Children could be found almost everywhere in nineteenth-century theatre. They appeared in pantomimes and ballet; entertained audiences in Britain, the transatlantic, and imperial worlds as so-called infant prodigies; and were fundamental to the staging of texts such as Alice in Wonderland, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Silver King, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Indeed, as a number of theatre historians and literary critics have pointed out, the Western concept of childhood innocence owes much to its enactment on nineteenth-century stages. Furthermore, as Marah Gubar has argued, children and youth also comprised a significant portion of theatre audiences during this period. Yet for all their centrality to nineteenth-century performance, child performers remain an underresearched subject by historians. Some scholars have dismissed children's theatrical work as mere mimicry, not the product of an actor's craft; even those disposed to see them as professionals have found that child performers often left the most cursory traces of their experiences in the archival record.

Fortunately, Shauna Vey's work on the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians demonstrates very persuasively that we need to see child performers as part of a continuum of skilled nineteenth-century theatrical workers. Founded by Robert Guerineau Marsh in Philadelphia, the troupe lasted from 1855 until 1863, and comprised approximately thirty child actors who performed adult material for audiences of a range of ages. Through exhaustive research, Vey produces a detailed portrait of the troupe's early years, a time when it garnered a solid stream of bookings in the eastern and southeastern United States as well as positive reviews. Despite the troupe's initial successes, though, Vey points out that in short succession it faced a number of problems in 1857 and 1858. During those years, Marsh experienced confrontations with performers' parents who demanded greater control over (and compensation for) their children's work—conflicts in which older notions of apprenticeship competed with an increasing emphasis on child actors as employees.

Worse yet, Marsh's young daughter Mary died in 1859 from severe burns after her costume caught fire onstage during a performance in Macon, Georgia. In her treatment of the brief life of “Little Mary Marsh,” as the actor was popularly known, Vey explores both the idealized representations of the female child actor, ones that encompassed both sentimentalized purity and eroticism, and the tough working conditions that Mary endured. As Vey reminds us, Mary's tragic fate was not unknown in nineteenth-century theatre. Not only was fire a hazard in North American urban centers in general, it was particularly lethal in theatres: lighting fixtures overheated next to highly flammable costumes in buildings that were often poorly built and flimsy. Yet Mary's death was not remembered as the result of the unsafe working conditions experienced by both child and adult performers as workers; rather, her memory was framed by nostalgia that turned her into an archetype of Victorian childhood. As the 1850s ended, Marsh faced more challenges, professional and political. Not only had he lost his daughter, Marsh also needed to find new troupe members as his performers aged. The impending Civil War also made touring more precarious. The solution, it seemed, was to move further west, to gold-rush communities in California, Australia, and New Zealand, and to Canada. Marsh's company thus was part of the transnational, often high mobile, world of nineteenth-century theatre. Expanding his company's geographic reach was a decision that served Marsh well in the short term, even though by 1863 Marsh had lost a number of his major performers to adult careers and marriage.

Vey's account does not end with Marsh, though, as she expands her narrative to explore the adult careers of two of the troupe's most prominent members, Louise Arnot and Georgie Marsh. In contrast to Mary Marsh's persona of angelic fragility and tragically truncated career, Arnot's conveyed a tomboy, and she enjoyed a lengthy career on the American stage, moving from antebellum melodrama to vaudeville and burlesque. Georgie Marsh also shifted from being a child performer to a mature adult actor, a transition Vey attributes to his having honed his craft as a boy and his ability to draw upon his expertise with the Marsh Troupe. By taking her research beyond the strict chronological limits of the Marsh Troupe's lifetime, Vey provides her reader with the opportunity to see these child performers' careers in larger frameworks and contexts. She thus goes beyond a snapshot approach that looks only at their childhood experiences and fleshes out her case for treating these performers not as precocities or oddities but, rather, as skilled workers.

On a number of fronts, then, Vey's exploration of the Marsh Troupe's fortunes has much to tell us. As well as being thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Vey situates the troupe within a range of contexts and debates, both historical and historiographic. Her work draws our attention to the ways in which changing conditions of mid-nineteenth-century child labor, apprenticeship and education, and dominant constructs of childhood framed the Marsh Troupe's work. Far from being a narrowly focused niche study, her microhistory of these child performers demonstrates how such research can bring together histories of childhood, youth, and the family, performance, and labor and working-class history to enrich and deepen our understanding of nineteenth-century theatre.