The Greatest Shows on Earth

A History of the Circus

Linda Simon

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781789147032, 9781780233581
• eBook ISBN: 9781780233987
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Beautifully illustrated and filled with rich historical detail and colorful anecdotes, this is a vibrant history for all those who have ever dreamed of running away to the circus, now in paperback. "Step right up!" and buy a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth—the Big Top, containing death-defying stunts, dancing bears, roaring tigers, and trumpeting elephants. The circus has always been home to the dazzling and the exotic, the improbable and the impossible—a place of myth and romance, of reinvention, rebirth, second acts, and new identities. Asking why we long to soar on flying trapezes, ride bareback on spangled horses, and parade through the streets in costumes of glitter and gold, this captivating book illuminates the history of the circus and the claim it has on the imaginations of artists, writers, and people around the world. Traveling back to the circus's early days, Linda Simon takes us to eighteenth-century hippodromes in Great Britain and intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso became enchanted with aerialists and clowns. She introduces us to P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, and the enterprising Ringling Brothers and reveals how they created the golden age of American circuses. Moving forward to the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia and to New York City's Big Apple Circus and the grand spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, she shows how the circus has transformed in recent years. At the center of the story are the people—trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists and clowns—that created the sensational, raucous, and sometimes titillating world of the circus.

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

1 Hermine Demoriane, The Tightrope Walker (London, 1989), pp. 25–6.

2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, 4 September 1838, Passages from the American Note-books (Boston, MA, 1891), p. 192.

3 John Evelyn, quoted in Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, The Commèdia dell’Arte (Oxford, 1990), p. 23.

4 E. E. Cummings, ‘The Adult, the Artist and the Circus’, E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany (New York, 1958), p. 47.

5 George Speaight, A History of the Circus (London, 1980), p. 161.

6 George Van Hare, Fifty Years of a Showman’s Life (London, 1888), p. 59.

7 Naomi Ritter, Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer since Romanticism (Columbia, MO, 1989), pp. 3–4.

8 Ibid., p. 2.

9 Joanne Joys, The Wild Animal Trainer in America (Boulder, CO, 1983), p. 265.

10 Josephine DeMott Robinson, The Circus Lady (New York, 1980), pp. 2–3.

11 Kenneth Little, ‘Talking Circus, not Culture: The Politics of Identity in European Circus Discourse’, Qualitative Inquiry, 1/3 (September 1995), p. 358, n. 3.

12 William Dean Howells, A Boy’s Town (New York, 1890), p. 95.

13 The Knickerbocker, XIII/1 (January 1839), quoted in Matthew Wittmann, Circus and the City: New York, 1793–2010 (New Haven, CT, 2012), p. 188.

14 Joys, The Wild Animal Trainer, p. 227.

15 E. B. White, ‘The Ring of Time’, Points of My Compass (New York, 1954), pp. 51–5.

16 Quoted in Ritter, Art as Spectacle, p. 314.

17 Edward Hoagland, ‘Circus Music’, Sex and the River Styx (White River Junction, VT, 2011), p. 84.

18 Ibid., p. 87.

19 American Sunday School Union, The Circus (Philadelphia, PA, 1846), pp. 11, 12.

20 American Sunday School Union, Slim Jack (Philadelphia, PA, 1847).

21 C. David Heymann, A Woman Named Jackie (New York, 1989), p. 30.

22 Robinson, The Circus Lady, p. 1.

ONE
TRICK RIDERS

1 Charles Montague, Recollections of an Equestrian Manager (London, 1881), p. 99.

2 H. Barton Baker, ‘Philip Astley’, Belgravia (June 1879), p. 473.

3 Handbill, London, 1786. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Research, document no. CW3305300803, www.gdc.gale.com.

4 Charles Dickens, ‘Philip Astley’, All the Year Round (27 January 1872), p. 206.

5 Ibid., p. 207.

6 ‘Dead Circuses and Vanished Playhouses’, Saturday Review (15 July 1893), p. 67.

7 Dickens, ‘Philip Astley’, p. 210.

8 Quoted in James S. Moy, ‘Entertainments at John B. Ricketts’s Circus, 1793–1800’, Educational Theatre Journal, XXX/2 (May 1978), p. 188.

9 Marius Kwint, ‘The Legitimization of the Circus in Late Georgian England’, Past and Present, 174 (2002), pp. 86, 88.

10 Ruth Manning-Sanders, The English Circus (London, 1952), p. 49.

11 New York Daily Times (16 May 1853), p. 4.

12 Nicola A. Haxell, ‘“Ces Dames du Cirque”: A Taxonomy of Male Desire in Nineteenth-century French Literature and Art’, Modern Language Notes, XXV/4 (2000), p. 795.

13 Shauna Vey, ‘The Master and the Mademoiselle’, Theatre History Studies, XXVII (2007), pp. 39–59.

14 Thomas Frost, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities (London, 1881), p. 126.

15 Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the Arts (New York, 1921), pp. 177–9.

16 Nellie Revell, Spangles (New York, 1926).

17 Baker, ‘Philip Astley’, p. 471.

TWO
CIRQUES INTIMES

1 Anne Roquebert, ‘Last Work’, in Toulouse Lautrec, ed. Richard Thomson et al. (New Haven, CT, 1991), p. 486.

2 Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (New York, 1994), p. 471.

3 Quoted in Corinne Bellow, ed., Lautrec by Lautrec (New York, 1964), p. 205.

4 Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder [1948] (New York, 1959), p. 48.

5 Phillip Dennis Cate, ‘The Cult of the Circus’, in Pleasures of Paris...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• ONE TRICK RIDERS
• TWO CIRQUES INTIMES
• THREE THE BIGGEST TENTS
• FOUR CAVALCADES
• FIVE WITHOUT A NET
• SIX BEASTS
• SEVEN CLOWNS
• EIGHT FEATS
• NINE PRODIGIES
• TEN TRANSFORMATIONS
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX