Fantasies and Realities of Children’s Stage Costume: Madame Behenna’s Juvenile Jollities, 1925–26
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Madame Behenna’s Juvenile Jollities was a song-and-dance troupe of girls, age four to fourteen, based in northeast London. This article examines the troupe’s costumes and practices through a case study of Eileen Brock, a member of the Jollities from 1925 to 1926. Eileen’s stage wardrobe illuminates both fantasies and realities of childhood in the 1920s. Jollities performances—up to fifty songs spread over several hours—were kaleidoscopic displays of spectacular costumes, designed by their manager and made by the performers’ families. Their concerts revealed and reflected the fantasies of interwar audiences: nostalgic singalongs, racist stereotypes, and innuendo, enacted by a “fascinating” and “artless” troupe of children. Although the children of the Jollities and other dance troupes leave very little account of themselves, by observing the Jollities’ costumes, and hearing other accounts of dancing and performance, we can “surmise and infer” the experiences of Eileen and the other Jollities, who performed childhood in the aftermath of the First World War.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".