Marvellous Matilda: the child on stage

Abstract

Along with stage musicals such as Lionel Bart's Oliver! during the 1960s and Billy Eliot, produced by Lee Hall and Elton John in 2005, Matilda is the story of a misunderstood child overcoming adversity to achieve her dreams. All of these shows (and many others) focus on the child protagonist, who is simultaneously the object of pity and admiration. The idealisation of childhood goes back at least to the Romantics. Children, poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1804, have traces of heaven in them, "trailing clouds of glory" until the "shades of the prison house" of human (adult) life close in on them. This very idealisation goes hand in hand with the increased concern for the rights of the child across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.