Recovering Miss Rose: Acting as a Girl on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Abstract

This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.