shows, up to the middle of the nineteenth
century, took place not in the huge tents of
later years but in portable wooden
structures, like the "wooden pavilion" of
Sleary's circus in Hard Times,4) The
auditorium of the circus as Dickens knew it,
in short, was fundamentally similar to that
of a theatre; except for the ring, its interior
arrangements were the same.
Furthermore, the nature of the
entertainment had much in common with
performances in the theatre of the day. The
succession of variety acts, or scenes in the
circle, which generally constitutes the whole
of the show in a circus today, formed only a
portion of an evening's attractions during
the first half of the nineteenth century.
Then, top billing was given to a dramatized
entertainment on horseback, in which riders
and animals would enact a play. The
spectacle might be a mock battle, a
melodrama, or a pantomime, but an essential
element of the performance was its dramatic
nature: a story was enacted by the company.
Mr Sleary gives an indication of the nature
of equestrian drama when he describes one
of his plays for Sissy:
If you wath to thee our Children in the
Wood, with their father and mother both
a dyin' on a horthe-their uncle a
rethieving of 'em ath hith wardth, upon
a horthe-themselvth both a goin' a
black-berryin' on a horthe-and the
Robinth a coming in to cover 'em with
leavth, upon a horthe-you'd thay it
wath the completetht thing ath ever you
thet your eyeth upon!5)
Following the famous instruction of Andrew
Ducrow, "Cut the dialect and come to the
'osses!" dialogue in hippodrama was minimal,
the emphasis falling firmly on feats of
horsemanship, music, costumes, sets and
pageantry.6) Ducrow himself, mentioned with
admiration by Dickens in Sketches by Boz7),
was the most talented horseman of the
century, and during his reign at Astley's
(1825-42) his combination of dance and mime
on the back of a galloping horse brought
equestrian drama to its highest level of
sophistication.
In these circus plays individual horses
were often billed by name as the leading
actors, dancing, playing dead, rescuing
heroines, and apprehending villains;
sometimes elephants or lions were included
in the cast. The foremost military spectacle,
The Battle of Waterloo, first staged in 1824,
was revived season after season, as was the
dramatization of Byron's Mazeppa (1831), in
which a wild steed, with the hero tied naked
to its back, galloped across the countryside,
up precipices and over ravines. (For the
most fearful adventures of Mazeppa's ride
the equestrian was generally replaced by a
dummy, but in 1865 Dickens was turned away
from a full house assembled at Astley's to
see Adah Isaacs Menken perform the daring
ride of Mazeppa, "not as hitherto done by a
dummy."8) In 1853, immediately before
Dickens started writing Hard Times, Astley's
developed Billy Button's Journey to Brentford
(one of Signor Jupe's routines) from a comic
act of supposed bad riding into an elaborate
Christmas pantomime, with more than thirty
named roles.9) In these, and countless other
equestrian dramas, a thorough fusion of
