Famous child actor plays at Ledbury

A lucrative novelty, these young stars blazed for a short while then for the most part disappeared into obscurity as they grew up. Was such a brief moment in the limelight worth it or were these children the victims of a ruthless profession?

Master Calhaem and his infant brother were a pair of child actors, who amongst others, such as Master Betty and Clara Fisher, appear often in the British Library playbills collection.

Master Betty, child actor (Credit: Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Fund)

It is not uncommon for all the members of a family, even the smallest, to perform.

For audiences, the effect of seeing a youngster in one of Shakespeare’s most demanding roles was sensational - and lucrative for theatre managers.

Children tackled major roles such as Shylock for example.

But in this playbill, the young Calhaem’s are the Princes in the Tower, murdered at the behest of the ruthless tyrant Richard.

As we can see from this particular production, the two brothers Calhaem are versatile and they can also sing and dance for their supper.

Although it was a demanding life, compared to the fate of others the same age who could be working in the mines or the factories, treading the boards was a far more pleasant option.

And yet for some it still amounted to a form of exploitation.

In the novel Nicholas Nickleby, published initially in serial-form just two years after this playbill, Charles Dickens satirises child actors, attacking those who saw their youth as a means to make money.

In the novel, Ninetta the daughter of the theatre manager Vincent Crummles, is known as ‘the infant phenomenon’.

She is supposedly ten years old and seemingly “the idol of every place we go into”.

The nobility and gentry of almost every town in England have written complimentary letters about her dramatic abilities as according to her father, her talent is not to be imagined.

Dickens writes; "The infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the same age… for five good years. But she had been kept up late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall."