The Joy of the Circus

The Weekly Machen

We end the year with a marvelous trip to the circus. Below, Arthur Machen treats us to an early memory from his childhood before guiding us behind the scenes of a show. Reading this article, I recalled my own earlier experience of attending the famous Ringling Brothers Circus during the late 1980s. Witnessing the spectacle under the roof of a stadium somewhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I still remember being awed by the immensity of the panorama—lions in cages, clowns tumbling, an acrobat falling—all at the same time. Has the circus quite vanished from the American highway and the country fair?

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The Joy of the Circus
by
Arthur Machen
December 20, 1911

Has the circus quite vanished from the English highway and the country fair and the waste place and the village green?

It is, perhaps, the only form of entertainment that is of a purely English origin. And it was invented some time in the sixties of the eighteenth century by Philip Astley, “sergeant-major in his Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Dragoons.” He roped in a ring in a field at Halfpenny Hatch, Lambeth—Waterloo Station now occupies the site of this first of circuses—and prospered so on chance coppers that in 1770 he had a roofed-in building. Horace Walpole visited it in 1783. Marvellous to relate, Horace, the Sublime Sniffer of the Universe, for once forbore to sniff. Astley, he says, was beyond his expectation: “Astley can make a horse dance minuets and horn-pipes.”

So it was early in its history that the circus departed from its primitive designs. Astley exhibited at first what we might call trick horsemanship; he performed “twenty different attitudes on one, two, and three horses.” Probably he found that some variety was needed, if he would keep his audiences amused; hence the minuets and hornpipes; “Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford”—ridden by Master Astley—the dancing dogs; the clown borrowed from the pantomime; the tight-rope, and the acrobats.

Dick Turpin’s Ride

Astley’s became a great institution on the south side of the river, and early in the nineteenth century the travelling circuses with their tents began to go all over England. I went to a circus myself a good many years ago, but I am afraid it was not a tented circus, but a wooden temporary building. The riders enacted a grand drama which I shall never forget. It was called “Dick Turpin’s Ride to York,” and its action consisted of going round the ring at a thundering gallop, leaping five-barred gates, and firing pistols at frequent intervals. I have seen many plays of larger pretence and finer subtlety that have not pleased me half so well. It was not a moral piece; for Turpin, a thief and a violent man who shot off his pistols at slight provocation or none at all, was represented in a heroic light. This was very wrong indeed, but in those dark old days, the bishops had not turned their attention to the ethics of entertainment, and my parents and I sinned in ignorance.

After Forty Years

And then I stayed away from the circus for some forty odd years; it was only a day or two ago that I visited “the riders” a second time; and then their tent was not ready for the show. Their tent! It is called Olympia, and Mr. Cochran is turning it into a wonder-world to hold all Herr Hagenbeck’s wild beasts that are coming over from Germany. And he has built a ring where all the dear old diversions will be enacted. Sleary is coming back, again from his long retreat, and he is bringing his clever horses and his Learned Dogs with him. For some reason he has taken to calling himself Mr. Althoff and he has got 150 horses and twenty dogs—a far larger troupe, I am sure, than he brought to Coke-town long ago. And the Ring Master, that fellow of infinite grace and elegance, is to be enacted by Mr. Charles Sugden; who will drive into the ring in grand style, in a dashing buggy, and attended by his grooms.

The thing is to be done in the good old way. The seats are to be white and gold with red cushions, the attendants are to wear blazing liveries, there is to be a big band.

The Brassiest Band

“I hope it is to be a brassy band?” I said anxiously to Mr. Cochran. “You know a circus is no place for the nuance.”

“It is to be the brassiest band that the world can provide,” he said, warmly and generously, and I felt at ease.

But the circus, good as it is, is to be only a bit of the big show. The workmen are thundering and hammering all over Olympia; they are turning it into the Zoo of the future, in which the animals and birds will no longer be prisoned in cages, but will be seen freely wandering in marshy plains, climbing wild and rocky heights, wallowing in warm tropic pools, and perching on tall trees.

The glass roof of the huge hall is fast disappearing. The green and twisted growth of the golden Americas is covering it, and there the flowering creepers are blossoming in rich colours. As you enter you turn round and see the far-lifted peaks of the Andes soaring to the sun, here golden, there fading away into the blue distance. To your right, on the lower slopes of these mountains, there will be hundreds of monkeys; in the centre the birds of the tropics will fly from palm to palm behind invisible meshes, to the left are the rocks of the lions.

Endless Marvels

All the floor of the building has surged up into savage cliffs, has been hollowed into deep pools, into caves and caverns; and here all the beasts and birds of the earth will have their habitations.

And then the elephants and the llamas and the donkeys for the children to ride on, the Animals’ Kindergarten where little lions and tigers and bears will play with a little girl. Augustus the Giant Python for the contemplation of the braver spirits—but of such marvels there is no end.

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The Weekly

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Introduction and supplementary material – Copyright 2023 by Christopher Tompkins. All rights reserved.