An “Unmanly and Insidious Attack”: Child Actress Jean Davenport and the Performance of Masculinity in 1840s Jamaica and Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines how and in what way the movement of child performers along global theatrical circuits in the mid-nineteenth century served British imperial interests and aroused debate about colonial identity. It analyzes two politically charged controversies that surrounded child actress Jean Davenport: the first erupted in the island colony of Jamaica in September 1840, the second in the island colony of Newfoundland in August 1841. In both locations, colonial theatres and newspapers became the staging ground for heated debates about the actress’s proclaimed virtuosity, notably her portrayal of male characters and her supposed resemblance to Edmund Kean. These debates quickly extended beyond a consideration of Davenport’s acting abilities, however, to include discussions about the responsibilities of theatre audiences and critics, definitions of gentlemanly behaviour, and the relationship between colonial-settlers and strangers from the metropole. Central to the analysis of the controversy surrounding Jean Davenport’s appearances in Jamaica and Newfoundland, then, is a consideration of how theatrical representations of masculinity—in this case, male characters played by a young girl—provoked discussion of, and gave rise to, other performances of masculinity in two very different colonial settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".