The Circus and Victorian Society (review)

The Mayor of Casterbridge famously begins with a wife-selling at a country fair. A drunken Michael Henchard auctions off his wife for five guineas in a fair tent, while outside, crowds enjoy attractions such as "peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, . . . nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate." By the time Hardy published his novel in 1886, one offshoot of the country fair, the circus, had developed into a commercial spectacle which rivalled lavish theatre productions and provided entertainment to thousands of spectators. The development of the Victorian circus, from its roots in various cultural sites (including the fair, the ancient amphitheater, and the cabinet of curiosities) to the late-century consolidation of "an organized and respectable trade" (2), is the subject of Brenda Assael's fascinating and important new book.

The circus is an understudied Victorian spectacle, given recent emphases on the 1851 Exhibition, the theatre, the music hall, and the museum. Assael's welcome study participates in overlapping fields of inquiry (the histories of leisure, of sport, of entertainment, of celebrity, of reading, of the periodical press) and complements recent work on Victorian visual culture and the grammar of visuality in Victorian prose. Readers of VPR will particularly relish Assael's careful and extensive use of the Victorian press, which includes more than 60 newspapers and 40 periodicals, as she analyzes (for example) "waif stories" of child circus performers, topical military spectacles, debates over female acrobats, and humanitarian concern for exotic animal displays.

In contrast to the freak show, the circus featured strong bodies, which were showcased in the gymnastic and equestrian elements of the program. Although "the strong body became a metonym for progress and power" (1), Assael provocatively suggests that "an examination of the circus at times reveals an anti-improvement narrative of the nineteenth century" (11). That is, circus spectators were torn between their desire for "respectable entertainment and transgressive thrill" (11). These individual responses are located in letters, memoirs, parliamentary and police court evidence, and, notably for VPR readers, newspaper and journal articles. In Assael's compelling study, the circus emerges as a site of contestation whose conditions of development included changes in work (e.g., the reduction of the working week and the proliferation of leisure activities) and technology (e.g., the greater mobility railways provided proprietors and performers). Countering the resistance model prevalent in much working-class historiography, Assael also argues that certain circus performances consolidated British patriotism. Particularly convincing in this regard is her chapter on "The Spectacular Hero," in which she considers the popularity of the equestrian military drama in relation to the rise of print culture and the manufacturing of heroic images. She estimates that more than 250,000 people, including the Duke of Wellington, saw The Battle of Waterloo at Astley's auditorium in 1824. Army officers who saw this production commented on the spectacle's accuracy, which "provided living proof of newspaper descriptions" (53). Long before the Times's war correspondents vividly depicted the Crimean theatre of war, circuses presented theatrical panoramas not unlike the Illustrated London News's panoramic illustrations and patriotic representations.

Assael's wide-ranging archival research has unearthed intriguing information about circus performers and their working conditions. Her broader arguments are illustrated well by individual cases, such as the fundraising campaign for clown Tom Barry mounted by fellow performers, the courtship of itinerant equestrian performer W. H. Cooke and his middle-class fiancée Caroline Heginbotham, and the death of high-wire acrobat "Madame Blondin" in her eighth month of pregnancy. The book is handsomely illustrated with circus posters, cartes de visite, and advertisements and cartoons from periodicals. Scholars of the periodical press will find this study valuable not only for its mining of the press as a resource (Assael quotes from many little-known specialist magazines such as Gymnast, which merit further research), but also for its thoughtful considerations of method, material practices, and popular culture.