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).Footnote 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.Footnote ² 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.Footnote ³

Figure 1.

“Miss Rose, in the character of Tom Thumb”; mezzotint by Edward Fisher, after John Berridge (1770). © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Miss Rose was a “phenomenon” of sorts, an important though short-lived novelty, and investigating her career offers important cultural insights into young girls’ lives on the eighteenth-century stage—an area with very sparse scholarship at present. In recent decades scholars in the field of “Actress Studies” have produced excellent work on actresses in the period; however, these works primarily focus on adult women, not on girls.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, although excellent scholarship exists on boys’ companies in Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as well as on the child-star craze in the Victorian era, there have been comparatively few sustained critical studies of children on the eighteenth-century stage.Footnote ⁵ So, because girls, and children in general as historical subjects belonging to a separate demographic from adult performers, rarely appear in theatre scholarship of the period, this study of one little girl on the eighteenth-century stage is partly recovery work of sorts, an initial foray into re-creating the public and private scripts young actresses performed—in mainstream drama, at London's other entertainment venues, and as daughters. I use the word “script” here not only because it is apropos for studying a theatrical performer, but also because the young girl in focus emerges as a tissue of textualities, a figure constructed through multiple, often contradictory, scripts penned by the adults around her. Mary Kearney states that girlhood can be seen as “a fluid discursive construct which female youth variously negotiate alongside a range of other socially produced subjectivities, rather than as fixed identity that is biologically determined. In other words, there are many ways to be a girl, and these forms depend on not only the material bodies performing girlhood, but also the specific social and historical contexts in which those bodies are located.”Footnote ⁶ Kearney's observation seems particularly applicable to “female youth” in eighteenth-century theatre, who could have “many ways to be a girl,” insofar as the materiality of their body was consistently implicated in protean negotiations with contemporary discourses of young femininity. Recovering Miss Rose reveals that performing girlhood in the eighteenth century could be a queer business indeed, straddling a range of traditionally incompatible identities.

Some of these incompatibilities are manifested in the tensions between a performance of girlhood on the eighteenth-century stage and the girlhood of the performer. Miss Rose might have successfully re-created the cutely precocious girl-child in the theatre, but that iteration of girlhood was only one dimension of the complex identities she performed on and off the stage. For instance, in the playhouse she also played the role of Tom Thumb, while in private life a range of different parts, from a distressed “infant” to a dutiful daughter, were scripted for her. Some of the modes of girlhood Miss Rose seems to have performed in real life can be pieced together thanks to her mother's facility with print media. Especially, de Franchetti's public feud with the theatre establishment—exemplified in the twenty-five-page monologue that she had her child perform before a London coffeehouse, Infant Morality Displayed, in Miss Rose's Address to the Impartial Admirers of Theatrical Merit—offers us an unusual glimpse into her daughter's world. Also, as de Franchetti seems to have penned most of the public notices about her five-year-old actress daughter—serving as an eighteenth-century version of a PR agent—tracing the young performer's ups and downs through newspapers, playbills, and stage calendars offers valuable insights into Miss Rose's experience as part of a duo that even today raises significant cultural anxieties: the talented girl performer and her pushy stage mother. So, Miss Rose, along with “Miss Rose's Mamma,” de Franchetti, allow us to glimpse the tensions between acting and being a girl in the eighteenth century.

• • •

Miss Rose, extremely talented as she seems to have been, was hardly sui generis; many children participated in the theatre entertainment business during the century, including at least two of her own siblings.Footnote ⁷ Despite their invisibility as a coherent demographic in the theatre scholarship of the period, children regularly appeared before eighteenth-century theatre audiences as part of an evening's entertainment along with the main dramatic performance. Whether it was Master Ferg in 1738–9 playing “a preamble on Kettle drums,” or Master Thomas Linley, the “English Mozart,” playing violin as Puck in the masque Fairy Favour, or Miss Froment, a six-year-old dancer in 1767 who was “more applauded than anyone who appears on that stage,” such talented little ones were a common sight.Footnote ⁸ Children were also often used for delivering prologues and epilogues—as we shall see in Miss Rose's case. They were also part of the evening's main dramatic entertainment, the “play proper” as it were, frequently appearing as pages or servant boys. And though these were often not speaking parts, the silent child actor could still be an important aspect of the theatre experience. Addison humorously notes that when a declaiming queen in a tragedy agitatedly paced up and down the stage, he barely heard anything she spoke because, “[his] Eyes [were] wholly taken up with the Page's Part,” where a boy desperately tried to hold open her train, “lest she should entangle her feet in her petticoat.”Footnote ⁹ In addition to such silent ancillary parts, a variety of plays in the century have speaking roles of differing lengths for children;Footnote ¹⁰ but following the careers of specific young performers reveals that there were a handful of staple roles that any strong child actor would almost always perform. Among these the most commonly performed by children are the Page in Thomas Otway's The Orphan, the Duke of York (younger son of Edward IV) in Colley Cibber's version of Richard III, Prince Arthur in Shakespeare's King John, and Fielding's Tom Thumb.Footnote ¹¹ A girl with a long stage life, like Miss Yates, usually included other popular roles such as Boy in Henry V and Robin in Merry Wives of Windsor. Footnote ¹² Or, if a child was particularly versatile, as Colley Cibber's granddaughter, Anne Brett, seems to have been, she might contribute in even more diverse ways. Miss Brett danced at Drury Lane, spoke the epilogue to The Provok'd Husband, played the title role in Fielding's Tom Thumb, performed in a Harlequin pantomime, and played Lucy in the children's “Lilliputian” company production of The Squire of Alsatia managed by Christopher Rich.Footnote ¹³ Thus, when Miss Rose appeared on the stage in 1769, she performed for an audience quite familiar with talented child actors and entertainers. Nevertheless, she does seem to have garnered significant praise for her acting—perhaps because she was both small in stature and exceptionally young for the demanding parts she played.

Miss Rose made her London debut on 21 June 1769 in Haymarket Theatre in the role of a young girl named Miss Polly in Isaac Bickerstaff's new comedy, Doctor Last in His Chariot. She also spoke the epilogue to this play, which proved to be tremendously popular, and she performed it as an independent piece through the season. The epilogue was reproduced in the Town and Country Magazine that same year, where it is described as spoken by “a Girl of Four years and a half old,” the specificity of the reference to Miss Rose's age suggesting contemporary audiences’ fascination with this very young actress.Footnote ¹⁴ She became something of a specialist insofar as she was “regularly used as prologue and epilogue speaker.”Footnote ¹⁵

Indeed, her talents must have been prodigious because in less than two months after her debut as Miss Polly, Foote revived Fielding's Tom Thumb and cast Miss Rose in the title role, which seemed to have sealed her popularity. Fielding's burlesque of contemporary heroic tragedy, featuring a pint-sized hero with larger-than-life conquests in war and love, almost always cast a young performer as the protagonist; but Miss Rose, barely five, is by far the youngest in the century to play this demanding part. Furthermore, she apparently reprised the role “with much characteristic propriety, and to the entire satisfaction of the audience,” and was “received with great applause.”Footnote ¹⁶ The role made her enough of a popular novelty to be invited to perform for the king and queen “and many persons of distinction” by “the Right Hon. Lady Charlotte Finch,” governess to the royal children. Here Miss Rose received “the highest applause” and “[t]heir Majesties (ever partial to real merit) were pleased to express their astonishment at her enchanting abilities.”Footnote ¹⁷ This approbation seems to be echoed by most of Miss Rose's audiences, who compare her favorably to other child performers: a reviewer commenting on one Miss Mary Linley's performance as young Sally in Colman's Man and Wife comments that she is “not so entertaining as little Miss Rose, in Bickerstaff's comedy of Doctor Last in his Chariot,”Footnote ¹⁸ and Francis Gentleman says of her performance as Monimia's page in Otway's The Orphan later that year that “[t]he page we have seen done extremely well by several different children, but apprehend, Miss Rose, who played last summer at Mr. Foote's with so much and well deserved applause. would … surpass any who have come under our notice.”Footnote ¹⁹ That she was perceived as more talented than many of her young peers makes her difficulty in finding employment at the theatres quite puzzling. Indeed, Miss Rose seems to have at least a brief period of intense lionization, for she says of her life in Infant Morality, “I … am honored with the Approbation of … many of the Royal Family; … praised and applauded to the Skies by the Multitude, sought after and chased like an hunted Deer, only to be looked at.”Footnote ²⁰ The self-description here, probably scripted by her mother, might be too generous, but the accolades Miss Rose won seem to indicate real merit and significant popularity. Douglas Nigh has even identified a rather fulsome poem written in her honor published in The Gazetteer toward the end of summer in 1769. In it she is the “budding Rose, … the sweetest flower” decking Foote's “gay parterre” with “such judgment, sense / Such grace untaught by art” in spite of her “Infancy” that her “pleasing charms at once dispense / Delight to every heart.”Footnote ²¹ This kind of audience approval translated to monetary rewards too, as attested by the solo benefit night on 29 August of her debut year.

Her two big successes in that first year, playing Miss Polly in Doctor Last in His Chariot and her starring role in Tom Thumb, also suggest that the performing life of a girl like Miss Rose had—to put it in current critical parlance—some potential queerness. On the eighteenth-century stage, young actresses often occupied a fluid dialectical space between “a girl acting” and “acting a girl.” The young girl, representing a young girl onstage, might naturalize the discourse of girlhood she embodies; but on the eighteenth-century stage, the actual acting life of a young actress could be particularly resistant to such essentialization about the nature of girlhood. Miss Rose's debut role as five-year-old Miss Polly in Isaac Bickerstaff's three-act comedy Doctor Last in His Chariot, along with the epilogue she delivers, indicate what “acting a girl” on the eighteenth-century stage could entail. For Miss Rose, performing girlhood in this play meant portraying intellectual naïveté and sexual precocity.

Doctor Last, based on Molière's Le Malade imaginaire, satirizes a hypochondriac, Ailwou'd, and the eponymous exploitative quack; Polly is Ailwou'd's daughter and is made to tattle on her older sister Nancy's amorous plots. Even before she appears on the scene, Polly is described by her mother as “forward enough” such that “she knows as much at five, as I did at fifteen.”Footnote ²² And her father somewhat indulgently calls her “the little slut” (III.i). While in the eighteenth century, “slut,” like “jade” (I.xiii), could be used as a casually derogatory word for females, often of lower classes, and did not always refer specifically to sexual promiscuity, the word is not without erotic undertones. Polly is definitely a mix of childish innocence implied by the epithet “little” and an innate knowingness implied by the “slut.” The following exchange between Polly and her father, where he interrogates her about his older daughter, Nancy, suggests the comic acting Miss Rose could show off in this scene as a precocious little girl, alternating between ignorance and knowingness, impudence and fear:

In this scene of the father mining his young daughter for information about her older sister's intrigues, Polly comes off as a winsome little minx, well aware of what he wants to know but prevaricating imperfectly about what she has seen, while pretending to be an obedient little girl. But once she has spilled the beans, she launches into a detailed and enthusiastic narrative of the lovers’ interactions—while probably acting them out—in a way that clearly signals her intense interest in adult sexuality:

Here, after building sexual and narrative anticipation, Polly amusingly cuts off her retelling of the lovemaking at a climactic point. Her father knows well she is still hiding something, but is temporarily satisfied with the information and lets her go, though not before he half-heartedly threatens her with the rod one more time if she does not obey him.

This short scene is a layered metatheatrical moment in which the little girl performs both real and pretend childishness under the eagle eye of her father; it also exemplifies a common type of girlhood represented on the eighteenth-century stage. The scene posits “acting like a girl” as a liminal state between simplicity and duplicity; a mode of erotically charged female artfulness that is entertaining because it is transparent. The trope is repeated at the end when little Polly moves from being an observer of adult sexuality to a desiring but still childish subject. When accused of being a tattler she pipes up, “but I'm no tell-tale, so I an't; for he kiss'd me too, and I never said a word of it. … And won't you get somebody to marry me, papa? You've been promising me a husband a great while, and I'm tired of old John the butler” (III.xiii). Polly here probably means she's been “playing house” with the butler, but her comment also constructs this child as a labile, desiring body. Frederick Burwick, discussing the eroticization of pubescent girls on the eighteenth-century stage, draws a parallel with midcentury paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze, who frequently placed “the face of a girl of 12 on the body of a more amply endowed young woman of 18.”Footnote ²³ Polly and Miss Rose, are of course, much younger—barely five—but the approach to girlhood here is similar. Girls like Miss Rose and Polly embody what Gemma Miller has called the “equivocal fantasy of childhood,” which collapses delight in a child's eroticism while cherishing the innocence that allows it to become easily visible.Footnote ²⁴ The young girl's childish body in Doctor Last too is made to signify unsophisticated desire, rendered amusing rather than threatening because it remains artless enough to be visible to and under the control of the patriarch's eye.

This stage portrayal of girlhood as a state of inherent but as yet immature eroticism was not unfamiliar to the eighteenth-century audience. It was a well-established female type in representations of older adolescent girls—Wycherley's Margery Pinchwife, reborn as Garrick's “Country Girl,” as well as the heroine of his popular creation, Miss in Her Teens, are good examples of such figures. Burwick even recounts a production of The Country Girl in which the eight-year-old Miss Mudie plays the flirtatious protagonist who, when dressed as a boy for her protection, is “fondl[ed]” in the park by a couple of beaux who see through the ruse, and she responds by showing “increasing interest in the kisses.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, as Polly in Bickerstaff's comedy suggests, while the oversexed teen girl was the more common stereotype, younger girls were not exempt from such sexualized characterization. Indeed, it could even provoke censure: one contemporary says about Sally in Colman's Man and Wife, a young girl similar to Polly, played by Miss Linley, “[t]he character of the little girl educated to the Dexterity of Lying, is stolen from the French, and is in the English writer's hands the most immoral and indecent exhibition our theatre has known for many years.”Footnote ²⁶ Sally is remarkably similar to Polly in that she is privy to her older sister's amorous intrigues. So why exactly the commentator finds her role repugnant while he seems to have enjoyed Polly is unclear. Possibly it is because Sally is more sexually forward; unlike Polly, she is not just privy to her older sister's amorous affairs but also an active and successful colluder. She is “an arch little soul,” a “little coquet” who loves “a little roguery to her heart,” and when one of her sister's beaux is ready “to make love to [her]” because she is “as handsome as a little angel,” the little girl is knowing enough to say with false coyness, “I must not kiss the gentlemen.”Footnote ²⁷ Thus, though she is a young and eroticized character like Polly, Sally is not as childishly transparent. More significantly, the reviewer, in his casual comparison of the two characters and his preference for “little Miss Rose” over the actress playing Sally, indicates that he was familiar enough with this particular representation of girlhood to prefer one iteration over another.

It is necessary to note, however, that what we today identify as a “deviant” pedophilic gaze in such theatrical productions of sexualized girlhood—a creation by and for adults—was not completely alien to mainstream discursive constructs of children in the eighteenth century. Little girls in the theatre such as Miss Rose might be more vulnerable to adult exploitation due to their public displays, but their erotically charged representation was not particularly anomalous in terms of eighteenth-century discourses about children.Footnote ²⁸ The period is known for its “invention” of childhood as a cherished state of innocence to be protected from adult worldliness and corruption, and discourses about childhood such as Locke's notion of the child as a tabula rasa or the Rousseauistic belief in children's innate goodness are offered as evidence for this.Footnote ²⁹ But, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's conception of children as beings of natural animalistic passion was also a mainstream notion in this century; a child was driven by the “material principle [bodily sensuality]” and unconstrained by Reason as an adult might be, so that “its own gratification” was of instinctive and paramount importance.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, notions of children's “innocence” could coexist with a belief in their sexual nature without dissonance.

In addition, as Anja Müller has shown, “childhood” could be a rather fluid category in terms of numerical years: who was identified as a “child” was a function of situation rather than mere age.Footnote ³¹ Often categorizing childhood was dependent on two distinct indices—that of sexual maturity and that of cognitive-rational maturity—mapped unevenly onto each other. The relationship of actual age to these parameters of growth could differ contextually. For instance, the legal age of sexual consent for girls was only ten (or sometimes twelve, depending on legal interpretation), whereas boys became responsible for sexual and criminal acts at age fourteen. Parish orphans could bind themselves to an apprenticeship as early as eleven or twelve, and yet, the Hardwicke Marriage Act sought to prevent children under twenty-one from marrying without the consent of their parents. While adult contemporaries often considered the period before seven years of age to be the “Age of Innocence,” based on the assumption that children were unaware of sexuality, they viewed fourteen-year-olds as sexual creatures though not mentally mature enough for adult partnership like marriage.Footnote ³² Thus, when theatre audiences saw Miss Rose prattle about sexual activity, they did not find it a particularly dissonant mode of girlhood from that acceptable in the everyday world outside the theatre. Instead, for them it was an extension of the sexualized and potentially pedophilic gaze that children's bodies were routinely subjected to in the eighteenth century.

Certainly, this aspect of girlhood is reaffirmed in the popular epilogue to Doctor Last spoken by Miss Rose, which became a staple in the young actress's repertory as a stand-alone piece. Prologues and epilogues in the eighteenth-century theatre, wherein players speak directly to the audience in their own voices, are important transitional elements that mediate between the world created on the stage and that of the audience. As “mainstays” of the eighteenth-century stage, such prologues and epilogues often gave performers an opportunity to reflect on the character they assumed in the play, inviting what Diana Solomon describes as a “slippage between character and actress.”Footnote ³³ This is certainly true of Miss Rose's epilogue, which often slips into the same mix of precocity and naïveté that characterizes Polly, even as it incorporates more everyday aspects of girlhood such as daily chores and duties. Miss Rose's behavior there is not unlike Polly's—somewhat timid at the beginning but then prattling about how the “author took me in his arms just now … he kiss'd me too I vow,” promising her “ribbons and a fine new cap” and “next time he comes / Behind the scenes, to bring me sugar-plumbs”—but only if she can “make the audience clap” hard. Miss Rose, musing aloud in the epilogue about the play's success, hopes that if nothing else, the audience will definitely go home and talk about her as an acting sensation—“Such action, such a tongue—and yet I query / If she be five years old—a very fairy!” But, she hastens to assure viewers who think “Children … shou'd be sent to school” rather than fooling about on the stage, that she is not one of those “naughty ones” of “idle breed” who can't learn without “books nor needle”: “At four years old, I could both write and read.” Not only that, she also claims in the epilogue that “To be at work my fingers still are itching— / These flowers here are all of my own stitching” and “[Tak [es] up and shew [s] her frock].” Finally, she vows if none of these things will convince the audience to shower applause, then perhaps they could clap because, “‘pon my word and credit, I'm a maid. / Will that pass here for merit?” A five-year-old girl asserting her virginity is meant to be archly humorous—and it surely would have evoked a laugh. But the joke also sexualizes the little actress's body in the same breath that she proudly claims childish accomplishments of reading and writing—a rather Pollyesque conflation of babyishness and coquettishness that links Bickerstaff's character with the girl playing her. But this epilogue also reaches outward from the hothouse world of the theatre that is shaping the actress's girlhood to a world where young females like her are expected to learn womanly accomplishments like embroidery. For instance, Alexander Monro's The Professor's Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct lays out the content of such an education: “Girls of your Station are generally taught Reading, Writing, Arithmetick, Dancing, Musick, S[e]wing with all the other Parts of what is called Women's work.”Footnote ³⁴ While this was by no means all that girls were expected to learn, such skills were indeed the core elements of education for female youth with genteel pretensions. Miss Rose's epilogue thus constructs a complex self, one inhabiting the interstices of staged girlhood, acting prodigy, and mainstream expectations of ideal femininity. As Miss Rose's case suggests, “acting a girl” in the eighteenth century—whether in a dramatic role, or as a professional entertainer, or based on a cultural script—could be quite complicated.

However, that is not the end of the story—because, ironically enough, “a girl acting” in the eighteenth-century theatre would more often play the role of a boy onstage. One of the basic conditions of successful employment for a young actress in this time was that she be good at acting boys’ parts. Most of the typical “meaty” roles assumed by children in the period—Duke of York in Richard III, Tom Thumb, the Page in The Orphan, Boy in Henry V, and Prince Arthur in King John etc.—are male characters. Significantly, in Friedman's bibliography of plays with children's roles in the long eighteenth-century, fewer than fifteen percent are female, of which most are nonspeaking parts; the others either feature boys or ask generically for “children” who appear onstage but have barely any lines. Even in plays with boy characters, the majority are pages or other petty servants.Footnote ³⁵ But if a manager was casting a talented young actress in an important child's role requiring strong acting skills, he would more than likely require her to play a boy. Burwick, commenting on this practice, notes that children “could conveniently be cast as either male or female,”Footnote ³⁶ and while he is technically correct, a survey of eighteenth-century child performers and roles reveals that this kind of cross-gender casting almost always worked female-to-male and not the other way around. While a skilled girl would mostly be playing male children onstage, boys rarely played girls’ parts. The only instances I've found of boys acting as females have been as “fairies”; and while a fairy can be of either gender on the eighteenth-century stage, Thomas Kennedy's role as “Elfina, the fairy” in Edgar and Emmeline (1761) when he was about eleven or twelve years old definitely seems an example of a male-to-female cross casting.Footnote ³⁷ However, one can safely assert that this is not common: the trend is for girls to play boys’ parts.

There are some practical reasons for this casting phenomenon, most notably the limited number of young girls’ roles in much of eighteenth-century drama (though toward the end of this period there is an uptick that escalates with the fad for child actors in the nineteenth century). The disproportionately high number of boys’ roles as compared to girls has to do with the usefulness of children to certain kinds of adult plots—for instance, tragedies tend to require young actors more frequently than comedies. Comedies in the century—often concerned with sex and courtship before marriage—rarely need children for their plotlines. On the contrary, as T. G. A. Nelson has shown, comedies frequently manifest acute anxiety about procreation and progeny.Footnote ³⁸ And while comedies might occasionally use a young servant or two, the requirement for young pages in tragedies is far greater. In tragedies, which typically feature royalty or other nobly born characters, children are needed in two capacities—as servants or pages who are part of these august personages’ equipage, and as heirs or progeny in tragic plots of state and succession. So, in the aristocratic, primogeniture-driven worlds of tragedy in the period, both kinds of role—page and progeny—tend to be for male children. These dramatic trends meant that there were enough boy characters in eighteenth-century drama, from small servant parts to more emotionally and intellectually demanding roles, to suit the capabilities of most male child actors, thus precluding the need for frequent cross-gender casting.

Broadly speaking, then, the male roles a girl like Miss Rose would usually assume for mainstage plays in the period fall into three categories—servants, young princes, and the sui generis part of the “freak” adult male in Tom Thumb. Each category would have its own nuanced iteration of masculinity, of course—the exaggerated braggadocio of a Thumb would be very different from the pathos-evoking yet innately royal boyhood of a Duke of York. However, despite these differences, a boy's part would have required a different physical style of self-presentation than that of a young girl such as Polly. It is well-established that throughout the century, feminine and masculine identities came to be gradually but increasingly polarized, so that Man and Woman came to be seen as fundamentally irreconcilable and distinct modalities of being.Footnote ³⁹ Thus, in his 1804 memoir we find Charles Macklin dismissing breeches roles in drama, observing that “there is such a reverse in all the habits and modes of the two sexes” that it is “next to an impossibility” for actresses “to resemble the other” convincingly; the gap between the actress's female body and the naturalized script of masculinity seems insurmountable.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, in the world of small boys and girls clear gendered divisions could sometimes be less evident due to cultural habits of thought and everyday behavior. In terms of performing gender in everyday life à la Judith Butler, eighteenth-century infants can be seen as beginning the process in a more leisurely fashion.Footnote ⁴¹ Before the breeching ceremony, which could take place anywhere from four to eight years of age, boys wore gowns and dresses identical to their sisters, so that it is often impossible to distinguish between young girls and boys in portraits of the time (Fig. 2). As Mary Abbott notes, small boys in frocks can be “distinguished from their sisters” in paintings only “by the masculine character of their props” rather than from any physical differences (Fig. 3).Footnote ⁴² But, she notes, “As little boys recognised, the ceremony of breeching marked a promotion from neuter infancy to masculine superiority,” citing the instance of Lady Lincoln's five-year-old son who chopped off his skirts because he would be “like a girl no longer.”Footnote ⁴³ So, in terms of early childhood gendering practices and such “neuter infancy” for eighteenth-century adults, boys and girls more closely resemble one another visually—age is a more primary marker of identity than gender.

Figure 2.

Thomas Gainsborough, Master John Heathcote (1770). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.

Charles Willson Peale, Boy with Toy Horse (1768). The Bayou Bend Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Biology-specific rearing practices nevertheless continued to be extremely important. As the case of Lady Lincoln's son suggests, masculine privilege coincided with age privilege, and boys could be very aware of this. Onstage, thus, while the girl-to-boy cross-casting at one level echoes the culture's ease with visual slippage between small male and female children, the gender-bending acting life of a young actress invited her to go beyond the cultural scripts of female youth as a training period for “Women's work” in Monro's words, such as embroidering “flowers” of one's “own stitching” on little frocks, as Miss Rose says in the prologue to Doctor Last in His Chariot. Abbott notes that as the century progressed, education became more gendered, in that, “For girls, domestic crafts and accomplishment were priorities”; so “[w]hile boys’ horizons expanded, girls remained ensconced in the household.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But, public girls such as Miss Rose, who spent most of their time playing male characters in the theatre, were actually praised for doing the opposite of what contemporary conduct books such as Sarah Fielding's The Governess proposed—that girls should learn to “keep[ ] down all rough and boisterous passions” to gain happiness in the “stations of life allotted to the female character.”Footnote ⁴⁵ For, if young girls were seen as “emotional and passive, and, ideally, defensive, modest, and delicate” while young boys were “associated with … activity and aggression,” then Miss Rose's claim to fame rests on her ability to perform the latter rather than the former.Footnote ⁴⁶ The particular dramatic moment that artist John Berridge depicted (and engraver Edward Fisher preserved) for Miss Rose's portrait as Tom Thumb is a good example of this. As the quote from act II, scene ii of Fielding's farce inscribed below the image suggests—“Ha! Dogs, Arrest my Friend before my Face! … Tom Thumb shall shew his Anger by his Sword. (*Kills the Bailliff [sic] and his Follower)”—Berridge chose the most exaggeratedly choleric and violent moment of the little hero's behavior to portray Miss Rose. In the context of the play, Tom Thumb's overreaction and gratuitous slaying of the bailiff along with one of his men is a scathing subversion of the contemporary tragic heroes’ hair-trigger temper at the barest suggestion of impugned honor. But in terms of actually acting the scene, the portrait suggests that what apparently endeared the audience was also the little girl's perfect mimicking of the mighty heroes’ challenging expression and belligerent physical gestures—her ability to perform a corporeality radically contrasting with the one expected from her small female body.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, while roles such as Tom Thumb allowed the young actress to inhabit a script of exaggerated masculinity, most other significant male roles for children in popular repertory plays—precocious servants such as the Page in Otway's The Orphan, or young princes who are victimized by ruthlessly ambitious guardians such as the Duke of York in Richard III and Prince Arthur in King John—required more submissive postures. For instance, the powerful scene between Arthur and Hubert in Shakespeare's King John, where the “innocent prate” and deep affection of a frightened little boy for the very man ready to gouge out his eyes with heated irons, offers a fine opportunity to the young actress for evoking pathos (IV.i.25).Footnote ⁴⁸ This meaty role is typical insofar as children are usually “archetypal innocents” used to “occasion pathos” in tragedies.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, some, like the Duke of York in Cibber's adaptation of Richard III, are allowed to discomfit their persecutors with precociously intelligent but equivocal accusations. The little Duke of York is portrayed as a very astute and knowing child, for instance, quite aware of the political threat that his ruthless uncle, Richard III, presents. The boy has such “a Sharp, provided Wit”—“So cunning, and so young is Wonderful”—that his taunting questions half reveal and half conceal the accusations everyone is levying at the usurper but none dare articulate (III.i).Footnote ⁵⁰ And though there is pathos enough in this boy's role, for he is ruthlessly killed, his precocious insights into the royal brothers’ perilous situation is an important part of this character's power onstage. This position of a young male character as a critical commentator on the corruption and crime of adults can also be seen in the role of the Boy in Shakespeare's Henry V, who, disgusted with his thieving, lying, and cowardly masters, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol, notes, “I am boy to them all three: but … indeed three such antics do not amount to a man” (III.ii.28–30).Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, playing parts of boys means that young actresses like Miss Rose performed a mix of naive pathos and precocious moral wisdom onstage, enjoying a broader histrionic spectrum than that afforded by the simpering young misses they performed when acting as girls.

The eroticism that underlies girls’ parts like Polly, however, is not entirely banished in girls’ presentation of male roles. Much of the humor in Tom Thumb, for instance, arises from the absurdity of sexual congress between the passionate but tiny hero and the well-endowed Huncamunca or towering Glumdalca. And Fielding frequently makes his protagonist say outrageously sexual things—imagine the five-year-old Miss Rose as she appears in the portrait eagerly saying, “I'll hug, caress, I'll eat her [Huncamunca] up with love. / Whole days, and nights, and years shall be too short / For our enjoyment, every sun shall rise / Blushing, to see us in our bed together” (II.ii. 20–3).Footnote ⁵² The impact of such a disjunction between speaker and speech would undoubtedly be quite hilarious.Footnote ⁵³ In addition, it perpetuates the sexualized framing of the child's body we saw in little-girl roles such as Polly or Sally. As Tom Thumb, the locus of sexual humor would once again be Miss Rose's childish body, inadequate to the coital role about which the adult hero fantasizes.

Such adult laughter at the child's expense is not merely a function of Fielding's plot, which presents stunted manhood performing excessive machismo; it also imbues young boys’ characters in eighteenth-century plays. The role of the Page in Otway's The Orphan, which Miss Rose also performed, is the perfect example of such sexualized framing of youth for the entertainment of adults. The Page, who is employed by Polydore for his sordid bed-trick because he has a “pretty forward lying Face / And may'st in time expect Preferment” (III.i), is very much implicated in adult sexual plots, not unlike Polly in Doctor Last or Sally in Colman's Man and Wife. Footnote ⁵⁴ In his artfully ingenuous prattle meant to delay Castalio from retiring to bed, the boy reminisces about the time when, as he says, “I told you what Colour my lady Monimia's Stockings were of, and that she garter'd them above Knee” (III.i).Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, as with Polly, the page boy in Otway's play is not only a facilitator of adults’ sexual games, but also a desiring subject himself. But as a boy, Miss Rose performs childish sexual desire in a way that is discursively and functionally different. Upon being asked by Monimia why he no longer spends time with her, the Page confesses it is because he is flustered by her “swelling Breasts” which are “so very white” (I.i).Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, when Polydore questions the Page about Monimia's response to his billet-doux, the young servant admits he is still titillated by her mesmerizingly magnificent mammaries, for he replies: “she did so sigh, and so look with her Eyes, and her Breasts did so lift up and down; I could have found in my heart to have beat ’em for they made me asham'd” (III.i).Footnote ⁵⁷

The difference between this iteration of childish libido and the one Miss Rose represented as Polly is striking: as a young boy she simulates the male gaze fixated on the ampleness of the female form, while as a ripe little girl she acts like an eager recipient of intimate gestures, including kisses from her older sister's beau, or—as she says in the epilogue—the author. The former attracts attention to the breasts of the adult actress playing Monimia, while the latter invitingly highlights the young girl's sexually inexperienced body as still that of “a maid.” That Miss Rose played the role of the Page as excellently as she did that of Polly is evident in Francis Gentleman's praise of her, quoted above: thus, a girl acting on the eighteenth-century stage was expected to play expertly both the childish object of male erotic gaze as well as the young gazing subject eroticizing the female body for the audience's delight. Either way she was a child subject to the eroticized gaze trained on both girls and boys on the eighteenth-century stage, exuding, as Jim Davis says of children acting in the Victorian period, “an androgynous mixture of innocence and precocity that was highly ambiguous in its appeal.”Footnote ⁵⁸

If that was not queer enough, a young actress such as Miss Rose would also be expected to perform “age transvestism,” as Marah Gubar calls the theatrical practice of “children impersonating adults.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In the eighteenth century, there was a definite market for children playing adult roles, not just in the parodic mode as in Tom Thumb, but also as if they were actual adults. Both Christopher Rich and David Garrick produced plays with “Lilliputian Companies” comprising children acting mainstage plays, and in his play Lilliput Garrick presented the size difference between Gulliver and the denizens of Swift's island through juxtaposing one adult with a cast of children acting like court grandees.

Not only was there a taste for such age transvestism in the period, but it was often yoked with delight in watching children mimicking popular stage stars. Certainly, Miss Rose's popularity as an entertainer was cemented by her ability to play adult parts from stage hits, often in imitation of star players. In October 1770, The London Stage notes, Miss Rose performed “Tragical Imitations” to great applause;Footnote ⁶⁰ what such a performance might mean is made evident by an advertisement in 1771 for her forthcoming performance at an evening's entertainment at a public ball in the Middlesex Assembly Room. Here, we are told “Miss Rose, near six Years old, of surprising Capacity” will, with “her Brother,” perform sundry “theatrical Imitations for which they are deservedly celebrated”:Footnote ⁶¹

This performative anthology of some of the most popular theatrical parts in the second half of the century indicates the taste for “Infant Imitations” in the period—that is, the novelty of seeing children mimicking popular performers from contemporary stage plays.Footnote ⁶³ Miss Rose, for instance, acted “to perfection” Frances Abington's portrayal of Lady Betty ModishFootnote ⁶⁴ and presented the character of Mrs. Cadwallader from Foote's farce The Author in “the manner of Mrs. Gardner,” who performed the role in Haymarket to great applause.Footnote ⁶⁵ Certainly, as attested by the dramatic calendar in London Stage, all the parts she played at the Assembly Room would have been familiar to eighteenth-century viewers from recent performances in the licensed theatres. So, audience enjoyment arose from the novelty of very talented children pushing at the boundaries of the cognitive, emotional, and intellectual limitations that were seen as typically characterizing childhood.Footnote ⁶⁶ This aspect of Miss Rose's acting career thus depends on strong mimicry skills insofar as the adult parts she played were not only that of a dramatic character but of a particular actress's portrayal. Burwick, though, states that in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre the child actor was valued for his capability of learning how to mimic adult behavior—but in the eighteenth century, “the child actor was seen as a prodigy capable of intuiting natural passions.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While this might be true of roles such as the Duke of York or Monimia's page, Miss Rose's career suggests that imitation remained an important aspect of the delight adults took in child performers. Moreover, in her reprisals of popular actresses, Miss Rose was participating in the pervasive taste for performances based on mimicry of well-known figures. As Matthew Kinservik notes, there was a “vogue for mimicry” in the second half of the eighteenth century, initially popularized by Garrick's excellent reprisal of contemporary actors’ acting styles early in his career.Footnote ⁶⁸ And though Garrick gave up mimicry as a “lower” form of acting, he continued to encourage his company's actors to offer popular imitations, thus creating a climate that later made possible Samuel Foote's extraordinary success as a mimic.Footnote ⁶⁹ Miss Rose, who made her debut in Foote's Haymarket, was thus following his own tactic of “using the celebrity of other people as the artistic raw material for creation of [her] own fame” in re-creating the dramatic and corporeal presence of the premier actresses of her day, such as Miss Abington or Mrs. Gardner or Mrs. Yates.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unlike for Foote, though, such “theatrical Imitations” became an economic necessity for Miss Rose rather than a choice. Refused employment in any of the theatres, she was reduced to the paratheatrical world of offstage dramatic entertainers, performing in assembly halls, concert venues, coffeehouses, taverns, and so forth, where the only acting she could do was a pastiche of extracts from popular plays in imitation of contemporary celebrity actresses, prologues or epilogues, or bits from her role in Tom Thumb. The exact reasons why theatre managers would not employ this talented young girl is unclear. Even if she was indeed being unfairly persecuted, as her mother alleged time and again, though without offering any specifics, little Miss Rose would have had no recourse. For, unlike many young girls acting onstage, such as Miss Yates or Miss Brett, she did not have the patronage and protection of a well-established thespian dynasty. What she did have was a strong and very vocal supporter in her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti.

The long address to “Impartial Admirers of Theatrical Merit” by Miss Rose at the London Coffeehouse at Ludgate Hill, published under the title of Infant Morality, offers important clues about her family circumstances. The pamphlet, most likely indited by de Franchetti, constructs Miss Rose as the heroic protagonist of her family drama, with the supporting cast of a feckless father, a mother struggling against straitened circumstances, and at least two other young mouths to feed. Miss Rose tells us that as a child of parents belonging to two different religions—a Protestant mother and a Jewish father—she was born into a world hostile to her very being: where “among Jews I am despised as a Christian, and by those who pretend to revere Christianity, considered no better than the Daughter of a Jew.”Footnote ⁷¹ Her parents’ families have boycotted the transgressive marriage; her paternal uncles “think it their Duty to Out-law, and, if possible, entirely bereave their own depress'd Brother of his Fortune,” while her mother's “near Relation”—Mrs. Spranger Barry, the former Mrs. Ann Dancer—“was (and still continues) principal Actress at Drury-Lane Theatre” yet, instead of aiding Miss Rose's acting career, “proves Herself one of my most unworthy and inveterate Enemies.”Footnote ⁷² If that wasn't enough, her “misguided Father” has a “Propensity to Gaming.”Footnote ⁷³ So, bewails the little girl (in words probably penned by “Miss Rose's Mamma”), if only “he had availed my Mother of those Hundreds he has wantonly squander'd, I should not have known … Misery.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The result of all this parental imprudence is that Miss Rose, the young prodigy, and her mother, the indefatigable de Franchetti, become the most visible figures at the forefront of their family's financial struggles.

This mother–daughter duo, talented young girl and her vocal “mamma,” constitute a unit that continues to be culturally charged even to this day. The archetypes of the Star Mom, Dance Mom, or Stage Mother, coaching and pushing her talented young daughter, remains a figure of intense cultural anxiety. Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr note that in the eighteenth century, as now, “Stage Mother” was a “term fraught with connotations, nearly all of them negative”; and “The most enduring image of the Stage Mother is the pushy parent in the wings, who has hothoused her child's talent and is now exploiting that child.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The modern iterations of toxic managing mother and performing daughter, shaped by the pervasive image-making cycles of the Internet, TV, and movies, are very different from a late eighteenth-century example of stage daughter and mother, of course; but there are persisting similarities too, insofar as such female teams often evoke questions about the proper maternal role in a daughter's life and the impact of an ambitious mother on a girl-child.

Contemporaries seem to have seen the little girl managed by her mother as a pawn or puppet. When Miss Rose appeared at the London Coffeehouse at Ludgate Hill, her appeal for support against the “miserable Effects of managerial Influence” in 1774,Footnote ⁷⁶ performed with entertaining dramatic flair, drew this response:

Here, as we see, the audience perceives Miss Rose's performing body as a palimpsest of sorts through which her mother's anterior presence can be glimpsed. The child acts on a script authored by her mother, who puts “Language into her Mouth.” The reporter's conceptualization of Miss Rose and de Franchetti echoes the particular fascination and anxiety in the period about mothers’ shadows on their daughters’ lives. Fiction of the period, for instance, frequently represents such conflations of mothers’ and daughters’ stories where the two seem to merge with each other, often with dangerous consequences. The actions of the heroine's mother in novels such as Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798), and Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice (1799) often seem to entrap the daughters, whose own narratives appear forever on the verge of slipping into the arc of their mothers’ stories. This particular iteration of mother–daughter enacted in a London coffeehouse by Miss Rose and de Franchetti is much more pedestrian, but it participates in the cultural imaginary of inexorable maternal influence on daughters. Such anxieties seem to represent the dark underbelly of the idealized role of a mother as her daughter's most important teacher that we see articulated with relentless regularity throughout the second half of the century. A girl's moral and social education was her mother's primary responsibility, and women were constantly exhorted to train their daughters properly.Footnote ⁷⁸ This maternal role here gets inverted into a dystopian version of girlhood tainted and manipulated by her mother, “from whom she receives her Instructions.”

However, Elizabeth de Franchetti did not take such imputations lying down. Being an effective spokeswoman for her daughter's talents and employability also required crafting her own public persona. So she retorted to the writer's condemnation of her conduct that, “I cannot help thinking” if the “wise Preacher” were “lamenting the same cruel Wrongs” against what “his Child were equally entitled to” he would “throw out the same if not worse Invectives.”Footnote ⁷⁹ What the Morning Post writer saw as a shrill, unbecoming harangue against the managers is recast here as righteous maternal anger. Indeed, de Franchetti actively tried to take charge of her public perception as a mother—evidenced best in the role she chose for her one and only foray on the stage as an actress. The London Stage notes that in 1771, “Miss Rose's Mamma”—not Mrs. de Franchetti—played the role of Andromache, the eponymous heroine of Ambrose Philip's The Distress'd Mother. Footnote ⁸⁰ De Franchetti's choice of this role not only says much about her active efforts to script their family's plight, but also replicates a strategy successfully employed by the best actresses of the period. Engel and McGirr have demonstrated how actresses in the period exploited the “‘cult of motherhood’” and audience's fascination with “the pathetic spectacle of suffering maternity.”Footnote ⁸¹ Susannah Cibber, for instance, leveraged her role in Shakespeare's King John as the grieving queen mother as a means of rehabilitating her public reputation after her scandalous separation from her husband, emphasizing her status as a “good mother” who is “morally and artistically worthy of her celebrity status and salary.”Footnote ⁸² Likewise, Siddons chose Andromache's role to craft herself as “a heroine renowned for her faithful widowhood and maternal virtue,” asking her audience to “draw a parallel between the ‘distrest’ Andromache and the distressed actress.”Footnote ⁸³ This is the strategy that de Franchetti too attempted, albeit with less success than the brilliant Cibber or Siddons, as suggested by the fact that she appeared in the role only once.

Even if de Franchetti was unable to portray herself convincingly as a heroically suffering mother, she was certainly active in managing Miss Rose's public image. We can see traces of her efforts in the various advertisements and newspaper notices involving her acclaimed daughter. For example, in the advertisement for her first benefit, Miss Rose apologizes for “not personally waiting on [her Friends] with Tickets for her Benefit agreeable to their kind Desire as their innumerable Invitations, Shortness of Time and Necessity of close Application makes it impossible.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The apology, surely written by de Franchetti, takes on the young actress's voice to present her as a much sought-after but complaisant paragon of talent and hard work. Positive public images take effort to maintain, and we see de Franchetti trying to clean up after untoward situations involving her daughter. For instance, a new prologue and epilogue were supposed to be spoken at her benefit, but, contrary to the information in The London Stage, these were not delivered.Footnote ⁸⁵ Instead, on 30 August 1769, Lloyds's Evening Post carried a notice in which Miss Rose thanks “the Public” for their “genteel and numerous Appearance” at her benefit but also clears herself of any blame for not speaking the new prologue and epilogue promised, claiming that “she relied on the Managers to get it licensed, their neglecting to do it was the Reason she could not possibly prevail on them to let her repeat it.”Footnote ⁸⁶ We do not know whether this was an excuse or fact, who was at fault for the audience not getting the new material it was promised, and why exactly the managers might not have allowed Miss Rose to perform the prologue and epilogue. The pieces might simply have been bad, for all we know; or, as Haymarket was not on a regular license at this time, seeking permissions from the Lord Chamberlain for particular performances could be laborious, and perhaps the theatre administration was not prepared to make the extra effort. Nevertheless, the newspaper notice, in the name of the young actress, indicates her mother's efforts to manage public opinion on her behalf. For Miss Rose, who was at this time barely five, was probably not in charge of her public communications or negotiations with adults, despite being a genius of sorts. It thus appears that de Franchetti and the theatre establishment were already at cross purposes about Miss Rose's performances. Some disagreement or dissonance seems to have been brewing between the managers—probably Foote, who was managing Haymarket at this time—and Miss Rose, or rather, Miss Rose's Mamma early in the young girl's career.

Despite possible tensions though, Miss Rose continued at Haymarket for the next year or so, appearing as the Duke of York in Richard III and the Page in Otway's The Orphan in addition to her usual roles of Polly and Tom Thumb. But though Miss Rose was garnering applause for her acting, her family seems to have been beset with financial problems, and her mother appears to have it necessary to leverage the girl's growing celebrity for monetary gain. On 21 February 1770, an advertisement in the Gazetteer uses Miss Rose's novelty as a five-year-old acting prodigy and a budding celebrity to help alleviate the family's money troubles: Miss Rose's mother is seeking subscriptions for the print portrait of her daughter as Tom Thumb. But the advertisement is no mere notice of sale; it is rhetorically framed as a vignette of virtue in distress, highly charged with emotions ranging from desperation to angry bitterness. “Miss Rose, and her defenceless Parent Mrs. De F—,” we are told, “begs [sic] leave to inform the Nobility, Gentry, and Public … that notwithstanding their unparalleled misfortunes and present pitiable situation … [and] the anxious solicitude of Mrs De F— [and] contrary to their deserts” they are denied “that priviledge [sic], which the present Lord Ch[amberlain], out of his well-known goodness, was rarely known to refuse.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The “priviledge” she means here is, of course, the license for a performance or a benefit, which only the Lord Chamberlain could grant. She blames this “afflicting circumstance” on “the instigation of a particular person, urged to distress an harmless infant,” who is “a malignant Mammonist, who through his avarice became her first, and for policy still continues her only enemy.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Who this Mammonist might be is unclear. Perhaps de Franchetti is referring to Foote again.Footnote ⁸⁹ But in the face of such villainy, she “ardently pray[s]” to “her Daughter's most exalted admirers” and the “many persons of distinction, whose wishes have long been expressed to see Miss Rose at any rate perform on the stage” to prove the “benignity of merit's champnios [sic],” by paying “10s. 6d.” for an “early subscription towards an elegant Metzotinto [sic] Print” of “Miss Rose in the Heroic-Character of Tom Thumb” because “the immediate sale of [this is] (at present) her only prospect of relief.”Footnote ⁹⁰

The advertisement clearly conveys that five-year-old Miss Rose is one of the main breadwinners in her family. She is part of the process that Dympna Callaghan, in her study of boys’ companies in Jacobean England, calls the “traffic in children,” denoting a theatrical system where adults profit from the acting child's labor.Footnote ⁹¹ The child star's economic value as a primary source of family income is reiterated in the advertisement for another “Benefit for Miss Rose” in Haymarket—a musical concert this time, interspersed with “several Scenes and Imitations”—which also announces that any “just demands of Miss Rose's Mamma, are desired to send the particulars of their demands to Mr. Deacon, attorney at law … who is commissioned by her to settle the same.”Footnote ⁹² Thus, as the advertisement for Miss Rose's portrait and her benefit suggest, de Franchetti saw the little actress as the ticket out of debt and indigence for her family. The advertisement for Miss Rose's portrait also establishes the discourse of persecuted innocence and wronged genius that de Franchetti repeatedly employs to position her actress daughter. The twin themes of money and persecuted merit are most clearly visible in one of the highest points of Miss Rose's dramatic career later that year: her performance for the royal family. The newspaper item about this performance notes that the family, including the young prince and princess, lauded “the unlimited genius of the little inimitable actress.”Footnote ⁹³ The fulsome report further notes that “Her Majesty also most graciously deigned to honour Miss Rose's mama [sic] with a generous and benign token of her Royal approbation, and Lady Charlotte Finch (distinguishable for her exemplary virtues) with obliging courtesy was pleased to make her a very considerable present.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Parental claim on children's labor or wages in the eighteenth century was nothing new, so it is not surprising that Miss Rose's Mamma would profit considerably from her daughter's talents.Footnote ⁹⁵ Parents’ commodification of progeny's talent was in fact the complacently accepted norm; as Anne Varty wryly notes about Charlotte Deans, an actress in a strolling company at the end of the eighteenth-century and mother of thirteen, her “indefatigable fertility kept them with a constant supply of juvenile members” for the troupe.Footnote ⁹⁶ And, when the actress Mrs. Edwin was young, her manager, Mr. Daly, kept thwarting her benefit performance, so that “the child, or rather her parents, had no benefit.”Footnote ⁹⁷ However, even if the commodification of Miss Rose and her talents in service of family finances was par for the course in the eighteenth century, her mother's public mediation of the sentimentalized discourse of suffering and family piety shows us how the young actress performed the script of daughterhood offstage.

This script is in evidence in the new prologue Miss Rose spoke in the role of Tom Thumb for her royal audience. The little girl, after praising the princes and their majesties, said:

We don't know who exactly wrote this piece—the newspaper mentions only that it was “written by a Lady.” It is possible that the “Lady” in question was Elizabeth de Franchetti, who was no stranger to the public pen, though if she did write it, her reason for refusing to claim authorship is unclear. In any case, as she seems to have been the “manager” and guardian of her five-year-old daughter at the royal performance, she would certainly have approved the piece if she had not authored it. The adult-written words Miss Rose speaks construct her as a pious daughter, happy to earn for her parent. Her labor is presented as voluntary; she has chosen to toil while other children play. Miss Rose's acting here is neither artistry, nor entertainment, nor prodigious talent—it is work.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ And it is portrayed as a form of heroism. Miss Rose draws her sword as she claims “Joy” in “dry[ing] a Parent's Eye” with her “Hero's wage.” The little girl is her mother's economic protector.

This script spoken by the young girl not only sounds alarmingly manipulative and speciously sentimental, but also problematizes emergent ideologies about family in the period. Anja Müller notes that the “child-oriented family” that scholars such as Lawrence Stone and Philippe Ariès have identified as an important social and affective unit in the century, was not only geared toward meeting “the child's essential concerns,” but also posited children as “passive object[s] and mere recipient[s] of fondness and charity.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Unlike the family oriented to a child's needs with the young one at the center, Miss Rose's family had an inverted dynamic—the poor parent was at the center, and the child acted as the nurturer and wage earner charged with providing for the family. A girl barely five years old would typically be perceived as one of the weakest and most dependent members of the family, but Miss Rose in this script of daughterhood is elevated to a pseudo-knightly stature as the piously heroic protector of her family. It is impossible to know if or how much the young actress contributed to the lines about her desire to help her poor, indigent mother. As a performance of daughterhood, though, delivered with power and pathos, Miss Rose's words are, in a sense, feats of maternal ventriloquism. The child has been handed a script that constructs her mother as an object of pity and herself as the provider. The poor, distressed lady can and should be helped by employing her little champion, who is ready to “toil[ ], whilst other Children play.” Or so said the adults who scripted little Miss Rose's performance.

• • •

And so we have Miss Rose—an eighteenth-century girl playing girls, boys, women, adult actresses, pious daughter, wronged child, and protective wage-earning hero. Her performances crossed not only gender and age boundaries but also pushed against traditional filial formations. We do not know what happened to Miss Rose after she disappears from the performance circuits at around age nine. Perhaps she joined a touring company and traveled the provinces. Or perhaps she is the Miss Rose who danced as one of the three Graces in Les Forges de Vulcain at King's Theatre in 1779—though the name is too common to claim that with any certainty.Footnote ¹⁰² A more horrifying end for Miss Rose is suggested by Thomas Holcroft, writing in his 1805 Theatrical Recorder at the height of the craze for acting prodigies like Master Betty.Footnote ¹⁰³ Holcroft warns of the harm this “mania for premature excellence” could cause to children, and in support of his argument uses the example of “a child” who appeared in Doctor Last in His Chariot at Haymarket in 1769,—a child who became an “object of public amazement” by the efforts “of an admiring, busy, vain woman” who used all “coercive measures” needed to hothouse such children, such as overloading a prodigiously retentive memory or training a small throat to produce a carrying voice.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ No names are mentioned, but Holcroft clearly refers to Miss Rose here, whose stage debut was in the 1769 production of Doctor Last, and to her mother, de Franchetti.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In that same section about “Extraordinary Children,” Holcroft expostulates against “parents who, from poverty, vanity, or avarice, have compelled these early plants to an undue growth,” offering an anecdote about “a mother” who “having one of these extraordinary children” was asked “by a lady who had seen it exhibit, what was become of the divine little creature.” The mother, says Holcroft, “replied, bursting into tears, ‘Oh! Madam, my child is become an idiot.’” “This is a fact” he concludes baldly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ That the talented Miss Rose might have come to this horrifying end, is chilling to contemplate. In the period an “idiot” implied acute intellectual weakness and inability. The idiot was one who “cannot count to number twenty, nor can tell who was his Father, or Mother, nor how old he is, &c.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Regressing from an intellectually precocious child with a prodigious memory and an unusual grasp of the emotional acuity needed for acting to such “idiocy” is tragic. In the context of eighteenth-century medical theory of nerves as a “network of sensible fibers,” such a child's breakdown might be attributed to either excessive “intellectual labors”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ or to the innate “nervous debility” of one whose “Genius is most keen and penetrating.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ We do not know for sure, of course, if Holcroft is talking about de Franchetti in this particular anecdote of harmful parenting, although the circumstantial evidence is compelling.

In the end perhaps, outside of all the roles she performed on the stage and off, the most palpable trace we have of Miss Rose is in her portrait. This portrait is from a time with very different standards of verisimilitude and shows her acting a part; moreover, it signifies her crass commodification. Nevertheless, perhaps in its incorporation of corporeal nuances—the flashing eye, or the chubby hand—it might be the closest we can come to the remarkable Miss Rose.