was most acclaimed in the "principal boy" roles. These roles permitted the actress to show her legs in tights, and Farren became very popular with the young men of the Gaiety audience, who would wear a coloured scarf to show support for their favourite actress. Farren's colours were dark blue, light blue and white, and she could look out over the audience to compare the number of fans displaying her colours as compared to the colours of the other actresses. According to Hollingshead, Farren developed a "spinal complaint, which troubled her in her early Gaiety career [and] developed into locomotor ataxy" later. Some of her best known roles in the 1870s included Tilly Slowboy in Dot (Dion Boucicault's version of The Cricket on the Hearth); Miss Prue in Love for Love; Princess of Trebizonde (1870), based on the Jacques Offenbach operetta; Sam Weller in Bardell v. Pickwick; Mercury in Gilbert and Sullivan's first operatic collaboration, Thespis, or, the Gods Grown Old (1871); Ali Baba; Polly Neefit in Shilly-Shally (1872), by Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade; Leporello in Robert Reece's Don Giovanni; Antony and Cleopatra (1873); Clemency Newcome in The Battle of Life, (based on Charles Dickens's Christmas story of that title); the title role in Henry James Byron's Little Don Caesar de Bazan (1876, a send-up of Boucicault's play); Thaddeus in Byron's The Bohemian G-yurl and the Unapproachable Pole (1877); and title roles in Byron's farce Little Doctor Faust (1878) his Handsome Hernani, or The Fatal Penny-Whistle (1879); and Robbing Roy (1879). Farren's Gaiety pieces in the 1880s included Lutz and Robert Reece's burlesques of The Forty Thieves (1880), as Ganem; the title roles in Aladdin (1881) and Little Robin Hood (1882); Ariel (1883, by F. C. Burnand, based on The Tempest); Blue Beard (1882); Camaralzaman and Mazeppa (1884); perhaps her most famous role as Little Jack Sheppard (1885); Richard Henry's Monte Cristo Jr., as Edmond Dantes (1886); Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887); Miss Esmeralda, or The Maid and the Monkey (1887); Fra Diavolo, Gulliver, Rip Van Winkle, Sonnambula; the title role in Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891); and dozens of others. Perhaps the most successful of her later roles was the title role in Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889, by Fred Leslie and H. F. Clarke, a take-off of Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas), which she and Fred Leslie toured in Australia