ABSTRACT
Mary Pickford and others used the adoption incident to highlight her childhood deprivation and to underscore her mother's love and the importance of familial bonds. Her story of a childhood spent engaged in paid labour resonated with her audience, familiar with the dislocations and hardships as well as the possibilities of life in the midst of a North American industrial revolution and its emerging mass consumer culture of the late 1800s and early 1900s. John J. Kelso established the Children's Aid Society in Toronto in 1891, the year before Gladys Louise Smith's birth. Born on April 8, 1892, Gladys Smith would adopt the stage name of Mary Pickford in 1907 upon her Broadway stage debut. The newly christened Mary Pickford made her Broadway debut in December 1907 at the landmark Belasco Theatre in the heart of Times Square, New York's emerging entertainment and advertising centre, with some of the nation's newest theatres and illuminated signs.
