The Clown
King is a micro history of popular entertainment in the period 1840
- 1860, woven out of the career of Arthur Nelson, the Clown King.
Born around 1816, Nelson began as an
actor in provincial and minor theatres before specialising as a
‘talking’ or Shakespearean clown. While some contemporaries wrote
accounts of their lives, Nelson left no such formal record and yet,
as one of the most popular clowns at the time, his career was one
full of interest. Traced through playbills, advertisements and
newspaper reports of the period, he moved seamlessly between circus
ring and pantomime stage, as well as performing in concert halls
with his musical novelties. His ‘benefit’ stunt, being drawn in a
washing tub by four geese, although not original, drew huge crowds
when performed in a town or city. This was to end with disaster in
1845 at Great Yarmouth, when spectators watching from the suspension
bridge over the river Bure were propelled into the river causing the
largest loss of life there has ever been in the town.
Using Nelson’s career this book
explores the social and economic place of the clown in circus,
pantomime and the wider milieu of early Victorian society. His
engagements enable the reader to trace the changing nature of the
circus from rings, in semi-permanent wooden buildings and theatres,
to the development of itinerant ‘tenting’. His collaboration with
other artistes allows for an exploration of performance as display,
whether it be the ‘pseudo-art’ of tableau vivants or ‘race-science’
with the exhibition of dwarfs, microcephalic children and peoples of
other cultures. His performance material gives an insight into
cross-fertilisation of popular music between Britain and the United
States before the American Civil War. This period saw rapid change
as an expanding middle-class wanted their leisure-time to include
entertainments that reflected both their aspiring cultural values
and a desire to understand the technological and scientific progress
of their age. |
