John McCormick's delightful book The Victorian Marionette Theatre is at once a labor of love, a comprehensive history of a popular art form, an insider's description of the craft by a longtime practitioner, and a nostalgic reminiscence of a nearly forgotten aspect of the Victorian theatre. For all that, the book has an authoritative point of view and a cohesive unity establishing it as one of the most important sources of its kind, complementing George Speaight's more wide-ranging, classic treatment of the subject, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (London: G. G. Harrap, 1955; 2d ed., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) and McCormick's own companion study, coauthored with Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Those three works anchor a shelf of studies of a major cultural phenomenon.