Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276.

Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. 

Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century explores girl actors and societal responses to them in the first half of the century. This interdisciplinary work contextualizes the careers of girl stars Clara Fisher and Jean Margaret Davenport—and many other child actors as well—in an overlapping series of historical frameworks, seeking to understand their careers in theatrical, cultural, artistic, literary, and economic histories, among others. Schweitzer uses the girls as two throughlines within a wide-ranging discussion of the performance of girlhood onstage and in the press, informed by a diverse set of theories and approaches to interrogate specific moments in time or items in the archival record.  

Structurally, Schweitzer reproduces the nineteenth century theatre’s packed evening bill by including a prologue, epilogue, and chapters interspersed with interludes. More than just an appropriate historical nod, this format enables Schweitzer to effectively tell the complex histories of Fisher, Davenport, and other girl actors in a roughly linear narrative, with interludes allowing short diversions into fascinating related topics and historiographic challenges that might otherwise have disrupted the flow of the individual chapters. Practically, this format also enables these excerpts of the book to be used effectively in introductory undergraduate research methods courses as engaging trips through the archive; Interlude 3, for example, is both an excellent model of an historiographical research process and a fascinating theory of the potential meaning behind three sentences in Mrs. John Drew’s 1899 memoir. Those few words are contextualized in transatlantic touring, amateur theatricals, the shifting attitudes towards professional actors during Drew’s lifetime, and more.  

The chapters delve more deeply into character types performed by Fisher and Davenport and how those reflect shifting audience and societal perceptions of children, child actors, and celebrity, all the while connecting these types and the performances to broader historical and societal contexts. Chapter 1 explores the fad for young girls playing old men such as Richard III, framing Fisher’s career as drawing on Master Betty’s fame, while also exploring its presence amid contemporary interest in miniaturization, phrenology (Fisher’s head was cast and studied), girlhood, and burgeoning press interest in celebrity. Chapter 2 explores her career as it moves into the terrain of travesty roles. Here, Schweitzer focuses on the role of Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child, contrasting the child performer against adult women who specialized in these lines, such as Dorothy Jordan, and she argues that the de-sexualization of the performer’s body––and thus the role–– undermines its prior transgressive power, shifting the focus towards a nostalgic view of childhood impishness that was particularly well received in the colonies. While this appealed to colonial audiences on transatlantic stops of Fisher’s tour, as Chapter 3 discusses, her continued aging and movement closer to an adult physique was sufficiently distressing as her career again morphed, this time into farcical roles written for girls. She had the most success in the breeches role of Matilda from Old and Young, which is notably written for a girl who must perform as her poorly behaved fictional brothers and which “enlists the plasticity of the girl actress to query emerging binaries of age and gender” (121).  

Throughout the first three chapters, Schweitzer also analyzes Fisher’s father’s motives and attempts to shield his daughter from the press while still exploiting its coverage of her vital content for then understanding the subsequent discussions of Davenport and her father in Chapters 4 and 5. Indeed, the tightly woven intersections between the chapters, the two performers, and the contextual topics raised is a delight—in part because Davenport’s career was so obviously modeled on Fisher’s—but also because those parallels and nuanced discussions are incredibly well foregrounded and supported by Schweitzer’s structural choices. Chapter 4 covers Davenport’s early career in the 1830s, which quite closely follows the roles, marketing, and framing of Fisher’s career, complete with attempts to balance competing demands of privacy, propriety, and celebrity. As with Fisher, Davenport’s aging eventually presents challenges, discussed in Chapter 5 alongside the limitations of her father’s engineering of good press on their transatlantic tour to colonies which approached Davenport’s performance of masculinity in these roles with much more concern.  

The strengths of Schweitzer’s work are the broad-ranging use of interdisciplinary research to explore our inherently interdisciplinary theatrical world and her deft inclusion of historiographical process and exploration of archival finds. Schweitzer makes excellent use of artefacts of actors’ careers throughout the book, regularly offering analyses of images which support her discussions of changing societal comfort levels with girls in breeches roles, travesty roles, and performing as adult men alongside adults on stage. Indeed, Schweitzer actively, but not intrusively, shares her historiographical process with readers throughout the book. Evidence gaps are discussed, such as when Schweitzer details her argument that Fisher’s father likely “had ample opportunity to follow debates about children’s reading” (33), thereby contextualizing his choice to expose his daughters to Shakespeare and have them perform as Richard III.  

These approaches are particularly seen in the interludes, which support the tightly woven narrative of the book by introducing contexts such as popular contemporary vehicles for celebrity, transatlantic culture, and performances of childhood. Schweitzer begins with the career and influence of male child star, Master Betty, in Interlude 1. Fisher’s fame draws on and responds to his career and ensuing Bettymania, just as Davenport overtly draws on Fisher’s, and thus the historical throughline and evolving popular trends of child stars and the representation of children on and off-stage is reflected in the structure of the book. Interlude 2, on the tomboy in society, drama, lays the groundwork for Chapter 2’s travesty roles, and looks far ahead to the final chapter’s discussion of childhood, performance, and race in the British Empire. Fandom is another constant, with a deeper exploration of fans’ material culture detailed in Interlude 4. The final interlude, then, offers another historiographical discussion of a scrapbook of transatlantic travel owned but possibly not written by Davenport, wherein a “most peculiar story of colonial anxiety emerges” (163), setting up Chapter 5’s discussion of scrapbooks and Davenport’s positioning in the British Empire.  

In part, this comprehensive range of approaches is necessary to better understand the complex interactions that Schweitzer is detailing—between performer, culture, text, audience, empire, and history. It also stems from Schweitzer’s following the archival trail to logical places, a process that is refreshingly explored throughout the book and shared in her overt discussions of historiographical process. The result is a refreshingly varied and vibrant work, reading as much as a cultural history of the period and exploration of the artists’ careers as it is an entry into Schweitzer’s own process of storytelling, research, and artistry.