ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN industry’s demography for several reasons It is thought that the dis-integration of the stock system in the 1860s, together with the comparatively minimal skills needed by actors in long running tours of the 70s and 80s, broke down the centuries-old tradition of familybased companies and made the stage more accessible and attractive to the middle classes who did not have theatrical connections The resultant need for training schools and the lobby for some system of accreditation is seen as integral to the justification of acting as a profession comparable to law, medicine, and the clergy, and hence to its cultural importance, the social status of its practitioners, and the stability of its labour pool A professionalized stage with an infrastructure of amateur activity to feed it allows for more British talent to develop, reducing the need and taste for theatrical immigrants particularly in dance, circus, and variety, integrating the theatre more fully into its parent culture and de-exoticizing practitioners Whether the competition inherent in an expanded marketplace fostered national or just local patterns of recruitment and migration towards work is indicative of the system’s complexity and demographic sophistication.11 The specification of birthplaces on the manuscript census allows for systematic testing of these propositions rather than mere impressionistic speculation The most significant change in numbers of foreigners shows up in Westminster, where foreign-born men dropped from 39 per cent of the acting population in 1861 to 25 per cent in 1881 Yet this remained by far the highest foreign population, for elsewhere it fluctuated between and per cent among men and women on both censuses This may be accounted for by foreigners’ familiarity with the West End as a hotel district even though their employment may have been elsewhere, but this does not explain why foreignborn actresses were as likely to reside in the West End as Lambeth or why British-born actors resident in Westminster show patterns of migration from their counties of birth unlike that of men and women elsewhere The proportion of actresses born and enumerated in London Middlesex was steady, while the number of actors from the immediate area decreased Irish actresses figure highly in Westminster in 1861, probably a result of the influx of the unskilled destitute poor to this area in emigrations of the 1840s and 50s; by 1881 they were displaced by Surreysiders likely to be from a slightly higher socioeconomic stratum 12 In Lambeth, London-born performers of both sexes dominated each census Among men, the 44