toy theatre, popular 19th-century English children’s toy that provides modern theatre historians with a valuable record of the plays and playhouses of its day. Most scholars believe the juvenile drama to have originated with the engraved sheets that began to be printed in London around 1810 as souvenirs of current plays.

Toy theatres were once essential advertisements for London's thriving, 19th-century theater scene. Today, these colorful, miniature theater reproductions live on in the hands of collectors, and in Pollock's Toy Theatre Museum.

In the first half of the 19th century, more than 300 of London's most popular plays saw the issue as toy theatres. Publishers sent artists to the playhouses of Georgian and early- Victorian London to record the scenery, costumes and dramatic attitudes of the greatest successes of the day.

Aug 26, 2009 · Toy theatre preserved some of the Regency period's most popular romantic melodramas. For example, The Miller and His Men (1813) by Isaac Pocock (1762-1835) enjoyed a strange afterlife in Victorian nurseries. The reason for its longevity lies in its climactic pyrotechnical effect: in order to rescue the heroine from the Bohemian bandits who have ...

Toy theatre, also known as paper theatre, model theatre and juvenile drama, is a technique that involves the manipulation of paper characters. The genre was probably born in England in the beginning of the 19th century.

Mar 18, 2012 · In the evening, Jane Austen and her family spent many hours entertaining each other. One popular form of entertainment that the older Austen siblings would have known about was the Toy Theatre, or a juvenile form of miniature theater.

Feb 7, 2020 · Toy theatre was a popular children’s entertainment from around 1811 (the date of the first preserved sheets) until the 1860s. More than just a model stage, publishers offered young practitioners a variety of scenery and character sheets, abridged play scripts, and small-scale special effects with which to perform juvenile dramas. [1]

What you may ask is the toy theatre or juvenile drama? It was a very popular Victorian pastime for children and sometimes adults. You would be able to buy a complete toy theatre and a scaled down version of your favorite play complete with characters and script.

Changes in fashion within theater, overall British society and children’s past times curtailed the popularity of the Toy Theatre through the Victorian age, although its legacy was maintained into the 20th century by London printer Benjamin Pollock.

Toy theatres were a popular form of entertainment in Victorian times. Once made you could buy plays to put on - hundreds of popular West End plays were reproduced for toy theatres. This Pollock’s...