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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2018
This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.
1. The girl who is the focus of this essay is called “Miss Rose” in a variety of reliable sources, such as theatre bills, dramatis personae, newspaper reports, and print articles authored by her own mother. This might have been a stage name or an adaptation of her given Christian name, for, in a notice to the Morning Post on 6 May 1777, her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, refers to her as “the inimitable Young Lady celebrated by the fictitious name of Miss Rose.” Nevertheless, de Franchetti herself is more often called “Miss Rose's Mamma” than by her proper name in stage-related print material. The 1770 mezzotint print of “Miss Rose, in the Character of Tom Thumb” (see Fig. 1) is by Edward Fisher, after John Berridge.
2. For instance, see de Franchetti, , Granny's Prediction Revealed to the Widow Brady, of Drury-Lane Theatre (London, 1773)Google Scholar and Infant Morality Displayed, in Miss Rose's Address to the Impartial Admirers of Theatrical Merit (London, 1774)Google Scholar.
3. Highfill, Philip H. Jr., Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward A. give a good overview of Miss Rose's acting career in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), vol. 13 (1991)Google Scholar: Roach to H. Siddons, 96–7. From newspaper notices we find that Miss Rose's offstage performances included items such as Infant Morality Displayed in March 1774 at the London Coffeehouse at Ludgate Hill; speeches from contemporary plays at concerts by conjuror Breslaw and his Italians in June 1774; George Stevens's Lecture on Heads in 1775 at various assembly halls; skits such as the “character of a modern female cook” at public houses; and so on. Also, an advertisement in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (19 January 1775) tells us that “Miss Rose waits on the nobility at their own houses on receiving two days notice”; so the girl was also being hired out for private entertainment. These newspaper citations are from 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, Gale Digital Collections (hereinafter Burney).
4. For an excellent overview of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century actresses, see Engel, Laura, “Stage Beauties: Actresses and Celebrity Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century” Literature Compass [online journal] 13.12 (2016): 749–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In these studies, though we sometimes get important glimpses of adult actresses’ childhoods—such as Anne Bracegirdle having played the Page in The Orphan, or Charlotte Charke wearing the oversized wig her father, Colley Cibber, donned for the role of Lord Foppington—the authors rarely focus on the actress's experience as children, privileging the future woman instead.
5. Two examples of recent works that include overviews of the field are the following: Lamb, Edel, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies, 1599–1613 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for boy actors; and Varty, Anne, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: “All Work, No Play” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for nineteenth-century child stars. For children on the long eighteenth-century British stage from a variety of perspectives see Avery, Emmett L., “Two French Children on the English Stage, 1716–1719,” Philological Quarterly 13 (1934): 78–82Google Scholar; Friedman, Lenemaja, “Bibliography of Restoration and Eighteenth Century Plays Containing Children's Roles,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 11.1 (1972): 19–30Google Scholar; Gottesman, Lillian, “Garrick's Lilliput,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 11.2 (1972): 34–7Google Scholar; Buckroyd, Peter, “More Children in Tragedy 1695–1750,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 12.1 (1973): 49–51Google Scholar; Nelson, T. G. A., “The Image of the Child in English Restoration Comedy,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 67 (May 1987): 102–14Google Scholar, and idem, “The Child in Augustan Farce and Comedy,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 30.1 (1989): 23–44Google Scholar; Straub, Kristina, “Performing Variety, Packaging Difference,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, ed. Swindells, Julia and Francis, David Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 229–46Google Scholar; Miller, Gemma, “‘Many a time and oft had I broken my Neck for their amusement’: The Corpse, the Child, and the Aestheticization of Death in Shakespeare's Richard III and King John,” Comparative Drama 50.2–3 (2016): 209–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, 5 parts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8)Google Scholar, and Highfill et al.’s Biographical Dictionary are great resources for research on children in eighteenth-century theatre, but because the age of actors is rarely referenced, their presence onstage is easy to overlook. This is especially true of girls, because females of all ages might be termed “Miss,” whereas young boys were often designated with “Master” before their first names. But tracking roles meant for younger performers through the century and noting players who acted these parts is one effective way of identifying young girls onstage in the period.
6. Kearney, Mary Celeste, “Coalescing: The Development of Girls’ Studies,” NWSA Journal 21.1 (2009): 1–28, at 19Google Scholar.
7. An advertisement for a benefit concert for Miss Rose at Haymarket mentions that she will perform various scenes “occasionally assisted by her Brother and Sister, who never appeared on any Stage.” Public Advertiser (London), Tuesday, 27 March 1770 (no. 11030), Burney. Later newspapers mention a brother, one “Master Frank” who performs with her in offstage entertainments. We do not know exactly how many siblings she had and which of them were involved in theatrical activities. See note 57.
8. London Stage, pt. 3, 1: 1219; pt. 4, 3: 1697, and pt. 4, 2: 1264, respectively.
9. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (London), Wednesday, 18 April 1711.
10. See Friedman.
11. Ann Blake offers a useful overview of the cuts, additions, and changes to children's roles in Shakespeare's plays over the centuries; some characters such as Young Macduff in Macbeth were usually omitted, for instance, whereas Cibber added lines to the young princes’ roles in his Richard III. See Blake, , “Shakespeare's Roles for Children: A Stage History,” Theatre Notebook 48.3 (1994): 122–37Google Scholar.
12. Highfill et al., 16: 312. The daughter of Drury Lane actors Richard and Elizabeth Yates, she had a stage career of some ten or eleven years (ibid., 310).
13. See ibid., 2: 322–3.
14. The Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment 1 (1769): 330Google Scholar.
15. Highfill et al., 13: 96.
16. Town and Country 1 (1769): 434.
17. Middlesex Journal; or, Chronicle of Liberty (London), 13–15Google Scholar September 1770 (no. 228), Burney.
18. Thompson, Isaac, ed. The Literary Register; or, Weekly Miscellany, vol. 1 (Newcastle, 1769), 269Google Scholar. (The last three words were not italic in the original, but they are indeed part of the play title and are thus italicized here.)
19. Gentleman, Francis, The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, 2 vols. (London: J. Bell, 1770), 2: 58Google Scholar.
20. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, 13.
21. Douglas Nigh, “Lesser Luminaries: Samuel Foote and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, from 1766 through 1777” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 255–6.
22. Bickerstaff, Isaac, Doctor Last in His Chariot (London, 1769), III.iGoogle Scholar. All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the essay. There are no line numbers. The character is called Miss Polly in the dramatis personae, but she is often referred to as Polly in the play.
23. Burwick, Frederick, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24. Miller, 214.
25. Burwick, 19.
26. Thompson, 269.
27. Colman, George [the Elder], Man and Wife (London, 1770), 35, 45, 46, 49Google Scholar.
28. The importance of carefully historicizing childhood, sexuality, and pedophilic desire is well exemplified in two recent scholarly engagements: Gubar, Marah, “The Cult of Child and the Controversy over Child Actors,” Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 149–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hatch, Kristen, “Introduction: Sex and Shirley Temple,” Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1–23Google Scholar.
29. See, for instance, Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldick, Robert (New York: Vintage Books, 1965)Google Scholar.
30. Buffon, quoted in Egan, R. Danielle and Hawkes, Gail, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31. Müller, Anja, “Putting the Child into Discourse: Framing Children in The Spectator,” in The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, ed. J. Newman, Donald (Newark: University of Delaware Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 2005), 59–80, at 75Google Scholar.
32. Müller, Anja, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 7Google Scholar.
33. Solomon, Diana, Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 1Google Scholar.
34. Alexander Monro, The Professor's Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct [letters of 1739–46], intro. and notes Monro, P. A. G., Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 26.1, suppl. 2 (1996), 9Google Scholar.
35. See Friedman.
36. Burwick, 14.
37. See Straub, 240–5, for an analysis of the fad for children as fairies in the century.
38. Nelson, “Child in Augustan Farce and Comedy,” 25.
39. For instance, see Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 98–113Google Scholar.
40. Quoted in Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 27Google Scholar.
41. See, for instance, Anja Müller, “Fashioning Children's Bodies,” in Framing Childhood, 19–67.
42. Abbott, Mary, Family Ties: English Families, 1540–1920 (Abingdon, UK and New York: Ashgate, 1993), 49Google Scholar.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 53.
45. Fielding, Sarah, The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1749; London, 1765), iiiGoogle Scholar.
46. Glaser, Brigitte, “Gendered Childhoods: On the Discursive Formation of Young Females in the Eighteenth Century” in Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity, ed. Müller, Anja (Abingdon, UK and New York: Ashgate, 2006), 189–98, at 193Google Scholar.
47. The way in which a young girl's demeanor and body might seem to change with the adoption of this swaggering role can be seen in Fanny Burney's description of her young niece, Nancy, playing Tom Thumb in their elaborate home theatricals. Burney says that “she spoke so loud and so articulately and with such courage that people could scarce credit their senses when they looked at her baby face.” The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778: With a Selection from Her Correspondence, and from the Journals of Her Sisters Susan and Charlotte Burney, rev. ed., 2 vols., ed. Ellis, Annie Raine (1889; London, 1907), 2: 177–8Google Scholar.
48. Shakespeare, William, King John (London: Methuen, 1995)Google Scholar.
49. Rothstein, Eric, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1967), 153Google Scholar.
50. Shakespeare, William, King Richard III, as adapted by Cibber, Colley (London, 1718), 32Google Scholar. There are no line numbers.
51. Shakespeare, William, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, ed. McEachern, Claire (Penguin: London, 1999)Google Scholar.
52. Fielding, Henry, The Tragedy of Tragedies (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
53. Jill Campbell talks about the tradition of queer sexual humor in this play, but her focus is not actor age but cross-gender casting. See Campbell, , Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 19–27Google Scholar.
54. Otway, Thomas, The Orphan, in The Works of Mr. Thomas Otway, in Two Volumes: Consisting of His Plays, Poems and Love-Letters (London, 1712), 2: 140Google Scholar. There are no line numbers.
55. Ibid., 150.
56. Ibid., 121.
57. Ibid., 151.
58. Davis, Jim, “Freaks, Prodigies, and Marvellous Mimicry: Child Actors of Shakespeare on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” Shakespeare 2.2 (2006): 179–93, at 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59. Gubar, Marah, “Who Watched The Children's Pinafore?: Age Transvestism on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” Victorian Studies 54.3 (2012): 410–26, at 411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60. London Stage, pt. 4, 3: 1500.
61. Morning Post (London), 5 February 1771, Burney.
62. Ibid.
63. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, ii.
64. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London), Tuesday, 31 January 1775 (no. 706), Burney.
65. London Stage, pt. 4, 3: 1537.
66. Jane O'Connor and John Mercer note that after the midcentury success of young Mozart, , “the public appetite for prodigious children” became well-established in the period. Childhood and Celebrity, ed. O'Connor, and Mercer, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 7Google Scholar.
67. Burwick, 13. For Elizabethan and Jacobean boy actors see 11–12.
68. Kinservik, Matthew J., Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 2002), 142Google Scholar.
69. The most notorious aspect of Foote's mimicry involved his impersonation of a gentleman named Mr. Apice in The Author, whose lameness, nervous tics, and vacuous expression he produced onstage with spectacular success and profit. See Kinservik, 138–9. In an intriguing instance of endless mirroring, Miss Rose's brother mimicked Foote's Apice in the dramatic entertainment starring Miss Rose before the royal family.
70. Moody, Jane, “Stolen Identities: Character, Mimicry and the Invention of Samuel Foote,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, ed. Luckhurst, Mary and Moody, Jane (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 65–89, at 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The dizzying mirror effect of the mimicry vogue is intriguingly glimpsed in an advertisement for one of the many offstage engagements of Miss Rose during 1774–5, where, we are told, “a promising young Genius (not four years old)” will also act “surprizing [sic] scenes” in “imitation of Miss Rose,” who would be nine years of age at this time. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London), Wednesday, 5 April 1775 (no. 761), Burney.
71. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, 18.
72. Ibid., 17 (italics hers). De Franchetti attacks Mrs. Barry quite savagely in Granny's Prediction, falsely accusing her of bigamy. The London Stage notes that a contemporary calls it written “by a spiteful female relative”; pt. 4, 3: 1683.
73. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, 24.
74. Ibid.
75. Engel, Laura and McGirr, Elaine M., “Introduction,” in Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830, ed. Engel, and McGirr, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 1–16, at 11Google Scholar.
76. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, i (italics hers).
77. Public Advertiser (London), 7 February 1771 (no. 11295), Burney. This passage is also printed, in fuller form, in de Franchetti, Infant Morality, ii.
78. For instance, see Wollstonecraft, Mary, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (London, 1787)Google Scholar and Burton, John, Lectures on Female Education and Manners (London, 1793)Google Scholar. Judith Burdan offers a good overview of such injunctions to women about rearing daughters in “Girls Must Be Seen and Heard: Domestic Surveillance in Sarah Fielding's The Governess,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 19.1 (1994): 8–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
79. De Franchetti, Infant Morality, iii (italics hers).
80. London Stage, pt. 4, 3: 1537. In another example of “age transvestism” Miss Rose played Hermione in this production.
81. Engel and McGirr, 11.
82. Ibid., 12.
83. Ellen Ledoux, “Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage,” in Stage Mothers, ed. Engel and McGirr, 79–101, at 85–6.
84. Public Advertiser (London), Monday, 28 August 1769 (no. 10864), Burney.
85. See London Stage, pt. 4, 3: 1546.
86. Miss Rose, in Lloyd's Evening Post (London), 28–30 August 1769 (no. 1896), Burney.
87. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), Wednesday, 21 February 1770 (no. 12,785), Burney.
88. Ibid.
89. Though, because Miss Rose did get a benefit at Haymarket the next month, on 29 March, Nigh suggests that Foote might have actually helped the Franchettis by interceding on their behalf with the Lord Chamberlain for licensing the performance, or even giving them the house “gratis” (278).
90. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), Wednesday, 21 February 1770 (no. 12,785), Burney.
91. Callaghan, Dympna, Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 67Google Scholar.
92. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), Saturday, 17 March 1770 (no. 12,806), Burney. In this performance, Rose was accompanied by her brother and sister, which reinforced how the Franchetti children, the talented five-year-old as well as her lesser-known siblings, were an important financial resource for the family.
93. Middlesex Journal; or, Chronicle of Liberty (London), 13–15 September 1770 (no. 228), Burney. Newspapers do not specify which of the seven children George III had by 1770 were present at the performance. At least four of the eldest royal progeny—George, Fredrick, William, and Charlotte—would be old enough to enjoy Miss Rose's performance.
94. Ibid. Finch was the royal governess.
95. See Cunningham, Hugh, “The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c. 1680–1851,” Past & Present, 126.1 (1990): 115–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
96. Varty, 8.
97. The Thespian Dictionary; or, Dramatic Biography of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1802), s.v. “Edwin, (Mrs.),” n.p. Italics in original.
98. In Infant Morality, which incorporates this prologue, “another's pain” is replaced with “a mother's pain” (6).
99. Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty (London), 13–15 September 1770 (no. 228), Burney.
100. For a useful overview of historical trends in children's economic value see Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
101. Müller, “Putting the Child into Discourse,” 75, 63.
102. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London), Tuesday, 23 March 1779 (no. 2008), Burney.
103. Master Betty, who first appeared onstage in 1803, heralded the fad for young acting prodigies in the nineteenth century that led to the lionization of child actors in unprecedented proportions. See Playfair, Giles, The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967)Google Scholar. This growth of this fascination with the “Infant Roscius” is comprehensively discussed by Waters, Hazel in “‘That Astonishing Clever Child’: Performers and Prodigies in the Early and Mid-Victorian Theatre,” Theatre Notebook 50.2 (1996): 78–94Google Scholar. See also Kahan, Jeffrey, Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
104. Holcroft, Thomas, “Extraordinary Children,” The Theatrical Recorder, vol. 2. (London, 1806; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 63–5Google Scholar.
105. Holcroft's use of Miss Rose's case to make his point more than twenty-five years after she debuted suggests that she held a significant place in cultural memory; thus, when the nineteenth-century fad for child stars raised new anxieties, she was appropriated as a historical exemplum into the cautionary narrative about theatre's exploitation of childhood.
106. Holcroft, 63. Whether the “become an idiot” reference is to the same girl who played in Doctor Last in 1769—that is, Miss Rose—or to some other unfortunate is tantalizingly unclear.
107. Fitzherbert, Anthony, The New Natura Brevium, trans. Hughes, William (1534; London, 1652), 583Google Scholar; quoted in McDonagh, Patrick, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 86Google Scholar.
108. Vila, Anne C., Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 95, 98Google Scholar.
109. Smith, C. U. M., “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” in Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, ed. Whitaker, Harry, Smith, C. U. M., and Finger, Stanley (New York: Springer, 2007), 15–28, 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
