we should also recollect that many have rolled in carriages, that could never, but for the stage, have emerged from behind a counter." (28)

Frances (Fanny) Kelly's Dramatic Recollections (1832), her one-woman show and proto-theater history, deepens our picture of theater's child-training capacities, especially as annotated and amplified in Gilli Bush-Bailey's Performing Herself. Daughter of minor actor Mark Kelly and niece to the famous Michael Kelly, Fanny Kelly portrays her earliest education as indebted to watching "the great--the inimitable" Kemble, Siddons, and Jordan. (29) Believing at "7 years of age" that "to be great in any way needed only a beginning." Kelly relates how she "nightly took [her] station" at "what is called the first Entrance to the Stage" in "rash defiance of an awful Board placed immediately near to the forbidden spot threatening the Penalty of Half a Guinea (to me at that time an impossible sum) to all intruders." (30) Her spirit paid off in Kemble inviting her to play the Duke of York in Richard ill, which he declared an "unprecedented success!" and she portrays as launching a thirty-five-year acting career. (Actually, Kelly began at age seven in the chorus of her uncle's Blue Beard and played the Duke of York when she was ten.) Bush-Bailey publishes in an appendix a passage excluded from the printed version that emphasizes Kelly's seriousness about perfecting her craft as a child actor. Describing one of her "earliest performances" as the unnamed Girl in The Children in the Wood, she castigates "the urchin who enacted my Brother" for sleeping through the scene "where Walter kills Oliver in the Children's defense" and ruining their "finest scene" by refusing to go on stage without his toy cart and horse. (31) Dramatic Recollections also reinforces the view of an intensification of youthful aspirants without theater-family connections. Significant satire within it is directed at deluded mothers who solicit Kelly's services as "Preceptress" to their daughters and who believe that their "little Darlings" are "so many Eighth Wonders of the World." The chief impulse behind Kelly's staging and publishing Dramatic Recollections is reform of the stage through acquiring sufficient funds to open her own private theater and Dramatic School for children at her residence on Sloane Street. (32)

Contrary to the Infant Roscius phenomenon, Kelly's recollections indicate that most child actors played children or minor juvenile roles until they grew into maturity, and these were the kinds of roles that the Godwin children saw. (33) As far as I can find, Kelly was not in the role of Girl on any of the three occasions that they attended The Children in the Wood. Play lists for 1 November 1798 and 15 November 1799 name Master Tokely and Miss Benson, minor company actors who played various child roles at very young ages, possibly age three in the case of Tokely but certainly eight when he appears first as Son in The Stranger (24 March 1798) and then Boy in The Children in the Wood. Unlike Miss Benson--both of whose parents acted and whose father, Robert Benson, "an actor of some consequence in secondary roles," had recently "flung himself from the top of a house" and "dashed" his "brains" in "the high road"--James Tokely was the child of "respectable parents," who nonetheless "early imbibed a predilection for the stage," possibly through a relative "concerned in the mechanical part" of one of the theaters. (34) A different Boy with whom Miss Benson played Girl on 21 August 1797 at the Haymarket, Master (Frederick) Menage, came to child acting through his father, Mons Menage, a chorus dancer at Drury Lane. As early as four, Frederick danced in The Enchanted Wood (Haymarket, 25 July 1792) along with his sisters, one of whom played Girl to his Boy when The Children in the Wood opened at the Haymarket in 1793. By 1796, the Monthly Mirror was hailing him "emphatically, the child of promise," who achieved significant popularity as Chimpanzee in the Covent Garden pantomime, Perouse, or the Desolate Island (26 February 1801). (35)

Associated generally with childhood, the "promise" manifested in child actors stands in marked contrast to the real living and working conditions of most theater children in this period. It also conflicts dramatically with the dire situations of children depicted in so many of the new plays. Those in the plays that the Godwin children saw are seriously imperiled: abandoned, orphaned, stolen, or lost, usually because of adult familial perfidy and greed. Boy and Girl in The Children in the Wood are ordered to be killed by an uncle raising them after the (presumed) death of their father, and then lost in the woods during a storm while awaiting the return of Walter, a poor carpenter who is in love with the nursemaid of these orphaned children and who shares her concern for their welfare. Julio/ Theodore in Holcroft's adaptation of Deaf and Dumb: Or, The Orphan Protected (1801) is a speechless orphan boy "thrown out helpless and unpitied on the world," as its Preface stipulates. The action in William Dimond's Adrian and Orilla: Or, A Mother's Vengeance (1806) is the consequence of one illegitimate dead baby and another legitimate one stolen as an infant by the first one's mother from the father of both. Moreover, plays not focused on children, like Pizarro and The Caravan, link their most spectacular moments to the fate of an imperiled infant--Rolla on the hanging bridge risking his life to deliver Cora's infant (a real one, and presumably Siddons's) into her arms, and Carlo the dog leaping from a high rock into a pool of water in order to save a drowning infant (presumably a doll). (36) While these situations all end non-tragically, this view of childhood hardly counts as innocent, carefree, or oblivious to impending mortality.

Such depictions may help to explain why this era of theater is considered a juvenile pleasure that is inappropriate for children. I wish to suggest instead that theater's use of children at this time works to underscore the centrality of childlike states of mind to successful theater, whether success is measured through increase in box-office receipts or ethical and aesthetic responsiveness. Features of the juvenility of theater that are deemed negative--delight in sensation and sensationalism, magical thinking, and paralinguistic modalities--are avowed traits of infantile minds and of what distinguishes theatrical from literary forms of communication. They promise nothing in particular other than that the representation is theatrical but, at the same time, evoking juvenile traits is the necessary precondition for shaping minds that respond with empathy. Set pieces of infants in peril operate as spectacular props that often steal the show, but they are also the most effective, because reliably affective, means of propping up the "humanity" honed and showcased in theater, a feeling-for that is also felt to be threatened by these negatively juvenile traits. Plots of child endangerment also capitalize on the near-irresistible appeal of babies and toddlers to affect minds otherwise preoccupied, indifferent, egocentric, or engaged.

Some of this propping by children and the expansion of feeling envisioned through it are evident in Thomas Morton's highly popular Children in the Woods: A Musical Piece in Two Acts, that Godwin and his children went to see three times. It is a markedly sentimentalized version of its source-text, the anonymous ballad of the same name, whose two children die alone in the woods and about whom nobody but robins care, for in Morton's version the children are ultimately rescued by parents falsely presumed dead and reunited with other benevolent caretakers, including Walter and his beloved Josephine, in a concluding tableau that articulates the force of sentiment and its desired contagion. "A Father here--at either knee, / A rosy dimpled baby.... Fullest mine of Mother's bliss, / Fuller nought can make it; / Since all tonight who witness this, / Seem kindly to partake it. " As a musical entertainment, moreover, the darkness of the ballad narrative is remediated by the lightheartedness of song. At the same time, however, Morton's Children in the Woods portrays the transition from old school (chapbook, ballad, fairy tale) to new school (didactic, sentimental, melodramatic) approaches to children's mental lives as a fusion or layering, rather than a progression. The concluding song that Josephine is asked to sing in order to soothe Walter's torment over having left the children in the woods is the ballad "The Norfolk Tragedy" that she "bought of the old blind pedlar who passed by this morning" and which features the ghost of a "murdered babe." (37) Moreover, as she sings it, the worlds of ballad and musical entertainment converge, as the ghost baby in the song and the rescued children on stage "knock" simultaneously on a window and, seconds later, "burst through" the door. (38)

What playgoers envision here is a confluence of the cognitive ends of fairy tale and moral tale, without their coinciding. This non-coincidence of fantasy and realism is fundamental to the aesthetic education of theater, where moral aims diverge from as much as they interact with stage illusion and, so often, no one is the wiser. In this, Romantic era theater suspends the discursive squaring off that attends debates regarding the appropriate books for children between poets, who champion ballads, fairy tales, and romance as optimally formative because imaginative and in touch with vastness, and prose writers, who favor sense-based experience and experimentation as better preparation for confronting reality. (39) Theater confuses the two, in part because theater practice and discourse on theater in the era lag behind print culture's investment in demarcating child from adult and making childlike minds appropriate for children. Theater trades on willed and unintended confusion over adult and child, the ages of infant and child, when one should become a child or act like one, and what children know or should know about human passion, mortality, and danger. While the Master Betty phenomenon provoked extensive public debate over how a child can know, represent, or be trained to embody adult sensations and realities, to my knowledge it never occasioned commentary that linked the positive aspects of theater's juvenility to the growing presence of children on stage.

My final grouping of plays that the Godwin children saw, those written by their father and close friends of the family, is at once limited to them as a specific set of individuals and generative of fresh perspectives on the commerce between children's bookstores and theater in the period. Filial duty might be dictating the presence of Fanny (age 13) and Mary (10), possibly Charles (12), (40) at Faulkener on 17 December 1807--another new play, by the way, featuring an illegitimate youth abandoned by his mother and whom Godwin worked hard to have played by Master Betty. But Mary and Fanny also attended Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb (23 March 1801), Godwin, Marshal, Thomas Cooper "and children" attended A Tale of Mystery on 17 February 1803, Fanny attended Lamb's Mr. H--(10 December 1806, shown with Travellers), and Fanny, Mary, Jane (later Claire), and William all were present on opening night of Coleridge's Remorse (23 January 1813). This grouping raises again the question of whether the Godwin household is an anomaly: in this case as family theater patrons and proprietors of a children's publishing house and bookstore, as a blended family in advance of even "German" (i.e., Kotzebue-inspired) stage renditions of illegitimacy, and as a site and sight of sociability that is cross-generational, especially as it pertains to theater. Beyond the peculiarities of this family, recognizing the presence of other children in theater audiences prompts us to extend the sociability recently accorded to Romantic era literary venues to include children.

All three of the distinctions associated with the Godwin household call for critical revision of "the second Mrs. Godwin," reviled then and often still for saddling the Philosopher with her suspect children, no-nonsense practicality, and for transforming the household into a book business establishment. A subject for another day, here I would only suggest that what Mary Jane Clairmont contributed to the family business is an approach toward children's minds and books that links fairy tale with moral tale and that encompasses theater. The appreciation of fairy tales as appropriate reading material for children is what she gained and produced during her editorial experience at Tabart's. (41) While her Dramas for Children (1809), produced for the Juvenile Library, participates in the demarcation of children's from adult literary genres and indulges in the "bookstore promotion" that becomes a "set-piece of juvenile literature" in the early nineteenth century, she raised her own children in both bookstore and theater and viewed the seeing, not simply reading, of Shakespeare's plays as a suitable endeavor for young girls. (42) In this she was well partnered with Godwin, whose own endorsement of theater exposure for children was even more hands-on and predates his second marriage and production of children's books. A vastly underappreciated accomplishment of Godwin mentorship is "the first actor to rise to fame in the new American nation," Thomas Cooper, the son of Godwin's first cousin Grace Mary Cooper, whom Godwin raised from the age of eleven, once the sudden death of Cooper's father in India left the family without viable support. "America's Premier Tragedian" and the "Father of the American Stage" (to cite two book titles), Cooper was not born to act but by the age of fifteen became an actor through the combination of straitened and enlivening fantasy circumstances that early exposure to theater (and to living with Godwin) cultivated. (43)

The case of Cooper also highlights theater's cross-generational sociability and arguable value as surrogate parent. The success of Cooper's turn to acting owes a great deal to Godwin's friendship with Holcroft, the heady artistic exchanges Cooper experienced within and between their households, and both men's extensive theatrical networks. Raising Cooper also occasioned some of Godwin's most anguished commentary on the difficulties of parenting, in particular, of providing instruction and criticism that are not resisted because of their perceived severity. To what extent was Godwin's own pull to theater and his introduction of troubled young persons to it owing to the amusing distractions of its aesthetic education? (44)

With his own children, might playgoing offer a welcome diversion from family life that helped keep them together and possibly solidify them as a family? Did the presence of accompanying adult friends make both family and theater feel more sociable and show the sociability found in theater to be enticingly cross-generational? (45) More broadly, rethinking the interchanges among theater, bookstore, and middle-class home life uncovers a continuum of sociable theatrical childrearing practices: from reading children's books that encourage children to frequent juvenile bookstores, to enlisting children in private theatricals where at home they perform plays purchased at theater or bookstore, to playing with toy theaters that reconstruct performances and set staging at home where children play and replay what others, and sometimes they, have experienced at the theater.

So far, I have found no accounts by the Godwin children describing memories of their early trips to theater. The two plays that Mary Shelley writes in 1820 as a young adult, Proserpine and Midas, are lyrical and mythic, ostensibly not written for theater, but the printed version of Proserpine in The Winter's Wreath (1832) is targeted at youth and at revising several fantasies about parent-child relations. (46) Possibly her early experiences of playgoing influenced her receptivity to seeing Frankenstein performed ("It lives!") in Richard Brinsley Peake's popular, and vastly altered, adaptation, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823). Though "not well managed" in terms of "story," it "much amused" her, especially T. P. Cooke's "well-imagined & executed" stage business: "his seeking as it were for support--his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard." (47) Interesting too is Miranda Seymour's comment on the "sensation-loving" venue (Lyceum) and the moralizing apparent in the title. (48) Accounts that do exist of persons witnessing their first plays as a child usually come from very unreliable places: adult memories of events that occurred thirty to fifty years before; hagiographic biographies of actors by theater personnel or aficionados; literary and theater critics with particular axes to grind. I hope that my attempt to reformulate the juvenility of Romantic era theater spurs recovery of more accounts by and of children in theater audiences and invites reading the ones that we have with fresh eyes.

One thing that these childhood recollections assert in all their haziness is that being at the theater made a lasting impression, however inaccurately that impression is described or ill-befits the play or experience that generated it. Another is that playgoing is felt to be transfomative. Seeing Siddons perform Elvira in Pizarro at age ten convinces Master Betty that he "shall die" if he is not permitted to become an actor. (49) Seeing Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd also at age ten activates Godwin's political as well as theatrical sensibilities. (50) Mary Russell Mitford dates her "passion for plays" at "somewhat short of four years old" when her "dear" father took her "to see one of the greatest tragedies of the world [Othello] set forth in a barn," the "dim recollection" of which is still palpable as she pens the introduction to her collected dramatic works. (51) William Hazlitt's first playgoing experience at age twelve sparks a mini-review sent in a letter to his father. (52) Besides the facilitating role of parents, Hazlitt's as well as Mitford's accounts underscore the importance of having a tutor whose "whole heart was in the drama" and who considered it a "duty" to introduce their charges to theater. (53) Kelly's Dramatic Recollections luxuriates in the sounds and smells of stage production and seeks to counter associations of acting with poverty and ignorance. As annotated by Bush-Bailey, it also cuts through mystifications surrounding female child actors evident in Charles Lamb's essay "Barbara S," based on Kelly, by stressing her own girlhood financial savvy. "Barbara at eleven years of age was some time before she felt the different size of a guinea to a half guinea held tight in her hand. I, at nine years old, was not so untaught, or innocent. I was a woman of the world." (54) The memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi delight in the gadgetry and boyish high jinx of stage life, tracing the fine line that separates artistic from scientific ingenuity in the age. (55)

In the highs and lows of their exaggerating discourse, even unreliable accounts bespeak a major truth of theater experience and its printed recollection. It is based in love. Theater makes a lasting impression, when it does, not because the impression is devoid of original content but because it arises and exists apart from that content, a phenomenon true of any lasting passion. Moreover, its modes of appeal address the infantile in all ages of playgoer because theater's multi-sensorial and cross-modal features recreate the synaesthetic environ out of which any individual initially is formed. (56) As Christopher Bollas argues, reactivating this "first human aesthetic" is the precondition for personal transformation. (57) This is what Joanna Baillie affirms in connecting playgoers' love for spectacle to its priority in human development, and is how she resists the approach/avoidance antics of other poet-playwrights of the period. (58) John Waldie correlates the collaborative multi-media environment of theater with occasioning playgoers' felt experience "of manifold realities," which, in effect, constitutes the promise and reality of theater's aliveness for the individual. That is, theater expresses:

   the reality of human nature, that the author contrives to create in
   his characters; the reality of soul and feeling in voice and
   action, that the actor expresses; the reality of the stage itself,
   the illusion of truth given to its fiction, its scenery and
   ensemble, stark simplicity or grand spectacle; and to these, the
   reality that has its only confirmation in the mind of the
   spectator, the reality that echoes my experiences, my sensations,
   or even my wild fancies. There is, after all, no reality on the
   stage but the reality of the stage--its only nature is what we
   recognize as a projection of our own experience--& its only truth
   lies in persuading us to indulge its pretences. (59)

In nostalgic depictions of first times and former times, playgoing adults recapture this experience rhetorically, but it is potentially available every time that they enter late Georgian theater. Perhaps adults seeing children in the audience visibly doing the same at a different stage of development activates a deeper consciousness of the layering of time on which transport in theater and the juvenile pleasures generated there depend. This perception can trigger all manner of positive and negative feeling toward what is happening, what has passed, is to come, is never to be repeated, and what is never wholly effaced. I follow Jane Moody's lead in prizing this potentiality made available in late Georgian theater.

University of California, Santa Barbara

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--. England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

--. "Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism." South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (1996): 575-602.

Clark, Norma. "'The Cursed Barbauld Crew': Women Writers and Writing for Children in the Late Eighteenth Century." In Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing, and Childhood, 1600-1900, edited by Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson, 91-103. London: Routledge, 1997.

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(1.) Jane Moody, '"Fine Word, Legitimate': Toward a Theatrical History of Romanticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, nos. 3-4 (1996): 223-44. I am extremely grateful to David Mayer (also external member on Jane's dissertation committee) for wonderful email exchanges during the early stages of this paper, and to research assistance by Mary Jane Davis, a Ph.D. candidate in Romanticism at University of California, Santa Barbara.

(2.) The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O'Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, accessed 20 August 2014.

(3.) David O'Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), esp. 17-50.

(4.) Even an otherwise excellent recent book characterizing Romanticism as instituting the "infantilization" of literary culture fails to consider the period's drama and theater (Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]). One significant exception is M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 116-21, 238-44.

(5.) Godwin counts Frederick Reynolds as a friend, though I am foregrounding intimates.

(6.) Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(7.) Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain's Greatest Comedian (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009), xxi; Mayer, Harlequin in his Element: The English Pantomime, 1806-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 6, 10.

(8.) Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 236.

(9.) O'Brien, "Pantomime Politics," in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832, eds. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 405.

(10.) Blanchard, "Some Memories of Harlequin," cited in Ann Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: "All Work, No Play" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 144.

(11.) Stott, Pantomime Life of Grimaldi, 33.

(12.) Cited in Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 3-4.

(13.) All reprinted in Survey of London, gen. ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, Vol. 35: The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and The Royal Opera House Covent Garden (London: Athlone Press, 1970).

(14.) Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12.

(15.) See http://dl.tufts/edu/catalog?f [subject_facet]=Audiences, accessed 20 September 2014.

(16.) Stott, Pantomime Life of Grimaldi, 195. See also "A View of the Confusion at Sadler's Wells," plate after page 276 (also at www.performingartscollections.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2012/90 IHLC-Sadlers-Wells-15-Oct-1807, accessed 20 September 2014).

(17.) Dickens's short story, "Astley's," also specifies that the boys debate "whether Astley's was more than twice as large as Drury Lane," implying that they have attended both venues. For the Rowlandson engraving and an unidentified one, see http://janeaustensworld .wordpress.com/2010/01/17/astleys-ampitheatre/, accessed 20 September 2014.

(18.) See http://www.britishmuseum.org/research.aspx, accessed 20 September 2014.

(19.) See http://dl.tufts.edU/catalog/tufts:MS004.002.057.DO01.00080; see also "Interior of the Little Theatre, Haymarket (1815) same URL as "Proscenium of the Old Lyceum Theatre," accessed 20 September 2014.

(20.) See http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Royal_Coburg _Theatre_1822, accessed 20 September 2014.

(21.) Wording above the proscenium arch: "Men are but Children of a larger growth." See a letter of protest regarding the mania for juvenile performers in Gentleman's Magazine (October 1805): 908.

(22.) See Julie A. Carlson, "Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism," South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 575-602; Jeffrey Kahan, Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010); Frederick Burwick, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9-26.

(23.) On the increasing demand for children as fairies, see Kristina Straub, "Performing Variety, Packing Difference," in Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 229-46.

(24.) Worrall discusses the asymmetric time allotted to rehearsals of pantomime over the Shakespeare repertoire (Celebrity, Performance, Reception, 91-93).

(25.) Quotation from the London Chronicle cited in Stott, Pantomime Life of Grimaldi, 15; Burwick, Playing to the Crowd, 13-14.

(26.) Burwick, Playing to the Crowd, 20-22. A playbill of 22 May 1806 records that the theater was then known as "The Academical Theatre, Leicester Place (late Dibdin)."

(27.) Stott, Pantomime Life of Grimaldi, 16.

(28.) Leman Thomas Rede, The Road to the Stage; or, The Performer's Preceptor (London: Joseph Smith, 1827), 5-6.

(29.) Gilli Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself: AutoBiography & Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 133.

(30.) Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself, 132.

(31.) Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself, 195.

(32.) Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself, 174-75, 132, 89-91.

(33.) Traditional juvenile roles include the Prince of Wales and Duke of York in Richard in, Boy in Henry v, Cupid in Cymon, and pages in various plays.

(34.) "Tokely, James"; "Benson, Robert" in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, eds. Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, 16 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973-1993), 15:17-19; 2:44-46.

(35.) "Menage, Frederick," in A Biographical Dictionary, 10:191.

(36.) See Mayer on the popularity of "drowning child plays" (Harlequin in his Element, 101).

(37.) Thomas Morton, The Children in the Wood, an opera, in two acts; as performed at the Royal Theatres of Drury-Lane and the Hay-Market (London, 1794). Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale: University of California, Santa Barbara), 33, accessed 10 August 2014.

(38.) Morton, Children in the Wood, 34.

(39.) On the various angles in this gendered debate, see Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91-101; Mitzi Myers, "Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books," in Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children's Literature and the Children's Literature Association 14 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 33-34; and Norma Clark, '"The Cursed Barbauld Crew': Women Writers and Writing for Children in the Late Eighteenth Century, " in Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing, and Childhood, 1600-1900, eds. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson (London: Routledge, 1997), 91-103

(40.) The diary annotators do not specify who "C" is. Also present is Thomas Turner, another youth whom Godwin mentored.

(41.) "In an age of strictly moralizing children's literature, [Benjamin Tabart] broke ground with his fairy tales and light-hearted nursery stories and chapbook tales" ("Benjamin Tabart," Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature online), http://www.oxfordreference.com, accessed 24 June 2015.

(42.) Grenby, Child Reader, 117-21; Katie Trumpener, "The Making of Child Readers," The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James K. Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 563.

(43.) F. Arant Maginnes, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper: Father of the American Stage, 1775-1849 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), 11, 26. See also Geddeth Smith, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper: America's Premier Tragedian (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 4-12.

(44.) For example, Thomas Turner: "I totter on the brink of perdition and call on you to save me" and who frequently accompanies Godwin to the theater (see note to Godwin diary entry for 19 May 1806, when Godwin and Turner attend the German Theatre at the Sans Souci).

(45.) Present with the children are John Philpot Curran, James Marshal, Lamb, and Holcroft. Godwin and Mary Jane attend plays at least twice with four of the Rowan children, but on those occasions their own children are not along (20 December 1805, 23 April 1806). On the sociability facilitated by various literary-cultural venues, see Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

(46.) Julie A. Carlson, England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 173-86, 248-56.

(47.) Letter to Leigh Hunt, 9 [11] September 1823, Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 136.

(48.) Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 326-27.

(49.) John Merritt, Memoirs of the Life of William Henry West Betty (Liverpool: J. Wright, 1804), 21.

(50.) Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992), 1:28. O'Shaughnessy voices legitimate skepticism over the accuracy of this memory (William Godwin and the Theatre, 35).

(51.) The Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Mitford, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854), xx.

(52.) He sees Henry Fielding's Love in Several Masques and Prince Hoare's farce No Song No Supper, the latter, according to the footnote, the Conversations of James Northcote records as "the first play I had ever seen." Letter to Rev. William Hazlitt, July 1790, in The Letters of William Hazlitt, eds. Herschel Moreland Sikes, William Hallam Bonner, and Gerald B. Lahey (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 50-51.

(53.) Letter to Rev. William Hazlitt, July 1790, 50; Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Mitford, xx--xxi. Interestingly, her preface notes that, if "some actor, powerful in mind and body, may think my drama [Otto of Wittelsbach] worth trying," Mitford requests that the role of Ulrich "be played by a boy."

(54.) Given that this interaction in her girlhood is written in a letter composed on 28 September 1875, her account is suspect too (Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself, 27).

(55.) Charles Dickens, The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, ed. Richard Findlater (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). His boyhood partner in (stage) crime, Jack Bologna, carries this further, supplementing his performance as Harlequin with mountings of various "Mechanical Exhibitions" (Sans Pared) and "Phantascopia" (Lyceum).

(56.) Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013), 223-61.

(57.) Bollas, "The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation," Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 40-49.

(58.) Julie A. Carlson, "Baillie's Orra: Shrinking in Fear," in Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas C. Crochunis (London: Routledge, 2004), 206-21, esp. 219-21.

(59.) Journal of John Waldie Theatre Commentaries, 1799-1839, ed. Frederick Burwick, 24, http://www.escholarship.org/uc/uclalib_dsc_waldie, accessed 18 September 2014.