Toy Theatre
Theatre was the main form of popular entertainment in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There were large numbers of theatres, with hundreds in London alone. At the time, theatre productions were the equivalent of our soap operas today. Everybody knew the stories to the plays and had their favourite actors.
Toy theatres became a popular form of family entertainment during the 19th century. It is generally believed that they were invented in 1811 by a man called William West, who had a stationery business in London, when he started to produce printed sheets of characters from various plays.
Toy theatres were usually constructed out of card and fitted onto a table top to be played with. The characters were printed on paper and card, attached to wooden sticks, and appeared on the stage by sliding in and out of slots on the stage floor. Different scenes and facades could be added to the basic set. Wealthy families often had a toy theatre custom-made.
While shops which sold toy theatre material began to surface everywhere, William West's shop continued to be one of the most innovative. He started to produce special books of shortened plays for use with toy theatres, called 'West's Original Juvenile Drama'. The sheets, which were produced with characters and scenery, came in different versions: cheaper ones in black and white which children could colour in themselves, or more expensive full-colour versions.
During the 1830s, German manufacturers such as Trantsensky led the market for toy theatres and related materials. The enthusiasm for toy theatres began to decline towards the end of the 19th century. The quality of material published had started to decline and became undesirable. Many of the plays produced for these miniature theatres had not kept up with the times, which was partly due to the nature of the plays - early juvenile dramas had been based on romantic stories or tragedies and the new theatre of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw did not translate well into theatre for children. However, it is also thought that Victorian morality also played a significant part in their demise, as families felt that plays originally written for adults weren't necessarily suitable for children.
Trentsensky Toy Theatre
This is known as the Trentsensky Theatre because some of the scenes used were made by this famous company.
