The Circus and Victorian Society (review)

Victorian circus folk, as Brenda Assael emphasizes, were caught between traditions of vagabondage arising from itinerancy and the fair circuits and modernization occasioned by a considerably expanded, regulated, and commercialized leisure sector. She adopts the tra-ditional date of origin for British circuses in Philip Astley's equestrian display of 1768, differentiating four subsequent phases of development: up to 1820, when a plethora of traveling troupes toured towns of every size and a few permanent amphitheatres (as in London and Dublin) were built; 1820–60, when troupes grew in size and number and repertoire broadened to include melodramas, pantomimes, and other quasi-legitimate genres, with or without a predominantly equestrian element; 1860–80, paralleling the development of music hall, when variety acts infiltrated the traditional repertoire; and 1880–1900,when wild animals provided the novelty rather than equestrianismand companies considerably increased in capitalization. Though pre-occupied with questions of respectability, working conditions, and workers' aspirations, the social history occasionally gives way tointerpretation of meaning in the acts themselves.

Victorian circus is generically elusive, which complicates a social historian's task. Some of its standard acts – aerial (tight and slack rope walkers), and ground (tumblers and jugglers), comics (clowns), and daredevils (stunt performers) – originate in antiquity and yet it isthe advent of the acrobatic balancing stunt rider who epitomizedthe nineteenth-century form. The equestrian's (and equestrienne's) dominance in the ring is itself derivative of military arts, coupled with narrative pretexts from the legitimate theatre. Perhaps Assael's most enduring contribution will be the chapter on 'The Spectacular Hero', which features military melodramas. She argues that 'in the period before photography', these spectacles 'structured knowledge about war for a popular audience' while mobilizing national memory on a par with narrative history painting (61). Both Eric Hobsbawn and Benedict Anderson get their obligatory invocations, as circus is attributed with creating an imagined community of brethren nationwide who attested, through attendance, their loyalty to national goals. This broadened the concept of 'the political' beyond Parliament, in a more populist and palatable form than John Wilkes, as episodes in the Napoleonic wars and subsequent affrays explained history to the masses and established a consensus about wars' significance. Less a soporific doled out to a stultified yet entertained public than a form of news dissemination, heroic melodrama (complete with regimental dress and pounding hooves) provided a forum to glorify military victory rather than foment radical sentiment.

Circus also materialized the projects of empire by democratizing access to natural history in the form of exotic beasts. This demonstrated the civilizing effects of colonial expansion on a par with the dissemination of the gospels and the expansion of trade. Lions, tigers, and elephants fueled the 'Victorian imperial imagination' (75) in a genuine coexistence and reciprocal scrutiny of East and West, in kind with Victorian zoos and colonial exhibitions. This phenomenon is summed up as 'curiosity', a surprisingly banal conception lacking the customary moralistic bite of postcolonial analysis, though it allows for two-way expressions between spectators and performers, and even within the audience, as they looked upon the strange and wonderful then looked upon each other. There was a perennial taste for beasts framed by narrative, as Imre Kiralfy's extravaganza, India, suggests by drawinghalf a million patrons in the 1895–96 season. Assael's chapter on this phenomenon is an informative introduction to the political significance of circus that, refreshingly, does not merely ascribe it to the realm of fantasy, imagination, and escape.

The book's later chapters, on clowns, female acrobats, and child acrobats, are restricted to more domestic concerns. Their subjectsare also less generically secure as circus acts. Clowns derive fromthe harlequinade, a condiment taken with pantomime and which remained associated with this biannual (and from the early-Victorian period annual) money-maker throughout the century. Ground and aerial acrobats diversified in the later part of the century to include new repertoire of mechanized daredevil stunts and the newly...