Art: A Penny Plain

When, in 1806, the Holy Roman Empire, after more than 800 reeling years, was jostled into its last bloody gutter by a Corsican elbow, when Virtue raged unchecked in England and that shrewd but disappointed politician, George III, was declared hopelessly insane, certain print shops in London began to sell miniature theatres. With them they sold engraved cards of scenes and characters; the price—a penny plain and tuppence colored. The game of playing with these toys became a fad more prevalent even than Virtue, and as fevered as the undone George. Recently, in the bookshop of S. Nott, in Manhattan, some of these tiny theatres appeared in an exhibition.

“A pair of boots for Jack Sheppard,” “A sword for the Red Knight,” “A suit of armor for Sir Florian.” Thus spoke honest burghers in London printshops on Saturday nights. They laid down their pennies, took home boots, sword, armor, cut them from their cards, pasted them on the effigies of contemporary actors. They took pains. Often the scenes constructed in the three-sided rooms of the toy theatres were works of subtle art. Artists afterwards famed sometimes got bread by engraving the penny cards, the tuppeny cards—Blake, Flaxman, Cruikshank. Thousands worked at the making of the theatres; now only one man is left who gets his living so—one B. Pollock of London; he is the last. Yet there still remain here and there a few people who cherish the toys. Ellen Terry, actress, possesses a little theatre and a collection of the plays from which its scenes derive; Charles Spencer Chaplin, cinema comedian, lightens with one his melancholy hours; G. K. Chesterton, paradoxhund, is said to play with one while thinking out his articles. Many are preserved in Jacobean farmhouses, in Tudor mansions, in dour Scotch castles, in London palaces.