'Delightful, Splendid, and Surprising':
The Theatre Dickens knew
Paul Schlicke
In chapter 39 of The Old Curiosity Shop Kit
and Barbara celebrate the half holiday which
Mr and Mrs Garland have granted them by
taking their families out for "a whirl of
entertainments". With his customary delight in
observing the amusements of ordinary people,
Dickens describes the cheerful anticipation
with which Mrs Nubbles and Barbara's mother
prepare for their evening out, the excitement
with which the entire party applauds the
performances, and the pleasure with which
they all enjoy their oyster supper afterwards.
In a novel otherwise filled with pain, sorrow,
fear, and death, this chapter stands out as a
brief moment of unalloyed happiness, an
epitome of Dickens's deeply held convictions
about the value of carefree amusement.
There is one detail in the account,
however, which may cause perplexity for the
modern reader. Dickens describes the high
light of the evening as a "play", staged in an
elegant auditorium complete with curtain,
gallery, and boxes, and yet patently the
entertainment is not simply a dramatic
performance; not only are there horses, a
clown, a graceful equestrienne, and a pony
who stands on his hind legs, but Dickens
specifically names the place where it is all
taking place as Astley's, the foremost venue
in London for animal acts and riding
exhibitions. The setting is at one and the
same time a theatre, where Little Jacob
claps for the three-act piece "until his hands
were sore", and a circus, with "clean white
sawdust" and a "vague smell of horses".
Unless we are to assume that this conflation
of two distinct and distinctive types of
entertainment is a particularly blatant
consequence of Kit's lack of formal
education, or that Dickens nodded while
writing this chapter, in order to make sense
of what is going on here we must set aside
our conception of modern theatres and
circuses, and look back in time to see just
what these enterprises were in early
ninetheenth century England. The purpose of
the present essay is to explain why Dickens
refers to a night at the circus as going to a
play in a theatre, and then to suggest some
implications of that explanation for an
informed understanding of the theatricality
of Dickens's own art.
The circus as Dickens knew it originated
in 1768 when Philip Astely, a retired army
officer, began putting on exhibitions of trick
riding on horseback, to which he gradually
added a variety of other attractions,
including tumbling, juggling, clowns, and
animal acts.1) By his second season he had
located his show in permanent quarters in
Westminster Bridge Road, across the Thames
from the Houses of Parliament, where the
circus he had founded was to thrive for over
a century, until it closed forever in 1893.
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