Our speaker David Powell is the author of William West and the Regency Toy Theatre (2004) and W. G. Webb and the Victorian Toy Theatre (2005). Born Hull 1955, he studied Literae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, 1973–77. Since 1982 he has been employed as Senior Special Cataloguer at the Congregational Library, London and has since 1993 been a Trustee of Pollock’s Toy Museum.
The English toy theatre (‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’) grew out of the Regency trade in prints, toys and novelities, initially from the shop of William West in Exeter Street, Covent Garden, a handy address for reproducing in miniature the new plays then appearing in the principal theatres of London. This exhibition uses prints, original plates and ephemera, largely from private collections, to show how a rather shadowy group of small-scale entrepreneurs produced and marketed sheets of scenes and characters, with playbooks, and ‘tinselled portraits’ in close association, passing on printing plates, pirating images, and moving from one address to another, while also trading in a huge variety of miscellaneous items, such as valentines, ‘conversation cards’ and, in the case of West himself, pornographic song books. By the later years of the nineteenth century, writers and artists including Robert Louis Stevenson looked back nostalgically to these gaudy fragments of their boyhood, and began a revival that has kept the toy theatre tenuously alive through the century following, stimulating creativity in many fields, among figures as diverse as Serge Diaghilev, Jack Yeats, Gordon Craig, J B Priestley, and Edwin Smith.
The material offers an instructive cross section of graphic reproduction methods from etching with hand colouring, to lithography with stencil colouring and finally different methods of colour printing. It forms part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Pollock, a principal figure in the story, who links the early days of the toy theatre business to living memory.
David Powell has selected material for the exhibition and written the catalogue, with a contribution from Jan Piggott, Archivist of Dulwich College. Alan Powers, of the University of Greenwich, has coordinated the team.
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