Printing the toy theatre

Exhibition preview and opening lecture:
Tuesday 21 November 2006
Exhibition: Wednesday 22 November – 4 January 2007

St Bride Printing Library
Bride Lane, Fleet Street
London EC4Y 8EE

‘We can’t turn ’em out fast enough’
Exhibition preview 5.30pm and opening lecture 7.00pm, Tuesday 21 November

Our speaker David Powell is the author of William West and the Regency Toy Theatre (2004) and W. G. Webb and the Victorian Toy Theatre (2005). Born Hull 1955, he studied Literae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, 1973–77. Since 1982 he has been employed as Senior Special Cataloguer at the Congregational Library, London and has since 1993 been a Trustee of Pollock’s Toy Museum.

Exhibition
Opens Wednesday 22 November

The English toy theatre (‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’) grew out of the Regency trade in prints, toys and novelities, initially from the shop of William West in Exeter Street, Covent Garden, a handy address for reproducing in miniature the new plays then appearing in the principal theatres of London. This exhibition uses prints, original plates and ephemera, largely from private collections, to show how a rather shadowy group of small-scale entrepreneurs produced and marketed sheets of scenes and characters, with playbooks, and ‘tinselled portraits’ in close association, passing on printing plates, pirating images, and moving from one address to another, while also trading in a huge variety of miscellaneous items, such as valentines, ‘conversation cards’ and, in the case of West himself, pornographic song books. By the later years of the nineteenth century, writers and artists including Robert Louis Stevenson looked back nostalgically to these gaudy fragments of their boyhood, and began a revival that has kept the toy theatre tenuously alive through the century following, stimulating creativity in many fields, among figures as diverse as Serge Diaghilev, Jack Yeats, Gordon Craig, J B Priestley, and Edwin Smith.

The material offers an instructive cross section of graphic reproduction methods from etching with hand colouring, to lithography with stencil colouring and finally different methods of colour printing. It forms part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Pollock, a principal figure in the story, who links the early days of the toy theatre business to living memory.

David Powell has selected material for the exhibition and written the catalogue, with a contribution from Jan Piggott, Archivist of Dulwich College. Alan Powers, of the University of Greenwich, has coordinated the team.

Check opening times before your visit

William West and the Regency Toy Theatre
The first ever exhibition about the first ever toy theatre publisher, William West was seen by 14.000 visitors at Sir John Soane's Museum between January and March 2004. The exhibition was supported by a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The exhibition included original toy theatre prints, plain and coloured, a wooden theatre with a West proscenium, a copper printing plate of the West period, and a 10 minute audio-visual based on West's account of his life given to Henry Mayhew, spoken in character by David Drummond, famous for his 'Pleasures of Past Times' shop in Cecil Court, London.

It was reviewed in the Evening Standard, Independent on Sunday and Country Life (go to press cuttings).

The 64 page catalogue, generously illustrated in colour, is obtainable from the Soane Museum and from the Pollock's Toy Museum Trustfor £14.95

The exhibition is due to be shown in 2005 at:
Coventry University Art Gallery in April-May
Cannon Hall Museum, Barnsley June-August
Pickford House, Derby, September-November
Soho House Museum, Birmingham, June 2006.

More about William West
In 1811, William West,1783-1854, began to print sheets of figures, copied from recent productions in London theatres, and went on to create scenery and miniature theatre fronts, some of which are breathtakingly beautiful examples of design and colouring from the Regency period, reflecting the exotic melodramas of Covent Garden, the Olympic and Astley's Amphitheatre in miniature. West also published plays translated or written by the architect Sir John Soane's stage-struck younger son, George.

Link to Sir John Soane's Museum website