expert with bicycles, model aircraft and the cinema, scorn so tedious a toy. Most grown-ups laugh at so crude a hobby. We have no feeling for melodrama.But, though the last of the old theatrical print shops is closing down - Pollock's of Hoxton - the sheets of characters and scenes are someday to be sold "nearer the West End." That will be some reminder of a glorious past, for everyone who has loved or worked in the theatre has bought and treasured the old penny plain, twopence coloured sheets in the past, or dabbled in the delights of a toy theatre in childhood.
Cochran, Priestley, the Sitwells, Gordon Craig, Charlie Chaplin are a few of many who have built up their gaudy toy theatres, inserted the shaky sheets of incredible scenery, and manoeuvred the stiff cardboard characters across the stage.
The Juvenile Drama (quaint, pompous title!) came into being soon after 1800, and rocketed at once to the heights of fashion. In the theatre proper, it was the heyday then of melodrama, pantomime and the equestrian drama-yes, real horses galloping at full speed about the stage-and no sooner did a new play make a hit at Covent Garden, the Olympic or Astley's, than sheets of the play would be rushed out for the miniature stage. The play itself would be potted down into a brief but emotional booklet. The characters and scenery would be drawn in miniature, engraved on to sheets, and sold in sets, the price being twopence for the hand-coloured sheets, and a penny for the plain ones which you coloured yourself.In the early days, the quality of the plates was magnificent. Flaxman, Cruikshank, even Blake,
drew for the Juvenile Drama. The characters would be exact portraits of the great actors of the day, and you could cut out or frame Mrs. Siddons, Madame Vestris, or Edmund Kean as Macbeth or Othello. There seems no doubt that at this date the toy theatre was a pastime for grown-ups. The Juvenile Drama was, in fact, your "Picture Post." Instead of buying magazines with lush photographs of your stage passion of the
moment, you bought a set of prints, and enacted your favourite play at home. But it soon became a popular game for children.
In the great days of the Juvenile Drama, there were something like fifty publishers of the prints, West, Hodgson, Webb, Skelt, Redington (afterwards bought by Pollock) among the best known.
What a choice of plays the Victorian child had to choose from! Sagas of the sea, dramas of blood and battle, stirring tales of Oriental passion. Blue-beard, Timour the Tartar, Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica, The Ruffian Boy, are a fair sample of the titles. 
They were plays of action and emotion rather than thought, of drawn swords and threatening glances, love and murder, rescues and elopements, swelling bosoms and spangled deshabille. The scenery was as violent as the action. Mountains rise sheer out of bottomless lakes. Impregnable castles reveal rooms of fabulous splendour.And the dialogue!
"Scene 4. No.5. BRIDAL CHAMBER. Wings No. 10," run the stage directions in Timour the Tartar. "Zorilda discovered reclining on a couch.
SELIMA: Dear lady, do not thus give way to grief.
ZORILDA : There exists no hope. Oglou's ingratitude is too bitter to be endured.
SELIMA: Some one is unlocking the door!
Enter Oglou, Left Hand-Plate I.
ZORILDA: Now then, perfidious man!
OGLOU: Hush, Princess, Hush!-at the hazard of my life, I come to save you, and to
save your son.
ZORILDA: Blessed are those words! Yet can I believe you, Oglou? You who betrayed my secret!"
And so on, in the same high-flown vein. Nearly everyone who has dabbled in the Juvenile Drama agrees that the performances of the plays were usually a failure. It was the preparation that provided so many hours of delight. 
Choosing your sheets from the vast selection at the toyshop; colouring them in gaudy colours; cutting out the characters and scenes; pasting them on cardboard; pasting the proscenium and orchestra on to the theatre, fixing the footlights. This was the fun! 
But the performance was usually a sad anticlimax. It was incredibly difficult to push the characters on in the right order; to get life into the action; to make the dialogue comprehensible, where one or two children had, by squeaking and growling by turns, to represent a dozen different characters or more. C.B. Cochran says that, as a small boy, he "bought packets and packets of spangles," but could never hold an audience right through a performance.
Mr. Priestley says that even as an adult he "could never make the things work." A. E. Wilson, whose book Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured, gives a full and charming account of the history of the toy theatre, says the whole pleasure was in anticipation. And Robert Louis Stevenson, in his exquisite little essay of the same title, says that no child "could twice court the tedium, the worry, and the long drawn disenchantment of an actual performance."Stevenson was a frequent visitor to the print shops of the day, including Pollock's. But even then, the toy theatre was beginning to decline.
The quality of the prints was going down, many being reproduced not from copper-plates, but as lithographs. And the audience was fast diminishing.The birth of children's magazines, the introduction of compulsory education (which meant homework!), above all, the arrival of the play of ideas in the theatre proper, lowered the prestige and popularity of the Juvenile Drama.
And now it is at an end. Yet, after the war, there may well be a renaissance. Mr. Alan Keen, the collector and dealer, has bought all the Pollock stock of original plates, and plans to reprint the plays again after the war. Some experts in the theatre think that the Juvenile Drama must reflect the theatre of the time, and that it cannot truly flourish in an age which laughs at melodrama.
Yet, you have only to handle a set of coloured sheets; to drop a gaudy backcloth into your toy stage; to glance through the magical list of titles, to feel that here is a children's amusement for all time.ANNE SCOTT JAMES.
Chris Somerville Collection
