ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author focuses on the ways in which this ubiquitous middle-class toy helped shape the aesthetic sensibilities and desires of at least two generations of young men, thus occupying a significant place in a shared cultural imagination. From its beginnings in the late-eighteenth century, juvenile drama demonstrates the ways in which art and commerce were mutually imbricated through a spectatorial relationship of desire. Like many of the theatrical productions it represented, the toy theater was concerned less with high art than with spectacular forms of entertainment that could be replicated in miniature at home. The nineteenth-century fascination with all things theatrical is well documented. Colin Campbell identifies this mode of post-Romantic speculation as an aesthetic sensibility that gradually shaped modes of consumption from the late-eighteenth century onward. For middle-class boys, the occasional possession of money removes these barriers to consumption, enabling them to enter shops and acquire the goods on offer.