Page 74 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Benjamin Pollock: Pollock’s Toy Theatres (from c1856)
Aah the delight and magic of the toy theatre! Enormously popular in the second half of the 19th century, the toy theatre was evangelised by Pollock’s Toy Company. He drew on a tradition stretching back into the 18th century. In the first half of the 19th century kits for over 500 plays were published in London - each kit containing colour-printed stage sets, backdrops, flats, curtains, costumed players, the printed (abridged) play - all the paraphernalia of a theatrical production - even including miniature posters - so that children and adults could stage their own versions of popular plays, or invent their own. I was introduced to Pollock’s (which still exists in Covent Garden) by Valerie Allam (then course leader of East Ham Graphics, later creative director at Wolff Olins) when I started lecturing in the early 1970s. I still have some of the lithographed prints I bought then. These toy theatres still have the magical lustre of the Victorian theatre about them - rich in Punch and Judy, Commedia dell Arte, and fairground iconography, they remind us of the dramatic archetypes - heroes and heroines, lovers and villains - all the cabinet of archetypes so beloved by Jungians.