The Circus and Victorian Society (review)

The huge success of the circus in the nineteenth century shows how much the Victorians loved variety in their light entertainment, for the circus was nothing if not varied in its form and content. As with the minstrel show and later music hall, the circus presented a range of different acts and performances for the delectation of audiences who were, in themselves, diversified by age, gender, and social class. As equestrian acts declined in importance, variety acts became more salient, and wild animals were added to the circus's eclectic package of spectacle and wonder. Within this package there was, as the spiel went, something for everyone, or nearly so. The circus was neither high nor low culture. It was a promiscuous mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.

In this study, Brenda Assael is concerned first and foremost with exploring the ambivalent position occupied by the circus in the broader social, economic, and political world of which it was a part. The contradictions between respectability and transgression, order and disorder, foreign and familiar are central to her concerns. Her opening chapter, dealing with the development of the circus during the Victorian period, is valuable not only for providing a carefully researched outline of the circus's transformation from fairground entertainment to organised trade, but also for locating this within the expanding leisure market of the period, with its high financial stakes, fierce competition, and rigorous work-discipline for performers and artists.

Assael's method in the rest of the book is to take a generic type of circus act and isolate it at a moment in time in order both to examine how it exhibited particular cultural tensions and problems, and to analyze the ways in which these were articulated by contemporaries. In this way she covers spectacular patriotism and the national military hero of the early nineteenth century, open-mouthed enthusiasm for the exotic and bizarre, the shifts in clowning between innocent fun and subversive humour, the clash between female acrobats and moral reformers, and the moral panic over child performers that led to protective legislation in 1879 (later revised in 1897). Generally, this thematic approach and mode of analysis works well and is suited to Assael's focus on conflicting currents in Victorian society. To take just one example, these were revealed in appreciation of the skill of female acrobats on the one hand, and accusations on the other that their acts involved the lewd display of women's bodies.

Assael's weakest chapter deals with clowning: her treatment of this topic is marred by superficial references to humour theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud; uncritical repetition of assertions of direct continuity between the harlequinade of the commedia dell'arte and the blackface clown; and confused discussion of the conflations of race and nationality in the minstrel show. She also simply rehearses the romanticised contrast between the clown's merriment and pathos, failing to see that cultural contradictions can be mythical as well as based in verifiable historical evidence. The identification of poets and painters with the clown figure is fascinating, but should have suggested the need both for interpretative scepticism and a different line of cultural analysis than one focusing on the stock concealment of tears by laughter.

The socially heterogeneous audience of the Victorian circus and the culturally ambiguous zone of leisure and entertainment that it occupied do not sit happily with class-based interpretations or social control models of historical explanation. Although they may well seem valid for other cultural forms, the circus simply does not conform to notions of homological correspondence between cultural codes and practices, hierarchical social relations, and asymmetrical structures of authority and power. There are times when Assael falls back on bland assertion and untheorised claims, as for instance in telling us that "much of what was seen and appreciated by the public was experienced in terms of a universal human spirit" (9). By and large, however, her approach is...