The bloody tyrant evoked in Marlis Schweitzer's latest title is Shakespeare's Richard III, and “Little Pickle” is a rascally boy character in an eighteenth-century farce called The Spoiled Child. Over five brimful chapters and five increasingly buoyant interludes, Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century traces how these odd roles came to be the shared repertory of a procession of girl actresses. Appraising them through numerous lenses, the book explores what those performances meant, or threatened to mean, at various historical moments and locations. Schweitzer frames this story around the careers of Clara Fisher (Chapters 1–3) and Jean Margaret Davenport (Chapters 4–5), who played these and several other roles in common during different decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. She also recovers pathmaking actresses Jane Fisher and Dorothy Jordan, both new to me. Although the book's subtitle may suggest a dramatic-literature orientation, appreciations of material culture and transatlantic circulation—foci of previous Schweitzer works—undergird the text. In her cogent and wide-ranging discussion, Schweitzer shares insights on the nature of girlhood, phrenology, branded merchandising, tomboys, performative masculinity, postemancipation practices in the British West Indies, Charles Dickens, the sacralization of childhood, celebrity culture, and the “peculiar entanglement of theatre and empire” (168). As Schweitzer accurately admits, “There is no easy way to tie off the many threads” in this book (191), but the irreducibility of this fascinating compendium lends it gusto.

To tell the origin story of the Little Pickle role, Schweitzer's research embraces the script (she consulted four versions), its authorship, and its performance by particular bodies within their distinct historical contexts. Her analysis connects it to contemporaneous theories on child-rearing, emergent girlhood, nostalgia, androgyny, and “the modern sex/gender system” (86). The impish boy character Little Pickle was written in 1790 for actress Dorothy Jordan, who specialized in breeches and travesty roles. Eighteenth-century audiences applauded the breeches roles in Shakespearean comedy, where a female performer played a female character who disguised herself as a man but resumed her natural state by the final curtain. In travesty roles, a female performer audaciously assumed a male character throughout. Schweitzer contends that by the early nineteenth century discomfort with gender fluidity and “anxieties about women usurping male privilege onstage and off” made travesty roles like Little Pickle “too dangerous or unseemly” for adult actresses (69). These roles migrated to the repertoire of girls in the nineteenth century because, as “malleable, plastic subjects” (69), girls were not yet threatening. Schweitzer skillfully augments her case with images of actresses she discusses, including Dorothy Jordan (“wonky, bent limbs” [85]), Clara Fisher (diminutive, cute [67]), Jean Davenport (“charmingly harmless” [90]), and Mrs. Mills (sexually knowing [86]).

Two sections of the text explore protean farce, where a leading player shows off their talent by taking on multiple roles of various ages, genders, and ethnicities in a single play. The genre was first popularized by Charles Mathews, an adult actor, and next taken up by an adult actress before being embraced by a long line of girl actresses including Clara Fisher, Jean Davenport, Louisa Lane, Caddy Fox, and Lotta Crabtree. Schweitzer notes that although lines of business were standard practice, protean farces “pushed against the narrow parameters of traditional casting” (118) and “defied norms of gender, class, and nationality” (119). Clara Fisher debuted Old and Young; or, The Four Mowbrays in 1822 while playing four parts: a little girl and three badly behaved imaginary boys she impersonates in a deception aimed at gaining security for her family. In The Manager's Daughter, a decade and a half later, Jean Davenport played seven roles: a little girl and six characters she impersonates in order to deceive, and ultimately save from financial distress, her father. The comparison illustrates one of Schweitzer's core theses that “Girlhood is about plasticity, experimentation, and the capacity to change” (7). Schweitzer claims that Fisher's performance was a “subversive commentary on the performativity of gender and age” (121), but that Davenport's “reinforce[d] rather than critique[d] stereotypical depictions of gender, race, class, and nationality” (141). Although this argument failed to convince me, I was riveted by Schweitzer's analysis of Davenport's metatheatricality. Davenport's father skillfully scripted his daughter's offstage behavior and utilized press advertising and correspondence to merge successfully the child actress's persona with The Manager's Daughter character. Schweitzer's discussion coherently relates this process to romanticized childhood, celebrity theory, and twenty-first-century reality television.

Schweitzer's book reveals her love of the materials and ideas that make up history. Her final interlude, an exploration of Jean Davenport's scrapbook, might become required reading for burgeoning historians for its demonstration of the cyclic interplay of artifact, curiosity, written record, and thought. “It's 2010 and I'm in the Library of Congress Manuscript Reading Room,” Schweitzer writes. We look over her shoulder as she carefully surveys the object before her. “The bluish leather cover is mottled with cracks and spots of decay or rot—thankfully none of the hand-staining rot I've encountered in other scrapbooks from the period.” She exposes her process: first some luck, then careful observation, and finally adventure. “[A] few newspaper clippings escape containment and invite me to follow their trail. I'm not sure what I'll find beneath the cover but I am eager to find out” (159). Readers who begin this fascinating study will want to find out too.