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The circus and modernity: A commitment to ‘the newer’ and ‘the newest’

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460654.2012.664747

1746-0662

Gillian Arrighi,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Abstract This article examines the ways in which high-profile circuses of the long nineteenth century demonstrated a commitment to innovation that embraced many of the ideas and socioeconomic processes now generally accepted as belonging to or emerging out of modernity. The economic drives of capitalism, the development of the individual, and an enthusiastic embrace of new technology were all transmitted to vast audiences through the operations, performances, and linguistic declarations of the leading circuses of the period. Mobilizing the historiography of Thomas Frost and his first diachronic history of the British circus, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, first published in 1875, the author examines the ways in which leading nineteenth-century circuses in several Western industrialized nations embodied ideas about what it was to be modern, functioning as a metonym for modernity. The article proposes moreover that the circus's demonstrations of modernity in action contributed to the genre's immense popularity. Keywords: nineteenth-century circuscircus historiographymodernityThomas Frost (nineteenth-century circus historian)'Lord' George Sangerthe FitzGerald Brothers' Circus (Australia) Notes 1. The Argus, 9 November 1901, 20. A survey of newspaper advertisements and reviews from throughout the season reveals the other acts on the programme included animal acts developed originally by Carl Hagenbeck in Germany, numerous equestrian acts, bicycle acts, and several aerial acts in addition to the Flying Dunbars. 2. The Bulletin, 26 October 1901; The Argus, 19 October 1901. See also Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MS Q284 pp 213–5, undated letter from John FitzGerald to Dan FitzGerald. 3. Janet Davis explains that circuses in the United States were first illuminated with electricity in 1879 (the circuses of Cooper and Bailey and W.W. Cole), but on account of the unwieldy dimensions of the electrical system and the problems it posed to transportation this system of lighting was soon abandoned. Buffalo Bill's Wild West show used electricity to power spotlights in 1896; Barnum and Bailey began using electricity to illuminate its big top circa 1905; and in 1909 Ringling Bros. also began using electricity (Davis Citation2002, 251 n. 43; see also Stoddart Citation2000, 34–5). Both Davis's and Stoddart's notes about the use of electricity to illuminate circus shows indicate that the use of electricity at the FitzGeralds' 1901–2 Melbourne season was indeed a technological novelty. 4. Referring to major US circuses of the early twentieth century, Janet Davis observes that 'simultaneous' and 'contradictory impulses of… normative representation and subversion of established social hierarchies made the circus an appropriate emblem of an age of transition' (2002, 228). Similar tendencies within the Australasian circus of the same period are explored in Arrighi (Citation2007). 5. Because of the scarcity of copies, I have worked from an online transcript of the revised edition of 1881 published by the Circus Historical Society, which, while recognizing Frost's original organization into chapters, is not divided into pages. 6. This phenomenon has been examined within the national contexts of performance in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. See for example Assael (Citation2005), Davis (Citation2002), St. Leon (Citation1983, Citation2005). 7. Although Budd (Citation1997) and Segel (Citation1998) have very little to say about circus performers, their studies examine the modernist preoccupation with physical culture and touch on the influence that strength performers such as Eugen Sandow exerted upon social behaviour. Circus acts by male and female strength performers and by wrestlers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the modernist physical culture movement that is the focus of these two scholarly studies. 8. Secondary and tertiary literature about the early circus is extensive. See for example Disher (1937) and May (Citation1932). Scholarly studies of Philip Astley include Kwint (Citation1995) and Burke (Citation2006). 9. The term 'quadruped drama' is used by Moody (Citation2000). 10. Frost dates the appearance of tenting circuses to 1807 (ch. 2, n.p.). 11. First-hand accounts of the early travelling menageries in England can be found in Bostock (Citation1927) and Sanger (Citation1927). 12. The French gymnast Jules Leotard is credited with the invention of flying trapeze action at the Cirque Napoleon in Paris in 1859. Leotard swung by the hands from one trapeze apparatus, then let go and propelled himself through the air with forward muscular velocity to catch the handle of another trapeze, so achieving the appearance of flight. He had practised this skill at his father's gymnasium in Lyons. 13. In his study examining the modernist movement and its enthusiastic embrace of physical culture and sport, Howard B. Segel has proposed three sources for the 'spectacular enthusiasm for physical culture' observable in Western societies at the turn of the twentieth century. He cites the 'high visibility' of muscle showmen such as Eugen Sandow and his American counterpart, Bernarr MacFadden, a heightened public focus on sports which reached a climax with the first modern Olympics in 1896, and the phenomenon of mass physical culture movements in Europe and the United States which, having gained momentum throughout the nineteenth century, achieved 'maximum impact' in the early years of the twentieth century (Segel Citation1998, 204). Haley (Citation1978, 3) observes that 'No topic more occupied the Victorian mind than Health – not religion, or politics, or Improvement, or Darwinism'. 14. Frost singles out, for example, the double somersaults performed by the performer Niblo (Thomas Clarke) and the triple somersaults to the net below performed by Lulu (Frost Citation1875, ch. 8, n.p.). 15. Frost Citation1875, ch. 8, n.p. Wallett also notes that Batty made 'a princely fortune at Astley's' (1860, 71). The contemporary economic equivalence was made using the per capita GDP calculator available at: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/ (accessed 26 January 2012). 16. There are numerous autobiographies by circus entrepreneurs, most of which conform to the 'rags to riches' trope. See for example Barnum (Citation1883), Hagenbeck (Citation1909), Wirth (Citation1925), Bostock (Citation1927) and Sanger (Citation1927). The biography of Dan and Tom FitzGerald, written by their brother, John D. FitzGerald, is held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, in manuscript form (MS Q284 and MS Q285). 17. Recent scholarship of the circus in Victorian England (Assael Citation2005), late nineteenth and early twentieth-century North America (Davis Citation2002), and Australia (St. Leon Citation1983, Citation2005; Arrighi Citation2007) has revealed the appeal of the circus across class lines.