Victorian Theatres
The Toy Theatre was a popular toy in Victorian times, when children would have put on performances of popular plays running at the time, including Aladdin, Cinderella and Black Beard the Pirate. The theatre and plays would have been bought in sheets and cut out and pasted up at home.
Victorian Toy Theatres at Pollocks Toy Museum
How parts of a Victorian Toy Theatre were assembled
Pollock's Toy Museum is the oldest toy museum in the UK. The collection is housed in two atmospheric 18th and 19th century buildings in Fitzrovia, London.
At the heart of Museum is its extensive and unrivalled collection of Toy Theatre’s with a comprehensive archive of plays and plates. Pollocks Toy Museum’s history begins with the toy theatre printer and publisher John Kilby Green. Alive in the first half of the 1800s he made and sold toy theatres and plays. Toy theatres were very popular 19th Century toys, emerging off the back of the blossoming theatre industry in the heart of London.
Children who enjoyed the theatre would want to take home the action and perform shows for friends and family on a miniature scale. These theatres were printed from engraved metal plates and then hand coloured and constructed. (Mysite, n.d.)
This piece was made for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. When first looking at it you it looks like a simple painting in a frame but when you look through the hole in the painting a whole new detailed world can be seen. It's like you are taking a look into the palace and watching the celebration.
A piece at Pollocks Toy Museum
Similar pieces were made as sketches for designing and presenting the theatre scenes in Victorian Theatres.
The two illustrations here, showing both the back and front of the same scene, give a good idea of the make-up of the elaborate set scene which was in several plans.
The first of these two pictures shows a model of a set scene made up from parts drawn by one of Charles Kean’s scenic artists, Fredrick Lloyds, and printed in his book on scene-painting. The separate set pieces of trees, temple, foreground and middle distance are clearly seen against the distant backcloth. In the Second picture this model is viewed from behind with the backcloth removed. Lloyd’s ingenious design shows how each separate piece of scenery was constructed and which parts were of canvas (C) and which were cut out in what was called ‘profile board’ (P). The model has been arranged to show how the hinged arms of the upper grooves (designed to hold the tops of flat scenes) could be pulled up out of the way when a set scene was presented, so enabling it to have a greater height, and exploiting the possibilities of cut and arched upper borders. (Southern, 1970)
(Southern, 1970)
References:
Southern, R. (1970). The Victorian theatre: a pictorial survey. Newton Abbot, David & Charles.
Pollock's Toy Museum's guide.
Mysite. (n.d.). Historical London Landmark | Pollocks Toy Museum | England. [online] Available at: https://www.pollockstoymuseum.co.uk/ [Accessed 26 Jan. 2022].