Prof Marah Gubar‘s essay profile on JSTOR is about all-child acting troupes that performed Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the 19th century. It originally appeared in the academic journal Victorian Studies way back in Spring 2012, based on archival research that Prof Gubar began doing before we had searchable e-databases for 19th century newspapers (meaning, she found out about the existence of these all-child troupes by scrolling through microfilm by hand, which took AGES!)
In Matthew Wills’ JSTOR DAILY piece about Prof Gubar’s essay, “Topsy-Turvy: Children in Adult Roles,” he sums up the argument of Prof Gubar’s essay: namely, that the crowds of children acting like adults on the 19th century stage reveals how conflicted 19th-century Anglo-Americans were about the definition of childhood, and also paves the way for contemporary art featuring precocious children.
Read more here: https://daily.jstor.org/topsy-turvy-children-in-adult-roles/
Read Prof Marah Gubar’s essay here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.54.3.410?mag=topsy-turvy-children-in-adult-roles#metadata_info_tab_contents
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