ABSTRACT
The 1841 Occupational census lists 387 actresses in england and Wales and 987 actors. The 1911 census lists 9,171 actresses and 9,076 actors. This twenty-six-fold increase among actresses, and the altered ratio of their numbers to actors’, is remarkable evidence of the growth of the stage as a profession for women. 1 Even in 1911, however, the stage could not be regarded as a statistically significant source of female employment. Rather, the figures are an index of the theater’s, and particularly the actress’s, growing significance for society: to Victorians the profession of actress, like that of governess, had a symbolic importance as an occupation for women that transcended mere numbers. It offered striking opportunities for independence, fame, and fortune, and even for those outside it the stage incarnated fantasies, providing vicarious release in the notion that here was an area of special dispensation from the normal categories, moral and social, that defined woman’s place. Indeed, a writer in the Englishwoman’s Review remarked on the discrepancy between the rather lurid popular image and the mundane reality:
The life of an actress is to the world at large a curious terra incognita peopled by forbidding phantoms of evil or seductive visions of pleasure and success; as a gifted woman’s devotion to art, or the honest and laborious means by which she earns her bread, the vocation of the actress is understood by few. 2
